HOUSE ON SAND
2025-2026
Mixed media, physical objects, and XR/digital spaces
The House on Sand project grew not out of nostalgia, but out of an attempt to understand how people experience instability. The artist's childhood fell in the 1990s, a time of social and material vulnerability. Shabby houses, dangerous streets, a feeling of insecurity. But inside, this world was experienced differently: as a space for play and imagination, where reality was reinterpreted and transformed into the ruins of magical castles. This mechanism is not an escape, but a form of adaptation. In order to withstand the fragility of the environment, the mind shifts its focus, retouches the threat, and creates an internal landscape in which it is possible to live. It is this principle that underlies the project. Maps, collages, digital spaces, and objects do not reconstruct a specific area and do not strive for authenticity. They bring together an average, vaguely familiar space — one in which everyone recognizes something of their own. The landscape of Houses on Sand resembles a dream: there is no clear logic to it, but there is a sense of recognition. Here, you can wander, play, and devise routes, although the environment itself does not suggest any scenarios or rules. The reactions of viewers become part of the project. Some note the similarity to a dream, some see a dream for the first time in a long time after interacting with the space, and some recognize their childhood playground in it. This is not an individual story, but a collective experience—a common field in which personal images overlap. Today, in another period of uncertainty, this mechanism is once again relevant. When the future is unclear, imaginary “magic castles” become not an illusion, but a way to hold on. House on Sand captures this state: a fragile foundation on which, against all odds, a shared presence is possible.
2025-2026
Mixed media, physical objects, and XR/digital spaces
The House on Sand project grew not out of nostalgia, but out of an attempt to understand how people experience instability. The artist's childhood fell in the 1990s, a time of social and material vulnerability. Shabby houses, dangerous streets, a feeling of insecurity. But inside, this world was experienced differently: as a space for play and imagination, where reality was reinterpreted and transformed into the ruins of magical castles. This mechanism is not an escape, but a form of adaptation. In order to withstand the fragility of the environment, the mind shifts its focus, retouches the threat, and creates an internal landscape in which it is possible to live. It is this principle that underlies the project. Maps, collages, digital spaces, and objects do not reconstruct a specific area and do not strive for authenticity. They bring together an average, vaguely familiar space — one in which everyone recognizes something of their own. The landscape of Houses on Sand resembles a dream: there is no clear logic to it, but there is a sense of recognition. Here, you can wander, play, and devise routes, although the environment itself does not suggest any scenarios or rules. The reactions of viewers become part of the project. Some note the similarity to a dream, some see a dream for the first time in a long time after interacting with the space, and some recognize their childhood playground in it. This is not an individual story, but a collective experience—a common field in which personal images overlap. Today, in another period of uncertainty, this mechanism is once again relevant. When the future is unclear, imaginary “magic castles” become not an illusion, but a way to hold on. House on Sand captures this state: a fragile foundation on which, against all odds, a shared presence is possible.
- Via browser in Spatial using a direct link.
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Objects complete the cycle. I make plastic models of houses that are fluid, as if they were molten forms, and cover them with decals featuring textures of the same buildings. Thus, digital reconstruction returns to the material world, having passed through several layers of transformation: from memory to data, from data to objects.
One way to return to materiality is to create slides of a walk through a place that does not exist in reality, captured on Kodak Ektachrome film.
In December 2025, part of the project was shown at the exhibition “Yesterday, Today, Never” at the Parobrod Gallery in Belgrade. (“Juce Danas Nikad”, Parobrod, Beograd)
Curators: Olga Matveeva and Elena Anosova.
Curators: Olga Matveeva and Elena Anosova.
