corn song

Plant a Tree in Your Truck; wood, plywood, soil, tree;
100 x 60 x 100 cm, 2012

The exhibition, entitled "Corn Song", curated by Omar Mirza represents 3 separate works created and inspired by my one year stay in United States. The main piece, Corn Song is based on Native Americans tradition. I performed improvised music for the field of corn in Corn Belt area of USA (Oregon, Illinois). Native Americans believed that the corn will grow better, if they will sing songs to the field. In my case I played for genetically modified corn for industrial production and hybrid corn for food industry. I collected some of this corn to prepare bread, that works as headphones to listen to the original music. The work is questioning the process of creation of our food, which has turned many times dehumanized, denaturalized, and we are actually creating and eating the artificial nature.

Second piece in the show, Plant a Tree in a Truck is based on "light activist" project I did in San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. One of the symbols, defining american society, the Truck , has its specific history – once highly functional object invented for the use of farmers and merchants turned to be more a symbol -cult, praised by so many owners in present time. Although today it is losing its functional value as a truck – few of the drivers use the back space, and if so, very rarely. The cult of the truck is based on the look and on the size – the bigger, the better. Although being attracted to these cars for their beauty, in the time of global warming I consider driving them little irresponsible. In the attempt of changing it I use a guerrila method of spreading posters by fixing them on the car, insentivating the owners to plant a tree in the back side of their car to reduce their carbon emissions. The seeds of a maple tree and the instructions to plant it are the part of the kit, together with the poster. Believing that the positive change is possible only by positive methods, the truck owners, instead of being pranked, thay receive a gift:  an original serigraph poster and seed of a tree. Beside the poster, video and photos from this action, the newly built piece for this exhibition was a plywood model of the Ford Truck with living tree in the back space.

The third piece, "Blues Loudly", is loosely based on the idea for my future project, "Instrument for Listening" which will be a large scale sculpture of functional megaphone. Blues Loudly represents such a megaphone for afro-american community. Inside of 2dimensional megaphone shape there is a wooden piece with simple slide guitar based on the tradition of afro american farmers, who built such a raw instrument on wooden pillars of their houses. Similary to the function of megaphone, blues as a musical form served as a way of expressing loudly feelings, troubles, thoughts of those with no voice, minorities, rural people, beggars, wanderers. This instrument is opened for public - everybody can play on this slide guitar and express what he/she feels. 











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