A PART OF ME
Year: 2017
An Art Exhibition (photos and short videos as a part of the video performance)
Exhibited:
- SURFACES FESTIVAL, Venice, Italy - 2018
- Macedonian culture center in Sofia, Bulgaria - 2018
- Prima Centar Berlin, Germany - 2017
- Culture Center "Marko Cepenkov" - Prilep, Macedonia - 2017
„ YOUR PERCEPTION OF ME IS A REFLECTION OF YOU,
MY REACTION TO YOU IS AN AWARENESS OF ME“
It’s often heart that artists live in their own world, that they are different from the others. But the artist, as everyone else, are part of the societal life and often times their expression is a reflection of the ongoing social changes in the society.
The project is carried out by two artists who live in the Pelagonia region. In this part of Macedonia the tobacco is still one of the main sources of income for many families.
There are many artist from this region in whose works the tobacco has been the main theme.
Ferdi comes from a rural environment, and has been directly involved with the production of the tobacco since he was a child . Darko, on the other hand, coming from a town, has never been directly involved, but is well familiar with the entire process of tobacco cultivation due to the environment. One artist is of Turkish and the other of Macedonian nationality, which further enriches their artwork.
In the project ‘Part of me’ the sackcloth (a rough cloth used when packing the dried out tobacco) is taken to be the main material. The sack cloth carries the smell of the tobacco and it sticks to it in the same way that it sticks to the people who work with it in the fields.
Ferdi uses the sack cloths as his second skin because the skin is, in a way, a memory of life. He faced the hardship brought about by tobacco production when still a child, so the photographs and videos portray that. Pressed between the smell and the weight of the tobacco he is trying to get rid of them. No matter how strong and complete the separation, it leaves marks. That is the reason why in some photographs the’ second skin’ is shown and this time the material is a cling film. It is actually a symbol of the marks the society lives on a person. The difficult conditions, inevitably lead to people trying hard find a way out. They are trying to escape the smell of the tobacco leaves and the firm grip of the sack cloth.
Darko has been experimenting with his skin condition (which he incidentally discovered) for the last 2 years. Demography (or skin painting/ drawing) has become his medium of expression. This is how Darko sees it:
The skin is a covering of the body that both ‘protects us from others and exposes us to them. What I find interesting from the book "Thinking through the skin" by Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, is a thinking that reflects, not on the body as the lost object of thought, but on inter-embodiment, on the mode of being-with and being-for, where one touches and is touched by others. That how my skin become reflection of my personality.
Often his artwork is related with his attempts to espouse the other people emotions and interpret them in his own way – walk in other peoples’ shoes. The Macedonian proverb for the same would be roughly translated as ‘ to be/live in someone else’s skin’, so in this project the artist does just that: He is using his skin to interpret the other artist emotions, at the same time interweaving his own.
