The story of the Wear series started in an artist studio during my studies of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. I started assembling robust accessories, some sort of clothes, for a performance. I expected the performance to result in a personal statement that would be materialised during an event that would show the absurdity of these creations. I used the form of the performance to discover what I truly want to say.
Wear are machines, created from scraped steel welded together with random everyday objects. The design of the machines tries to reject the design character of their everyday counterparts. In his publication Political Prosthesis & Knowledge of the Body (2002) Stelarc addressed defragmentation, improvement and changes to the functions of the human body, which of course results in changes to the body’s purpose and development. Unlike Stelarc’s thesis, which is a thesis from the future, the series Wear is defined by the present and has no futuristic starting points. The moving elements are tools in the hands of the contents, which do not form surrealist, utopic or fictitious spaces, but symbolise reality and the present. I am the motor that drives the machinery.
Due to the prevalence of the shown over showing, the medium is completely irrelevant and is placed into the background, however, the used medium appears to be an excellent transmitter, for it is a temporally unrestricted record of a performative action. I chose it because it was technically accessible and it opened a new horizon for my researching and expression. Wear is created from multiple individual units, which have shared content and are connected within a circle, which indicates that this is a series that continues into infinity.
In the beginning the works were created in studio isolation and did not include organisational or socially active elements, and I played the role of the main protagonist myself. During the process I entered other spaces and kept opening spaces for cooperation and tried including other people into support roles, to the point, where I took myself completely out of the picture and opened up the stage for interaction with visitors.