The footage, captured in slow motion on February 24, 2025, in Novi Sad, Serbia, documents an ongoing cycle of daily student protests. These actions erupted after the deaths of sixteen people caused by the collapse of a canopy at the newly renovated train station, an emblem of infrastructural corruption and state negligence.

In a prolonged single shot, protesters bombard a police cordon with flour, eggs, yogurt, toilet paper, and red paint. The riot shields and armored uniforms absorb the materials, becoming unintended canvases of political expression. What begins as confrontation slowly morphs into a choreographed abstraction: textures spill, drip, and accumulate on the asphalt in painterly excess.

A dense sonic fabric of voices, whistles, impacts, and boots forms a dissonant mass, neither chant nor chaos, but something suspended in between. The auditory space becomes saturated, echoing a collective exhaustion as much as resistance. Temporality is stretched, tension becomes suspended. In this manipulated duration, reality is not only slowed but rendered unstable, caught between spectacle and breakdown, between visual poetry and institutional violence.

The work forms part of the ongoing cycle “Self-Sustaining System of Absurdity” where mechanisms of control, decay, and improvisation expose the paradoxes of late technopolitical realities.

This experimental habitat was constructed on the terrace of a house in Korčula, Croatia, as a fully functional, off-grid micro-system for survival. Combining rainwater dishwashing, gas-based cooking and refrigeration, and solar electricity (not visible in the frame), the installation operates as both a domestic and conceptual apparatus — a lived-in sculpture of systemic absurdity.

The work is recorded in infrared video, rendering the installation in a spectrum typically invisible to the human eye. The use of infrared is not merely aesthetic, it symbolically reveals the latent, hidden operations of survival. Heat signatures, bio-responses, and energetic flows echo the often-invisible mechanisms that sustain both ecological and technological life. As with many of Kojić’s works, the use of infrared imaging functions as a conceptual x-ray, exposing the infrastructure of absurd autonomy beneath the surface.

This piece is part of Kojić’s ongoing cycle Self Sustaining System of Absurdity, a body of work that constructs techno-ecological environments in which functionality and futility are not in contradiction, but entangled. These installations explore the interplay between autonomy and absurdity, exposing the latent mechanisms of survival through tools such as infrared imaging which, in this work, captures the habitat in a spectrum beyond human perception. In his broader practice, Kojić often employs LED grow lights to sustain plant life in darkness, further interrogating the artificial architectures of photosynthesis and control.

By employing technologies typically reserved for surveillance or optimization, the artist reclaims them as instruments of critique and imagination. The result is a kind of techno-anarchic laboratory, where ecological autonomy is achieved through absurd improvisation, and where visibility itself becomes a metaphor for survival. This habitat does not present a solution, but a question: What does it mean to inhabit a system that sustains life, while simultaneously subverting its own logic?

In this mixed-media installation, Stevan Kojić constructs a fragile, hybrid habitat from found objects, living plants, and reappropriated industrial detritus. At its core lies a slanted rain gutter which is salvaged from a derelict factory nearby. It is suspended diagonally across the gallery, its lower end resting in a shallow trench of earth and wild vegetation transplanted from the surrounding urban terrain.

Embedded within this living strip are solenoids that rhythmically strike the metal gutter, generating an erratic acoustic pulse: a prosthetic rain, an artificial weathering. A Raspberry Pi and infrared camera capture live footage of a small tree illuminated by LED grow lights, transmitting spectral images to an old CRT television. This technological loop sustains visibility and presence while referencing both surveillance and biospheric illusion even in low light exposure.

The gesture is at once poetic and infrastructural: the installation occupies a former workshop floor where drainage channels, now transformed into soil beds, suggest a reclaiming of ecological agency within an environment shaped by post-industrial transition. Rainwater from a leaky roof is meant to irrigate the transplanted flora, creating an if/then condition of speculative sustainability.

The work Rooted in Error oscillates between states of displacement and adaptation, evoking both rootedness and precarity. It is not a stable system, but an open circuit, fragile, reactive, and absurd, where mechanisms of life-support emerge from remnants of abandonment.