BLUE DRIFT

What Flows Through Us

Modri premik / Blue Drift – What Flows Through Us

Modri premik signals a shift in how we perceive the environment, which we often understand as something external to us. The English title Blue Drift adds a sense of movement to this shift. The two titles are not literal translations of one another; rather, they open up two aspects of the same process. The word drift refers to being carried along, or to gradual movement under the influence of currents, wind and other forces – a form of movement in which the path is determined not only by what is moving, but also by the environment through which it travels. In the context of this year’s edition of the R.o.R+ Festival, drift is therefore more than a metaphor. It also describes the way microplastics move through aquatic systems: particles travel with currents, settle in sediments, re-enter the water column, pass between different environments and enter living organisms.

Blue Drift thus shifts attention from the object to its trajectory. When a plastic bottle, packaging or synthetic fibre breaks down into sufficiently small particles, the original object disappears, but the material remains. Its path becomes increasingly difficult to trace: a river may carry it towards the sea, currents may redirect it, some of it may settle in sediment, some may remain in the water column, while some may come into contact with organisms. Microplastics are therefore not simply pollutants that accumulate somewhere; they are matter in constant circulation, whose trajectories connect different ecosystems.

This perspective comes close to what the philosopher Timothy Morton describes through the concept of the “hyperobject”: phenomena that are so vast and dispersed across space and time that we can never perceive them in their entirety, even though we are continuously entangled with them. We encounter microplastics as individual particles, samples and measurements, while the broader system through which they circulate extends far beyond direct perception.

It is precisely here that the subtitle What Flows Through Us becomes more than a poetic figure. The festival is concerned not only with what is present in water, but with the permeability of the boundaries by which we have organised the world: between the natural and the artificial, outside and inside, environment and body. These questions are not tied to an abstract idea of an ocean somewhere far away, but to the specific waterscape of the Soča, the Vipava, the Tagliamento, the Adriatic and smaller local waterways. By incorporating scientific study of local waters, this connection is no longer merely a curatorial proposition. The water addressed by the exhibition may be the very same water flowing only a few kilometres away.

In Plastični razcvet / Plastic Bloom by the duo Lumoskop_lab, this shift in scale takes place directly on the visitor’s body. The visual language of the installation derives from actual microplastic samples, whose structures spread across the visitor’s image within an interactive light environment. The title contains a deliberate paradox. Bloom belongs to the vocabulary of growth, flowering and life, yet here it is a synthetic substance that “blooms”. The installation does not present microplastics as foreign matter that could simply be removed from an otherwise untouched natural world. The human figure and the plastic particle appear within the same image. The question, then, is no longer simply what we have introduced into the environment, but whether, after decades of doing so, we can still maintain a clear idea of where the human ends and the environment begins.

Jazmin Rojas Forero addresses a related issue, although from an entirely different direction. Bodies Inside Each Other / Telesa znotraj drug drugega takes the frailejón as its point of departure, a high-altitude plant that captures moisture from fog and channels it through its own body towards the ground. Her sculpture becomes a body in which the atmosphere can manifest itself. If Plastični razcvet / Plastic Bloom speaks of the unwanted passage of synthetic substances across boundaries, Rojas Forero shows that permeability itself is not an anomaly. It is a fundamental condition of life. An organism is not a closed container, but a space of exchange. Bodies Inside Each Other / Telesa znotraj drug drugega thus opens up one of the exhibition’s central questions: bodies exist within other bodies, systems within other systems, and none of them is entirely autonomous.

Anne Fie Salverda’s Breaking Light / Lom svetlobe likewise begins at the boundary between the visible and a process that exceeds visibility. It takes oceanic photosynthesis and reflections of light on water as its point of departure, translating something planetary into an intimate optical experience. By contrast, in Observations at Low Tide / Opazovanja ob oseki, Lotte Beets draws close to the almost imperceptible. Her casts preserve tiny structures that the receding tide reveals on the seabed only briefly. Both works are concerned with perception, but each operates at a different scale: one directs attention towards a process on which life depends, the other towards traces we might easily step past. The ecological question therefore emerges not only as a question of responsibility, but also as one of attention: what has our perception been trained to overlook?

In the work of Damjan Šporčić, this overlooked trace assumes a distinctly material form. Fish Food. Back on the Menu / Hrana za ribe. Spet na jedilniku is based on small pieces of plastic that he collected over the course of many years on beaches in the Kvarner region. Storing them in jars, as one might preserve food for the winter, turns the title into a darkly humorous loop: what we have produced, used and discarded becomes incorporated into marine feeding relationships. Significantly, the artist does not present collecting as a solution. His archive does not “clean” the sea; rather, it documents a material culture that has outlived its usefulness. The human economy declares an object to be waste; the ecosystem recognises no such category. The material continues on its way.

In Robertina Šebjanič’s work, the same logic extends into historical time. Her research into submerged chemical munitions presents the sea as a space in which political and military history does not remain merely a memory. The remnants of conflict corrode; the substances they contain pass into the sediment and come into contact with organisms. Here, the past does not return as an image or a narrative, but as chemistry. The sea becomes an archive that does not remember an event in human terms, but preserves its material consequences. In this sense, microplastics are likewise archival material of our time: fragments without a legible history, yet with a very concrete material origin.

This also changes the role of science within the festival. GLOBE Italia uses a protocol for monitoring microplastics in surface waters that is also designed to involve schools and researchers. Here, the microscope, sampling and analysis do not serve as evidence confirming the message of the artworks. Art and science do not perform the same task. A scientific protocol seeks to establish what is present in the water, in what quantities, and how conditions are changing; an artwork can ask what it means to live in a world in which this substance has become part of the circulation of matter. If art were reduced to merely illustrating scientific data, it would lose its critical autonomy. If scientific data were used merely as an appealing metaphor, the reality of the problem would be lost. The productive space of Modri premik / Blue Drift lies precisely in the tension between the two.

For this reason, it would make little sense to understand this year’s edition as yet another exhibition about “saving nature”. Such a formulation preserves precisely the division that the works in the exhibition call into question: humans on one side, nature on the other. With Tentacles of Change / Lovke sprememb, Marsja van der Ven likewise introduces an organism into this relationship, one whose remarkable capacity to perceive and adapt to environmental changes disrupts the notion of a passive nature simply waiting for human protection. Natural systems respond, adapt and change without our permission; the question is what conditions we create for them and what kind of world emerges through these changes.

Modri premik and Blue Drift thus describe two aspects of the same process. The former speaks of a shift in our perspective, the latter of the movement of matter that disregards the boundaries by which we have divided the world. From ocean to river, from river to sample, from sample to particle, from particle to organism, and from organism back to the planetary system, both the scale and our position within it continue to shift.

In this sense, What Flows Through Us is not so much the exhibition’s slogan as its hypothesis. Perhaps the defining feature of the contemporary environmental moment is not simply that humans have altered nature, but that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the idea of nature as a space that begins where the human ends. Blue Drift follows the trajectories of substances that continually cross these boundaries, while Modri premik occurs at the moment when we realise that we ourselves have never stood outside this flow.