JANJA KOSI / Patchwork, 2020
PRESENTNG EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
JANJA KOSI / Patchwork, 2020
recycled plastic sheets (for printing textile patterns), woollen thread, foam, glue
Meet Yout at 16:17, 2020, floor and wall painting with wall paint and acrylic spray
Kosi was invited to make this new site-specific work in response to the interior spaces of the MTT. Kosi’s installation, which is divided in two parts can be likened to a form of cartography where she surveys, maps and translates from her observations. Her method is informed by the idea of the derive-walk, a psychogeography mapping of place and space. Her work focuses on how urban forms come to be defined, examining who controls their designation, their ownership and how it changes with time.
With Patchwork presented on the wall, details from planning documents and maps are given form, revealing in outline, the outer boundaries of planning zones. The boundary lines of the industrial zone of Melje and Maribor have been picked out, hand-stitched with red thread. In an earlier project titled, X°Y’Z’’N - A°B’C’’E, this idea developed so that maps of real spaces were compared to a physical bruise on the body. She refers to these patches of disregarded land as urban bruises.
The MTT had within it many of the plastic sheets that are used for the screen-printing process on textiles. Kosi discovered the disregarded sheets on a site visit to the factory and found they could be re-used. The plastic sheets hold the many patterns and designs that the original fabric produced here contained. The designs give an insight into the shifting tastes in the sale of textiles for both local and international markets.
Meet You at 16:17 is a site-specific floor and wall painting made in the space using the west facing windows. The outline form that you see is taken from the extent of the sun’s shadow as it transits through the storage space floor; 16:17 marks the point the sun reaches into the space in early September.
It marks another physical encounter with the space. Kosi will have observed the old orange curtains, long bleached by the sun that were part of this large storage room when it was a warehouse. Textiles were traditionally protected from the light, to avoid the bleaching effects of the sun on the coloured cloths. It was the case here too and so this place would have low levels of light.
The sunlight can be thought of as the reverse, of shadow, the place itself, a kind of camera obscura on another scale. Blackbox with a cast of light. The meet at 16:17 time-stamp is a reminder of the precise length of the encounter with the sun in the space and the early autumn shadow.
Janja Kosi (b. 1994, Maribor) has recently completed a postgraduate degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Her focus is mainly in painting and illustration, but she also makes animations, installations and environments.
