The Disappearing of Professor Petrovic

2014


photographic series (C-print 50x36m each)

video projection of a text

a shelf with objects


The Disappaearing of Professor Petrovic

Installation view

Professor Petrović likes to walk the path that leads from his house up the hill, all the way to the pine forest. As if obeying a list or a map, he abandons himself to a repetition of acts that, day after day, follow the same, identical order: he inhales the smell of trees, runs his fingers through a rosemary bush, stops by a stone wall to observe distant hills, takes a photo with his camera, puts in his pocket a few curious pebbles. This morning he is himself strangely aware of this regularity, and the thought of it suddenly makes him feel troubled. The street is deserted as far as his gaze can reach, to where the road bends by a high stone fence. Sometimes in his walk, Petrović would meet some of his neighbors from surrounding homes - nameless passers-by who live behind the walls and closed blinds, and swiftly, with scarce, trained grins, busy with their mobile phones, walk their dogs dressed in raincoats, their eyes utterly deprived of any notification of his presence. And so, for the first time (though we know it's not the first time) in professor Petrović’s mind an idea is formed about the strangeness of their passage. There, they don’t see me again, he then confirms to himself. And to tell the truth, it is not uncommon that someone would almost stumble upon Petrović, run into him, or unkindly freeze and barricade his way. Perhaps I simply never adapted, he would then think; and soon forget all about it.


Over night, the hills were drowned in a deep white sea of clouds. The mist poured out of the warm earth, it crawled down the olive fields and flooded the valley. As you look outside, your last night dreams are fading. An image fights to form: a house with blue windows, a strange wooden staircase. You inhabit an old photograph, you are a tenant of an old gaze. Inside the white cloud, a world may be gone.


The Disappaearing of Professor Petrovic

C-prints, approx 70x50cm each


Text (excerpt) presented in form of a video projection (scrolling text) as part of the show Something Like a Mirror, 2014