The expected nature, i.e. nature in its non-mediated form doesn’t exist, and what’s left of it are idealized notions and productional aesthetic requirements for what real, unadulterated nature should look like. By photographing new, created (not given) landscapes, images of nature which appear inside a society on facades and buses, as vignettes or decorative elements in homes, Stojanović reaches the concept of oases, the sad tropes of a capitalist fantasy about the prehistoric stage of Nature which doesn’t exist anywhere in its pure form and is impossible to adequately reconstruct or represent. Nature doesn’t need humans, but humans, especially capitalist society, need Nature in order to establish and sustain the order they insist upon, which is based on often incomprehensible strong and inexplicable laws of nature. Although they look like a pair of opposites at first glance, the motifs of nature in society – the foil with a pattern of forest or a mountain glade on an office building glass, or a deer peacefully grazing on the left wing of the city bus’s chassis – are where they belong, perfectly doing their function, convincing us that going to work, accumulating wealth or humbly and politely using the civilization’s attainments such as public transport, are completely natural, real and inevitable like sunset and sunrise. The natural habitat is no longer nature, and our inability to perceive Society as natural and Nature as “socialized” and cultural puts nature into an abstract and perfectly complete world of fantasy for eternity, into an oasis, where the presence of a real everyday man makes for a mistake, a glitch and an excess. (Excerpts from the Completely natural by Marija Ratković – Translation: Željko Maksimović)






