Sun as the ultimate capital is a collaborative project between Dr. Špela Petrič and Shreyasi Kar. The installation is a part of the 10th international festival of Svetlobna Gverila (Lightning Guerrilla). The main medium of expression in the works of contemporary visual arts, presented at the Lighting Guerrilla international festival, is obviously the medium of light. The main theme of this year’s edition of the festival is NATURE. The projects, shown at the festival, re-create the sublime beauty of nature, make space for playful substantial and formal arrangements and provide many starting points for various explorations and artistic experimentations. This year’s program also involves students from schools and faculties in Ljubljana with whom new projects are being developed through a series of workshops.
Sun, the Ultimate capital, employs techniques of photobiochemical printing of different images of banknotes onto plant leaves, faces us with the realisation that money as a symbol for an economic system contemporarily exists also as a sign for 400 thousand plant species that, thanks to their metabolic networks, enable emergent phenomena characteristic for the human culture. All the production surpluses that make the evolution of the society possible are inextricably linked to 550 billion tons of biomass of green organisms that tirelessly convert photons into chemical fuel. The accumulation of capital thus relies more on the strategies of survival, developed during the plants’ evolution in contact with the inexhaustible light of the Sun, than on the human workforce.
The installation also showcases the story of the collaboration between the two artists along with the journey of the leaves .
Press about the project can be found here, here and here (1:00 on).