ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ

In 2013 I started making mixed media drawings, using everyday materials (like the ones kids use for school). It was my manifesto – to use only cheap stuff and do only work I can do at my home desk. I was inspired by my local communities – industrial suburbs of Belgrade, where abandoned factories and wild forests intersect and mix.

Watching people find solutions to follow digitalization and globalization under economical and political sanctions in a country completely cut-off from the rest of the world was a great source of inspiration. My research inevitably pointed me towards media theory and history of technology and anarchist pedagogies; informal education modes I still follow today.

I chose drawing for artistic independence and it allows me to make something out of nothing. My visual method is anti-composition, based on temporality of computer games, offering navigation instead of fixed static fields. A lot of the power of that navigation is given to the spectator and I am always happy to embrace the artist’s role as an entertainer, comedian, illusionist and storyteller. Based on urban exploration (extended walks through forgotten and invisible parts of Belgrade),I speak of myths that underline the urban structure, myths that were always there and myths that are yet to come – bringing people, animals, plants, industrial, infrastructural, cybernetic and other living and non-living entities together, blurring the line between them, making them all the same. The drawing is, then, a big ecological actor-network game of life and disaster.