Парадајз Lost

Winter 2026

It was then twenty-nine - a year held by the neck; Americans shackled by ice, and the world shackled by America. During these climactic days, the echo of Oskar Davičo's 1949 poem Zrenjanin infused strength and brought a smile from home. His verses of sublime defiance and spite shook me out of lethargy and raised the danse macabre of everyday life to the pitch of a dignified resistance. The Paradajz Lost project became a kitchen of rebellion and happiness. What resulted was self-sacrificial, structural resilience. All twelve books can be fragmented and shredded into syntaxes, slogans, and signs, because each is infused with the same zest of struggle. The exquisite corpse of decentralized passages can be fraternally reconnected again into new anatomies and autonomies after decomposition.

Paradajz Lost consists of 12 antifascist scrolls measuring 15 inches wide and over 40 feet in length, and one even lengthier colophon. Monoprints of hand-cut Serbian cyrillic and dancers were made using reconstituted leather, and printed on 150gsm Hahnemühle Biblio paper. The color palette was dictated by a salvaged 5lb can of communally discarded ink. Rollers coated in black wax and filled with various surplus material including dead lightbulbs, shells, hair, bottle caps, lentils, pencils, rice, thorns, rusted blades, sand, and silence. Hand-built roller stands, covered with the papers that collected excess ink. Roller ends made from found objects, corks, and wooden prisms. Airbrush, oil-staining, direct roll-ons and palette knives, intimate annotations and documentations added during assembly.

Paradajz Lost was installed on March 24th, 2026 at FIT, NYC, as a part of Walking As Reading event. It covered 720 square feet.