български

Stick

Author

Dimitar Solakov

Birth year

1987

Place of birth

Bulgaria
Sofia

Year of creation

2021

Information on media/technique

HD video, looped

Section

Video

More information

www.dimitarsolakov.com

Video link

https://vimeo.com/656127591/2cbcd0424e

Biennale

25th Gabrovo Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art

Short description

Mushrooms have always fascinated me, with their alien appearance and even more so the fact that the thing we see is just the “reproductive organ” of the mycelium that lives underground. The work plays with the idiom “poke it with a stick”, where you are unfamiliar with something, are afraid or cautious of it to some extent, but want to establish some sort of contact regardless. It’s a very primal contact establishment, one that you can easily imagine our distant ancestors may have conducted and one that you can observe in children as well. For me, it’s not about an act of aggression or vandalism, but a crude way of establishing an interspecies communication, however futile and absurd it is. It’s a funny metaphor for humanity’s general lack of knowledge about the natural world and the whole “picture” and the Dunning-Krueger effect stemming from this insufficient knowledge.

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