by Aleksander Bassin*

I believe that The Thorn project by Damjan Kocjancic will figure eminently within the programme of the Noorderlicht photographic festival in the Netherlands and that, later, it will find a resonant public location in the centre of Ljubljana, finally returning back to where it was created in the lateness of night and the early morning hours. Why? Primarily because the author's socially inspired photography reveals the (internal and external) substance, which in the Slovene space has remained concealed for several reasons; because it shows the quality of uniting the authorial (authoritative) approach and the objective reality in a mirror-like reflection delineated between the classical photographic medium and the dreamed issues - as DK himself defines his fringe spheres of expression.

Perhaps the 'mirror-like reflection' sounds somewhat old-fashioned, too classically moderate; if there were times, however, when photography - just like any other art - was (also) expected to hold a mirror to reality in a certain sense, I am convinced that such a critical distance or, as it were, a notice of the dimension in art is utterly imperative and urgent also in the contemporary transitional (dis)order ruling the Slovene space. Thus, DK is one of the rare artists, who consciously elevates himself above the current neutral mediocrity varnished withnon-expression; he is an adherent of the outstandingly exploring medium, which takes the famous McLuhan's saying** as its basic starting point - but nothing more than that; his aesthetical superstructure, which we could recently test on his portraits of the Metelkova City people and in DK's reception of street responses to these photographs (The Face II), presents the artist as a responsive personality par excellence. His reaction only seems ecstatic; in fact, it is extremely sensible with a critical subtext.

The Thorn project is both a document and a certain j'accuse: a document about youth and their escape from reality into the world of psychological solitude. This solitude points to the problems of drugs, excessively consumed by youth precisely in the (biological) time when they are supposed to be at their socialising climax. Here we have, as DK himself puts it, a document about collapsing into solitude, again and again; a document about/portrait of a particular sociological-social state of the Slovene capital city and Slovene society. The project starts from the fact that taking drugs is primarily a result of psychological solitude, and therefore it should evoke in us (as a target group) a wider and more profound response than the one coming in the form of a declarative message or a warning from the public administration office of this very society, which actually finds itself in the dock precisely because of the rise in the use of drugs among the youth.

Is our target group capable of comprehending - through these anonymous, self-absorbed and concealed portraits of youth - the inner (causal) substance of DK's photography that contrasts, in its (invisible) context, non-freedom and the dependence on the capital with the ethics of uncontrollable development, or progress, in the transitional society? DK's project does not allow for staged snap-shots; it is an innumerable, thrilling document about addiction, about giving oneself up to utopian 'dreams' that ruin most cruelly the lives of Slovene youth.


* Aleksander Bassin is a director of the City Art Museum Ljubljana. 
** “The medium is the message.”