Парадајз Lost
(from the colophon)
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.
Monoprints of hand-cut Serbian cyrillic and dancers of reconstituted leather, primed with shellac on 150gsm Hahnemühle Biblio paper.
Airbrush, oil-staining, direct roll-ons and palette knives, intimate annotations and documentations added during assembly
Rollers coated in black wax and filled with surplus materials including dead lightbulbs, shells, hair, bottle caps, lentils, pencils, rice, thorns, rusted blades, sand, and silence
The color palette was dictated by a salvaged 5lb can of communally discarded ink
Full size of the floor installation 40 × 18 feet
(photographs of the installation were taken at The Great Hall at FIT, NYC on March 24th, 2026)
2026
Колофон
Зима 2025
Била је тада двадесетдевета - година мукла; Америка окована ледом, а свет окован америком. Тих гаврилских дана ехо поеме “Зрењанин” Оскара Давича из 1949, је улио снагу и вратио осмех. Стихови узвишеног пркоса и ината пренули су ме из летаргије и уздигли danse macabre свакодневнице на ниво мегдана. Тако је пројекат Парадајз Lost постао кухиња побуне и среће. Од побуне врви и флексибилна структура - свих дванаест књига може бити дефрагментовано и уситњењено на синтаксе, пароле и знакове, јер сваки од њих у себи носи исти жар борбе. Братски, као у игри еxquisite corpse, децентрализовани одломци и након разградње опет се могу преповезати у нове анатомије и аутономије.
