Small but dangers

Mateja Rojc & Simon Hudolin – Salči

smallbutdangers does not mean anything: it is an intentionally misspelled and paraphrased expression “Small, but Mighty” (sitan, ali dinamitan), used in the context of the south-eastern Europe  to denote a singular rebellious and powerful subject, capable of confronting and winning over an enemy who is usually much better consolidated. This expression, typical for the misfit-mentality of a Balkan man/woman, has become an operative term and a personal artistic brand of Mateja Rojc & Simon Hudolin – Salči, a couple from a tiny Slovenian village of Cerkno.

Small but Dangers put into focus the notion of the Image, and the variety of manifestations an image can take under the veil of (singular) Reality, while playing the transvestite role at the stage of virtual and analog realities. Central to their understanding of contemporary life and its aesthetics has been the power of mass-media and sensitive aspects of ideologies inherent to the mechanism of media “cross-dressing”.  Those aspects have gained prominence throughout their short but uprising formation at the Slovenian and international contemporary art scene. Small but Dangers mirror the complexity of a medium itself, through their paintings, videos, performances, and actions: they project onto the external world their intimate and poetic (but nonetheless rough and provocative) comprehension of everyday banality - as a vision of unprecedented (and destructive) power that a single little subject could produce, individually or by a domino-effect. Taking it rather as a concept, as a paradigm of such a power, Small but Dangers create ruptures within the sacred “banality of the everyday” by placing the manipulability at the centre of our experience of reality. As a means to oppose any status quo and to propose another way of positioning, the one that refers to the rhetoric and logistic of Time, they put into question the visual regimes of our times within the context saturated by visual codes: the proliferation of images, their movement, accumulation and dissemination, and their migration through space and time. Yet they have always preserved the poetics of singular vision inscribed into the modes of confrontation with (and against) the manifestations of political and socio-cultural orders, upon which such a power continues to exist. That is why the symbolic red line of their practice remains a game without rules, the nonsense of meaning in a hypnotically seductive and never-ending circulation of optical illusions. In a seemingly childish play with unforeseen consequences, an external adult onlooker loses his grounds – and even reluctantly steps onto the TV stage where a paradoxical scheme of image flow challenges, once again, the capacity of contemporary media tools to affect our perception of (sub)urban everyday life.

Marko Stamenković

http://smallbutdangers.cerkno.net