The series moves within the field of tension between digital image manipulation, brutalist architecture, and autobiographical fragmentation. Its starting point was a deliberate aesthetic engagement with the glitch — the digital error — as an artistic principle. The glitch functions not only as a formal device but as a symbolic metaphor for biographical ruptures, experiences of migration, and the ambivalent relationship between the subject and technological reproducibility.
My fascination with brutalist architecture arises less from an academic than from an affective connection to these massive, raw, and functionally honest structures. They embody a social legacy deeply rooted in the socialist architecture of former Yugoslavia. My emotional attachment to these buildings, especially in foggy winter settings, gives them an almost physical presence. Brutalism becomes an aesthetic cipher for belonging, loss, and resistance to the polished surface of the contemporary world.
“Brutalism glitching” began as a playful, almost manic impulse that soon developed into an obsessive daily practice. The continuous posting of works on social media became part of the artistic process — not as self-promotion, but as a way to negotiate my position between visibility and isolation. The glitch, originally a technical defect, turned into an existential symbol: of disturbance, migration, the failure to integrate, and the resulting inner fragmentation. The digital distortion of the images reflects a psychological and biographical distortion — a kind of static born from uprootedness and loss of language.
The conscious appropriation of kitsch in the form of an exaggerated, “brutal” glitch aesthetic is, for me, a subversive gesture. In a time when any deviation is quickly absorbed and commodified, the courage to embrace bad taste becomes an act of self-empowerment. Following Walter Benjamin, I understand the technical reproducibility of the artwork as a form of aesthetic democratization — an opportunity to make desire and affect visible beyond bourgeois norms.
In Michel de Certeau’s sense of the “active consumer,” I see my artistic practice as an ongoing act of self-construction through appropriation and the selective use of cultural forms. At the same time, in Bourdieu’s logic, I point to the link between symbolic and social power: the conscious production of the vulgar and the marginal as a form of aesthetic counterpower that challenges established hierarchies of taste.
The series culminates in the work Ruine in Mostar, which serves as an autobiographical conclusion. The site — Bosnia, my mother’s birthplace — became a projection surface for an internal system error that began with my migration to Austria in 2003. The glitch in the image surface stands for the rupture in the biographical continuum, for the irreparable remainder of a lost identity. The digital error thus becomes a medium of remembering and unlearning.
The series negotiates architecture, digital aesthetics, and biography as intertwined layers. It treats failure as an aesthetic resource, the banal as a site of truth, and error as a productive principle. In a time when cultural processes are increasingly shaped by algorithmic logic, I see the glitch as a poetic form of resistance — a conscious affirmation of imperfection.
Edit:
The final piece in the series (a ruin in Mostar) came about by chance and fits perfectly. The location of this magnificent building is ideal for this purpose. It’s in Bosnia, where my mother was born and where I spent the best times of my childhood with my cousin of the same age.
Then, in 2003, ten years after the war we spent in a basement, a major glitch occurred on the internal mental screen of my life. At 26 years old, completely unprepared, I moved overnight from Croatia to Austria, leaving behind my language, friends, family, and landscape. This glitch, which disrupted the image in my internal program and caused noise, has never been truly repaired. It’s still there, buzzing, trembling, and interfering, leaving me feeling like I’m living in the wrong film.
November 2022