The work operates within the expanded field of artistic practices. Starting from two binary oppositions\u2014architecture \/ non-architecture and landscape \/ non-landscape\u2014Rosalind Krauss demonstrated how traditional media categories expand logically, opening space for hybrid practices that no longer belong to any established discipline. Within this field, Destination<\/em> does not remain confined to photography, nor can it be reduced to a conventional installation. By actively combining the indexical veracity of analog recording, constructed space, and bodily kinesthesia, the installation produces a new perceptual regime that re-examines the experience of landscape\u2014a regime that can theoretically be situated within the field of phenomenological scenography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The locational and institutional relationship to the Balkan Cinema\u2014a protected cultural monument dating from 1867\u20131870, one of the oldest cinemas in Belgrade\u2014is particularly significant. The artistic intervention respects the protected interior (no permanent alterations are made), yet radically reprograms it: the former space of passive film projection is transformed into an active, bodily experience of moving through landscape. The palimpsestic tension between the cinema\u2019s historical role as a machine of illusion and a contemporary ecological critique\u2014traces of human activity in the desert, nomadic traditions, sustainability\u2014renders the work site-specific in the sense articulated by Miwon Kwon. The building\u2019s protected status is not a constraint but a generator of meaning: the work examines how cultural heritage can become a site of critical reflection on the relationship between humans and their environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The photographic series was shot in desert landscapes using a Nikon F4S analog camera on Kodak Vision 3 250D film stock, with a Zeiss Distagon 35 mm lens and ECN-2 processing. The images capture terrains shaped by natural forces, but also clear traces of human presence: roads, tire tracks, suggestions of energy infrastructure\u2014all subjected to erosion and natural processes. The photographs retain strong indexical veracity\u2014they are traces of light that physically touched the emulsion. Aside from color correction for visual consistency across the series, there is no digital manipulation of content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When cinematographic film (intended for exposure at 24 frames per second) is used in a still camera, this decision exceeds the technical domain and directly alters the meaning of the resulting image. A medium designed for motion is here used to produce a static frame; the photograph remains a photograph, yet acquires a temporal dimension\u2014it appears as a frame extracted from a flow of time. This establishes a retroactive remediation: a process in which a newer medium (film stock for moving images) is redirected to operate within an older one (the still camera), reshaping its expressive capacity. This transfer introduces a virtual temporality, so that each frozen moment carries the potential of the movement to which it originally belonged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hamovi\u0107 describes this procedure as the sensation that \u201cevery photographic image is potentially the opening frame of a film shot.\u201d This formulation also functions as a theoretical claim, pointing to a specific relationship between photography and cinematic temporality. In classical film theory\u2014from Hugo M\u00fcnsterberg to Christian Metz\u2014the phi effect denotes the perception of continuous motion arising from a succession of static frames and their cognitive integration into a unified visual flow. Hamovi\u0107, however, adopts and inverts this logic: rather than a sequence of static images producing the illusion of movement, a single photograph retains a reference to an imagined continuity from which it has been extracted. The isolated frame points toward a possible temporal sequence, even as it remains motionless. The absence of movement is not a deficiency of the medium but a structural condition that frees the installation from cinematic time, transferring temporal organization onto the viewer\u2019s bodily movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within Destination<\/em>, this logic is reinterpreted spatially and experientially: movement is no longer established between frames, but between the viewer\u2019s body and a sequence of photographs. Moving through the labyrinth, the viewer establishes a sequential relationship among the images, effectively constructing a montage. Not because it literally reproduces a cinematic procedure, but because bodily movement introduces discontinuities and shifts in spatial-temporal relations analogous to the cut in film. While film editing connects shots into a unified flow, in Destination<\/em> the transition between two static images\u2014achieved through physical movement\u2014assumes a similar organizational function. Photography does not become film, but the act of viewing activates temporal relations that, in cinema, are produced through montage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this work, the desert does not function as motif, background, or aesthetic object. It is an operational field\u2014a site where heterogeneous registers of meaning intersect and overlap: ecological, historical, cinematic, and psychological. What the photographs depict is not the desert itself, but the desert as a crossing of temporalities and human practices that have left their traces within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first register is ecological and material. The photographs record landscapes shaped by natural forces\u2014erosion, wind, sedimentation\u2014but also unmistakable signs of anthropogenic intervention. Roads fading into the horizon, tire tracks cutting across the surface, hints of power lines or infrastructural remnants\u2014these are markers of a human presence that is no longer active, now subject to the same processes of decay as the rocks themselves. These traces do not function as narrative signs (they do not tell who left them or why), but as indices\u2014material imprints of actions that have ceased. In this sense, the desert is not presented as untouched nature, but as a post-anthropocentric landscape: a space where human activity has already occurred and withdrawn, leaving behind infrastructure that gradually becomes geological.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second register is historical and nomadic. The desert\u2014though not explicitly geographically specified\u2014carries layers of migration, trade routes, and seasonal movement. Nomadic practices imply a relationship to space based not on permanence but on passage, temporary habitation, and knowledge of water, shade, and survival. This stands in direct contrast to the infrastructural traces also visible in the photographs. While nomadic traces are erased by wind, flattened into the surface, asphalt and concrete resist erosion, persisting as long-term markers. The installation neither romanticizes nomadism nor frames it as a loss in contrast to modernity; rather, it registers their coexistence within the same space, without establishing a chronological hierarchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The third register is cinematic\u2014the tradition of representing the desert in film as a site of emptiness, anticipation, or existential encounter. In Antonioni\u2019s Blow-Up<\/em> (1966), photography becomes a site of enigma and absence: what the image shows is not what occurred, but what is