Siniša Ilić: Surface Mining

As part of the Kamov residency program and the residency dedicated to work in the BADco. Archive on the second floor of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU), Siniša Ilić created an exhibition installation titled Surface Mining.

During his stay in Rijeka, Siniša Ilić worked in the archives of the performance collective BADco., which has been located on the second floor of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art since March 2023. BADco. donated to the Museum hundreds of artifacts, various publications, documents, and costumes to the museum, along with preserved physical and digital material related to their long-term work, with the intention that the archive serves as a living resource available to researchers, artists, and the interested public. In the archives and from the archives, Ilić created his Surface Mining, space installation placed on the floor, made of pages from a world atlas and props used in performances Drawer (2014) and Foundation Pit (2018). In his work, Siniša Ilić uses objects that have been “out of use”, such as geographical maps that no longer reflect the actual political, climatic, or demographic state of the world. Examining though this installation the very meaning of the archives, he creates a “meditative space of limited function, offering an active invitation to movement”.

The installation is accompanied with a text written by Siniša Ilić:

Surface Mining on a World Atlas

The work is realized through research and analysis of materials from the archives of the performance collective BADco at the MMSU in Rijeka.

The work measures 4 x 3.5 meters and consists of a geographical atlas and objects from the performances Drawer and Foundation Pit, created by BADco.

The installation can be visited upon request, in the spaces of the BADco Archives.

Surface Mining is a spatial installation placed in the largest room of the Archives. The installation is positioned on the floor as a horizontal image, designed to be viewed through the logic of horizontality. It invites movement, circling around it, and engagement from multiple sides and angles. An active approach to the installation can be seen as a choreographed semicircular walk, either short or long.

The materials taken from the Archives include set design objects from the performance Drawer, on which I also collaborated as a visual artist, along with a few dried tree roots with organic remnants of decaying soil, taken from the perfomance Foundation Pit.

http://www.badco.hr/hr/work/1/all#!drawer

http://www.badco.hr/hr/work/1/all#!the-foundation-pit

When we worked on the Drawer in 2014, a guiding principle for selecting the objects was the difficulty in determining their function. The pieces themselves revealed very little or almost nothing about their purpose. In the words of Una Bauer: “The drawer is in a studio filled with objects of limited function, where the performers, positioned among the things and engaging in dialogue with them, dedicate the choreography to an encounter with reflection, striving to endure the dependence on their own image, its origin, and its exhibition value.”

Today, a decade later, the function of the selected objects remains as unclear – if not even more mysterious – as their origin. Entering the Archives is like stepping into a “cabinet of curiosities”, and encountering the remaining items from Drawer feels like opening a box in an imaginary garage or warehouse.

Objects from Drawer and dried roots from Foundation Pit are strategically distributed across a surface made of pages from The World Atlas, a quite voluminous book (Serbo-Croatian edition by Mladinska knjiga, 1973). This book, from which I first learned about the world, is divided into three parts. As the introduction says: “The first part consists of relief maps, where the spaces in between are used for cartographic representations of certain natural features of the depicted areas. The second part contains numerous thematic maps illustrating human activity in space, while the third part introduces us to the continents, regions, and countries of the world through words, sketches, and pictures.’ In addition to these sections, The World Atlas also includes chapters on statistics, political maps, natural resources, and climate-vegetation zones.

The book presents a world from the not-so-distant past, yet one that is quite different from today. It is a geography and a picture belonging to another era, which turns Atlas not just into a geographical-political archive, but into a reflection of something that no longer exists – an object without a clear function or with a limited function. Being removed from Atlas and spread out across the floor, these pages create different units marked by pronounced disorientation and illogicality, serving as a foundation for the objects from the selected performances. Together, these objects and their backdrop, without any clear function, origin, or future, establish a meditative space of limited function, offering an active invitation to movement.

Siniša Ilić

Photo: Tanja Kanazir