by Marina Grzinic*

The Thorn is Damjan Kocjancic's new project of photographic investigation of the side effects of a transitional post-socialism running into a mad global capitalism. The Thorn points exactly toward the blind acceptance by the post-socialist condition of the capitalist-promised bright future. Concealed along this frenzied path lie, as corpses, the vulnerable bodies of individuals desperately suffocated by drugs and alcohol. No perspective at all. These young souls are penetrated by substances that allow them to quickly forget and fall deeply into the zones of a trans-zombie situation.

The Thorn is a tiny bone stuck in the throat, a moment of unchained hopelessness of the capitalist system, or simply put, the thorn is its side effect.

What extends this body of work beyond mere photojournalism is the moment of interpretation of the gaze that negates each and every "exotic other", rather allowing the impression to be made by the totality and melding of all of the subjects. In this new photographic series, DK conceptualises the desperate social fabric of youth in contemporary Slovenia. Reality is shown as a full "picture" of delusions and apathy, within which his photographs function as a set of anti-delusional and conceptual forces. DK's photographs are to be seen as sociological phenomena, or as "mind-fuckers". With these photographs, we are dragged into politics and the issues of this generation's affiliations and modes of survival.

Two features are crucial in this impressive new photographic opus by DK. First, it is the pop-cultic colour, the dazzling light and the psychedelic atmosphere that underlie the psychedelic forgetfulness of one's own body and senses. The intense spectrum of colours registered by DK's journey into underground spaces, from clubs through corridors to toilets, brilliantly exalts the dirtiness and hopelessness of such spaces. Spaces completely empty and lacking in spirit. Then there is the distortion of the body: the head is almost always captured in the photographs as a ball of hair or a non-perfect circular target, nearly central in the photograph. The head is always bended and the face is concealed; or the body is simply headless. The face is hidden, perhaps not to be recognised, perhaps in shame, or merely to be protected from a certain dangerous total exposure to the public.  The body lies on the floor without its senses, sometimes hands and arms protecting the vulnerable face, and if the bended head is visible, then it is adorned with, or suffocated by, cigarette butts, empty bottles, cans and glasses. The photographs can be seen as meditative urban underground landscapes.
DK's images consist of random, found bodies to which he gives a strange dream-like quality with his use of colour, placing the work in the tradition of Surrealist artworks with pop-iconic flavour.

Before Thorn, DK presented a series of photographs entitled The Face. The Face is displayed on the outside wall of a squatted former army barracks complex in the centre of Ljubljana, squatted by artists, intellectuals and activists, who sought a space for creativity and independent production in the Ljubljana of the 1990's.  This complex bears the name "City of Metelkova", or simply Metelkova, as it is the name of the street where the complex is situated, underlying that this is a city within a city. In these photographs by DK, the faces of activists and artists working inside Metelkova, are "captured". The photographs are displayed as a permanent exhibition on the wall that surrounds the squatted place, a wall that symbolically protects the Metelkova citizens from Ljubljana's citizens, who want to get rid, immediately and totally, of Metelkova, and not vice versa.

In The Face, Metelkova's "citizens" proudly stare, gaze at the passers by, but always with only one eye. DK divides the face, with a brilliant move of lights and contrasts, a move internal to photography: one eye is bright while the other is covered in heavy shadow. These faces are the modern urban pirates, absolutely aware that the stereoscopic gaze is an illusion within classical portrait photography. It is always a kind of blindness in the process of an exchange of gazes between the viewers, the portrayed faces and us. Vision is always a question of a partial act of looking.

In relation to The Face, in The Thorn all seems inverted: not as a sign of simple subversion, but as a process of rethinking how to capture today in photographic form the desperate youth situation gestating in between a transitional social and political state of mind and an almost carnivorous capitalist system. A post-socialist condition waits to be sucked totally by the capitalist system. Beware: this is the story of the proletarian body and/or of the capitalist industrial factory worker's body, as well.

We find DK in a strangely flaneur-like position, going from place to place in searching of the bodies of youth without hopes. With The Thorn, DK also echoes the 19th century photographic tradition of employing images as a type of "travel diary". The ability to translate loneliness into a photographic image is of crucial importance. He is painfully aware of the obsolescence of the "photographic aesthetic" to the point that he has to rethink how to develop the form of such a representation.

For DK, it is important to go back and question very specific social structures of individual bodies that have remained unexamined with the new forms of photographic medium and computerised information systems. DK asks about the boundaries between our bodies and our images of bodies. Thus these bodies could appear as apparitions. Sometimes the body becomes a blur, while "the world" around it is "clear". Consequently, the inflections and accents on the bodies' posture are crucial in this new series of photographic work.

Insisting on these faceless and headless bodies, DK presents compelling visual meditation on the relationship between the social, individual and political. The bodies caught in a specific position, as gestures of shadows and as choreographies of youth's desperation, offer disturbing moments from industrialised and urbanised life and environments. These photographs seem always to be fragments; they stimulate the viewer to locate them in the imagined whole and context. They are also an examination of youth's destruction.
What is important is the fact that they are placed in relation to other fragments: "in the darkness, I just laid back and closed my eyes; that was all I could remember from the night." DK's headless bodies are grotesque, bittersweet, sensual, provocative and poignant. The photographs' tensions and contradictions give them a special force.

DK creates a multitude of approaches that speak of the potential of the photographic image as form and social content. The most positive impact of this mode of working with photography has been a renewed confidence into the power of the "real" photograph. Photographs as reality-proof. Overpoweringly personal and real. Involved in urban images and sites of life, DK's work is grounded within the context of post-conceptual artistic practice. These photographs are very precise background studies of modern apathy, melancholy, void and capitalist evacuation processes.

DK's photo-places filled with headless and faceless youth are pointed toward the urban inferno of the transitional post-socialist period. The Thorn is subversive in its intent and presentation.


* Dr. Marina Grzinic is a Researcher at The Institute of Philosophy at ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, and Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.