missing or has disappeared from the frame. The desert is not literally present, yet its effect\u2014a space that resists meaning, that remains silent and opaque\u2014structures the entire film. In Garrone\u2019s Io Capitano<\/em> (2023), the desert appears as an obstacle, a site of death and initiation, a threshold to be crossed. These examples articulate two cinematic archetypes of the desert: as epistemic void (opacity) and as obstacle (resistance). Destination<\/em> invokes both, but does not reproduce them; instead, it translates them into a spatial and bodily regime. The labyrinth becomes a site of disorientation (epistemic void), while movement through it becomes a physical obstacle (resistance). The desert is no longer a cinematic image but an architectural condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These registers do not coexist harmoniously\u2014they generate tension. One tension arises between documentary evidence and psychological projection. The photographs attest to real space: roads exist, wheels have passed, infrastructure has been built. Yet viewers project onto them states of isolation, anticipation, abandonment\u2014affective conditions not directly grounded in what is depicted. Photography neither justifies nor prohibits these projections; they emerge in the gap between indexical sign and cultural archetype. Another tension lies between concrete geography and cinematic archetype. The installation prevents either pole from absorbing the other: geography remains present through indexicality, while archetypal emptiness persists through spatial organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As W. J. T. Mitchell argues in Landscape and Power<\/em>, landscape is not a neutral image of nature but a cultural medium\u2014a way societies render visible their relations of power, ownership, and ideology. Landscape always conceals something while revealing something else; it is an ideological construction presented as natural. Destination<\/em> adopts this thesis as an operational principle: it does not claim to present the truth of the desert, but activates multiple regimes of viewing that contest one another. None offers a definitive answer, and their irreducibility constitutes the structural condition of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The installation does not use the desert to say something about it; rather, it uses it as a field in which tensions are experienced rather than merely understood. The viewer does not observe the desert from a distance, but passes through it\u2014guided by an architecture that simulates disorientation and resistance. In this way, the work realizes what Mitchell calls the performative dimension of landscape: landscape is not only what is seen, but what is done\u2014the way the body enters into relation with space. In Destination<\/em>, the desert is not represented; it is performed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The installation is fully constructed to enable this mode of perception. The former cinema hall is transformed into a labyrinth formed by black walls mounted on frames. Precisely directed islands of light isolate individual photographs, while the rest of the space remains in darkness. The sound layer is spatially distributed and changes in response to the presence and movement of the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unlike many immersive installations that encourage free movement, Destination<\/em> deliberately imposes a one-way path. The viewer does not choose the sequence of encounters; each turn reveals only one image, and the spatial sequence resolves only at the exit, where a final photograph (400 \u00d7 300 cm) appears. Movement becomes a sequential experience in which relations among works are established through passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drawing on Merleau-Ponty\u2019s phenomenology, the body is not a mere instrument of perception but its condition. The dark passages between photographs function as intervals\u2014spatial and temporal pauses disrupting visual continuity. Each turn reveals a new image while removing the previous one from view, relying on movement and memory. Thus, a sequence of static images produces a temporal, kinesthetic experience analogous to cinematic continuity, while preserving photography\u2019s specificity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s concept of the emancipated spectator further clarifies this experience. The viewer is not reduced to absorbing predetermined meaning, but actively constructs relations between images, movement, and associations. Although the path is fixed, interpretation remains open. Meaning emerges through sequential experience, memory, and comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sound composition is not illustrative. It does not mimic desert silence nor reconstruct a soundscape. Instead, it acts as a counterpoint to visual emptiness\u2014suggesting what lies outside the frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A multichannel system distributes sound spatially, while its key feature is interactivity: intensity and presence shift depending on the number of viewers. The audience shapes the acoustic environment through mere physical presence. Sound becomes an echo of collective presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final photograph (400 \u00d7 300 cm) suspends the previous fragmentary mode. The labyrinth ends, walls disappear, and the image fills the visual field. The viewer no longer stands before the image but within it. Distance collapses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a narrative climax but a transformation\u2014from movement to dwelling, from sequence to simultaneity, from kinesthetic to visual perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Destination<\/em> does not abolish binary oppositions\u2014analog\/digital, movement\/stasis, document\/projection, path\/obstacle\u2014but decentrers them. Neither side dominates; the viewer inhabits their simultaneity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The work establishes an operational system for producing meaning through body, space, image, and sound. The desert is not merely shown\u2014it is enacted, with the audience as its performative medium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stevan Vukovi\u0107<\/p>\n\n\n\nPhotography: Index and Remediation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Landscape: An Operational Field of Tensions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Space: Labyrinth, Path, Interval<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sound: Presence as Participation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Final Room: A Shift in Regime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Decentering Binaries<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fondacijasasamarceta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SILBERSALZ35_8PERF_Bild_39-1024x660.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fondacijasasamarceta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SILBERSALZ35_8PERF_Bild_63-1024x660.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fondacijasasamarceta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SILBERSALZ35_8PERF_Bild_71-1024x660.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fondacijasasamarceta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/SILBERSALZ35_8PERF_Bild_159-1024x660.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":3433,"template":"","categories":[48],"project-tag":[],"class_list":["post-3442","events","type-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-current"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n