2024

Audio visual installation
Audio speakers, audio players, cement, transparent epoxy, neon, cables
(dimensions are variable)



We don't care about other people's problems.
That is human nature.
We are indifferent to other people's grief, pain and misfortune.

Disagree? Ok, how long can you empathise with someone else's tragedy?
A day? A week? A month? A year?
We can't spend our energy on experiencing someone else's tragedy for a long time, otherwise we won't have enough energy for ourselves. In general, we avoid what upsets us. And we can be completely understood for this. This is called adaptation.

We adapt to the news of other people's wars, losses, grief, disasters... and what to say, we adapt to our own lives of wartime, loss of relatives and friends or forced emigration. Sensitivity and empathy do indeed have their time limits. We consciously stop hearing other (our) voices, even when someone is screaming around us, even when they're asking for help, even when it becomes impossible not to listen.

What makes us distracted from our (measured) lives? What makes us stop, listen and open ourselves to the perception of the other in the midst of an insanely fast, irritating flow of information about violence, when another event is just one part of countless other events, events that are hard to count?

The constant exposure to scenes of violence, whether we see them on the screen or in our own eyes, kills something in us, and at some point these events of horror ceases to resonate with us and turns into an ordinary abstract set of numbers, a simple calculation.

Counting days of war, casualties, and bombings, those executed or taken prisoner becomes an everyday, routine practice and a kind of mechanism to overcome fear and anxiety. It is as if the process of counting itself implies a logical conclusion to the numbers of horror, as if the completion of the count means a return to normal life. Counting helps to digest the unacceptable, transforming the real into the abstract, the emotional into the logical, the personal into statistical data.

And it is necessary (?) to accept this.