Korčula Habitat – Living the Absurd
installation, infrared video, soundKorčula, Croatia, 2025
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?
Rooted in Error
installation, infrared video, plants, LED grow lights, solenoids, sound, found materialsFarsickness/Homesickness/Homelessness
curated by ART BOX | artboxportal.com
Creative District
Novi Sad, Serbia, 2022
artboxportal.com/ekologija-eksproprijacija-rekonstrukcija-relokacija
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.
Self-Sustaining System of Absurdity
Ecomitologies | Art Salon 13th NovemberNational Museum of Montenegro
Cetinje, Montenegro 2022
narodnimuzej.me
Self-Sustaining System of Absurdity
MFRU | IFCA International Festival of Computer ArtsVetrinjski dvor
Maribor, Slovenia, 2022
https://www.mfru.org/
Self-Sustaining System of Absurdity
