Everything’s Moving
Tourists, Migrants, and Natives, 2016
5 Collages, 50 cm x 40 cm
Based on research of Slovenian city Piran
The population of Piran is substantially less than statistics indicate. For a decade now, the number of permanent residents in Slovenia’s most beautiful city has been anybody’s guess. The age of the population is above the Slovenian average, and the place is almost deserted in winter. Historian Ivica Pletikosic writes that Piran has replaced its entire population at least three times since 1953, which makes it unique by global standards. He points out that Piran is a town of newcomers, where the first generations of native residents are still being born. Maybe this explains why in 2010 the people of Piran elected the first black mayor in Slovenia’s history – a newcomer from Ghana. Who would believe it!
In the collage series Everything’s Moving, I connect facts about life in Piran, a town marked by migrations, with the migrations that left their mark on Europe in 2015. Casual conversations of tourists relaxing on the beach by the Adriatic are interlaced with such serious topics as terrorism, refugees, and climate change. Both statistics and dialogues jump from the local to the global and from the personal to the social and thus create a picture of the changing world in which we all now find ourselves together.
