September the 16th, 2024 – A Lastovo exhibition being hailed as exceptional provides an insight into Croatia as it’s rarely ever seen. Hrvatska kakvo se rijetko viđa/Croatia as it is rarely seen will interest the crowds.
As Morski writes, the aforementioned exhibition by authors Romeo Ibrišević and Miljenko Marukić will be held next week on the gorgeous island of Lastovo in southern Dalmatia.
Miljenko Marukić’s stunning photographs showcase all of the beauty of the wild world. They include the strangeness of life, freedom of movement, and our eternal drive for survival. The exact opposite is evident in the paintings that the artists created based on Romeo Ibrišević’s photographs. In them, we witness the ugliness of human activity in all of its horror. Humans are portrayed for what we are – the truly “wild” ones that destroy the chances of the survival of others in every way possible.
Romeo Ibrišević and his Association (Green Feet) have been cleaning nature parks, the underwater world, mountains and rivers for twenty years as part of a commendable campaign entitled “Clean Croatia of car wrecks”, and documenting it all with his camera. Artists got involved in the action in their own way: they would choose one of Romeo’s photos documenting the recovery of a car wreck from nature, the photo was then printed on canvas, and then the artists, each in their own style, intervened on it in their own way and in their own styles.
Miljenko Marukić otherwise established himself as a photographer of the underwater and animal world. He became known for his patience in photographing rare birds and creatures that blend in well with the environment. The pair are connected not only by a passion for photography, but above all by fascination with natural beauty and conservation activism. Their works talk about the other, more ugly side of man’s existence on Earth. On one side is our primordial nature, and on the other is what humans have destroyed and continue to destroy.
Even the most hardened climate skeptics are becoming more and more convinced that nature is striking back at us – if we continue at the same pace, the world captured by Marukić will disappear and only the vile metal waste cemeteries photographed by Ibrišević will remain. If we compare Romeo’s photographic templates with the art, it’s easy to conclude that we’ve crossed all permissible limits of arrogance towards nature.
In the busy modern day, it’s quite clear that when the most developed countries talk about “green” or “clean” technology, and when they swear by the so-called green transformation of the global economy, they’re actually blatantly lying. It’s all faceless guff which allows it to continue, because without completely abandoning the existing profit-based production model, there can be no real change. Summers will be hotter, storms more destructive, mountains of human trash bigger and bigger. At the same time, we must take into account: the worst thing will not be what nature will eventually do to us, but what we’ll end up doing to each other.
The Lastovo exhibition will open on Monday, September the 23rd, 2024 in the premises of the Dobra Dobričević Association.
