Extima: Metastasis of Freedom

The slavery of difference

“We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench, in some oasis of public verdure, we’ve been seized by a love of nature, in our sere and yellow, it belongs to one and all.” Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing 3

The real problem of humanity is the human being. By referring to the protection of his own primordial nature, he consolidates his dominant position in nature and legitimises inequality and injustice in society. In global and local perspective, humanity is increasingly divided into citizens and non-citizens, natives and newcomers, locals and foreigners, westerners and southerners. The need to maintain difference is growing as a metastasis in the fabric of national cultures.

The right to independence, sovereignty and freedom of the individual, the nation, humanity, becomes a bulwark within which the sun will be ours alone. The need for security is growing, the defence industry is devouring more and more people, energy and money. The apparent threat is all-encompassing and omnipresent. Appearance becomes fact, fact becomes appearance. Life becomes apparent, we recognise ourselves only symbolically. Human being disappear under the debris of appearances. Freedom has become the slavery of difference."

Extima is a performance cycle that has its conceptual beginnings in the performance Naked Life ( 2019) and continues with its projects to slide through the questioning of what it means to be a living being in a living world today. Answers to this question in contemporary times slide incredibly fast through different emphases. Extima detects them in situations of our intimate involvement in the social sphere that inevitably marks us as individuals. Sometimes we perceive it very directly, but more often the dominant ideology is quietly and imperceptibly nested in the reflection of our existence in society.

Olja Grubić (1990, Pula) graduated in Space Conceptualisation from the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana in 2014. She has presented her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both at home and abroad. She was a recipient of a Cultural Euro grant from Kino Šiška. Her work is included in the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana’s Arteast 2000+ collection. Between 2016 and 2021, she was the leader of the group Cabaret Tiffany. In 2020 she became a member of the artistic council of Via Negativa. In her artistic practice, she addresses themes that reflect the primordiality of life, combining the basic functions, needs, and instincts of life into visual images and seemingly simple physical actions that, in their persistence in time, shape a wide range of feelings and the social condition of society. Her practice encompasses performance, cabaret, installation, drawing, set and costume design. She lives and works in Ljubljana.