Since 2018 Nika Erjavec has been developing hybrid artistic research related to sensory perception at the intersection of art and science and (in) visible transformations of the environment in the last two centuries. In her installations, she interweaves everyday, banal, consumable materials, such as various temporary building elements, artificial plants, processed electronic toys, etc. as representatives of our current subject and living culture. On the other hand, she explores, harvests, and includes dried plants from abandoned urban areas. These are mainly third landscape spaces, either undefined and abandoned pieces of land in cities, fenced spaces, or construction pits awaiting capital investments such as car parks, luxury housing, and shopping malls. During this time and seeming neglect, spaces of complex ecosystems are evolving. These are places of great biodiversity, the abundance of different species that thrive in these systems surpasses the composition of mercury on the average surface that is regulated, nurtured by humans. Indigenous and invasive alien species come together in these areas. Upon contact with the installation, the visitor enters a predetermined system of operation, either through an active management gesture or through his presence and movement, with which he/she introduces perceptual disturbances into space. One cuts and suddenly changes the acoustic landscape of the space, triggers vibrational disturbances of sound, tactile and visual in the contact of the natural and the social. These are concentrated in the most marginalized and weak points of the installation, which escape us from our perceptual field due to the speed of movement.

Photo: Damjan Švarc © ACE KIBLA.