Could you tell us what PROPAGANDNI MATERIJAL actually is, is it a one-off project? Where did the inspiration for the project come from?

The path to that project was very organic. My work over the past couple of years had mostly been collaborative, primarily with artists from the music realm so, for some time, I had this urge to do something solely with *myself*, or at least in a different medium. To challenge myself if for nothing else. I had the phrase PROPAGANDNI MATERIJAL written down for a couple of years and it fascinated me in a morbid way so I knew I would use it eventually. As I let it sit for so long, I realized its origin and meaning are directly or indirectly entwined with a couple of construal elements in my life, from growing up during the war [where my first drawings were almost exclusively military-based and violent], to being fascinated by the nWo mechanics and the ‘90s NBA gear alike and finally, pursuing academia where P-word is *forbidden* and derogatory. Then, it all connected in this current world’s climate where everything is so overly excessive that irony is sometimes the only functional weapon against the universal spectacle. PM was initially supposed to be a one-off drop, playing to all the aforementioned cards while testing my return to the fashion realm, reviving my project VERY RARE by portraying a fashion product in the collaged, mixed-media visual style I utilized over the years in work with musicians. It wasn’t long until I noticed the project’s role in what certain people that I look up to described as an “ordering device” or simply “a different storytelling device”, allowing me to remove pressure from the themes I deal with in my regular work. For example, now I know: PM is product-based, XIII1313 is text-based, “Sven Harambašić” works with faces, or as Francis Bacon would say – injuries. One doesn’t need to exclude the other though.

When it comes to your artwork, it blurs the boundaries of reality in a peculiar way, where often images of reality merge with contemporary media culture. I am referring to how tacitly in some of your works, such as your collaboration with Amenra, your art manifests itself as a true medium. Through your creative process, the viewer is able to grasp cultural processes and changes that help shape the way we perceive the world and develop critical thinking about it. Could you tell me about the social component present in your works, or how you interpret the role of art in contemporary society, understood here as a media-driven society in which the image form is omnipresent.

My drive to do art is selfish most of the time because I always speak to myself first. In a direct relation to that, I prefer to avoid giving away a direct interpretation of it because I like to hear different ways it affects others – there is a certain variation of inverted voyeurism in it I think. For example, you told me that my work with Amenra was tacit, which is something I could only ask for while creating it, because I always perceived their music as a variation of silence, despite its surface intensity. On the other hand, the work with DUMA was supposed to be very physical, and perhaps it was experienced the best when we performed it live and one could feel the full sensory assault on the spot.

I like the quote from Fredric Jameson which says that aesthetic forms live and die according to how well they resolve social and cultural anxieties of the time. On the other hand, general cultural anxiety often ignores individual anxieties. I don’t perceive my work as something that has a wider social component, in my opinion, its value lies in dealing with isolated, inner worlds. There is also this question of form which, by the saying, is only “visible” to those who can add or subtract from it, while the surface is visible to everyone. In that sense, artwork becomes a very strong communication device, a means to start a dialogue. After all, the purpose of art should be to facilitate feeling or further thinking, not imposing meanings – still, that shouldn’t be an excuse for simplifying things. The same way incorporating critical thinking in education is *critical* but also shouldn’t be an excuse for avoiding basics since those basics provide you a framework for further critical thinking. Today’s world is often dubbed as Orwellian, and Orwell still holds the championship belt in buzzword and hype context, even though in many ways, the situation today is more like Huxley; endless cycle of consumption and pleasure, with no time or interest to think. We are all guilty in that sense. My, or any artist’s (or person’s), responsibility is to be authentic, or at least to provide an authentic framework, and in that sense sometimes it’s more important knowing what you’re not, rather than knowing what you are.

Where does your creative process come from? Who do you feel most inspired by at the moment? Both artistically and culturally.

With time, I noticed that the answer to the inspiration question usually goes in one of two directions, both kinda cliché; one is very specific, driven by pretentious references, the other one takes a more general, secretive approach and cites ‘life’ itself as an inspiration. Personally, I lost belief in this romantic concept of inspiration as some divine intervention and learned that the only thing stimulating the work (and thus the inspiration) is the work itself. I doubt I would come to that conclusion this quickly without the original lockdown, where scarcity of new work made me slow down and detox from dopamine shots provided by airports and algorithmic manipulations. There is this quote how writer could spend a lifetime rewriting his ideas, in a similar manner I had to dig back into the archive in order to rethink my existing output.

Following that, the most valuable skill I developed over that course is learning to differentiate a termination point from a navigation point; often, artwork is perceived as a termination point while, essentially, it should always be a navigational, fluid point for the future process. Then, the process itself builds or kills whatever ideas come in its way. The idea is always somewhere inside, it just needs to be decoded and that takes time. If I’m more concrete, perhaps unusual for a ‘visual artist’, my process is almost always sparked from reading; a written word or sentence that catches my attention, then I build up (or down) from there. There is no rule for its format though, Lingua Ignota work was always about strong declarative sentences, Boy Harsher, on the other hand, were all about bold all-caps words. For the work with Moor Mother, I got the text first so I had to work backwards and reimagine those words visually…

All things considered, there is always a deeper hole to dig, with a lot of doors that lead to solid walls. It’s all about finding that one sensation which makes you want to rework your whole catalogue. The false approach would be to dig and expect answers, the point is exclusively in new questions, which is an eternal gift and curse. It sounds romantic once you revisit it though. To be less pretentious and more direct, symbiotic alien matter from Spiderman had been an inspiration ever since I first seen it, when I was four years old.