Irena Bekić
Silvio Vujičić: Nocturne

At the centre of Silvio Vujičić’s installation is the datura, a plant of dual nature: medicinal yet also hallucinogenic and lethal. Its beautiful white flower opens at night while by day it looks like a nondescript tube.

The artist uses a chemical process to extract poisonous and hallucinogenic alkaloids from datura plants cultivated in his garden. Transforming these into a paste, he transfers them into chromatograms using screen printing to write words and create invisible images. Further chemical processes on a chromatographic board makes them visible as the alkaloids decompose, move across the board and deform the image. The whole event lasts only seven seconds, which the artist fixes with a camera. The result is a photograph capturing the invisible: a vision, hallucination, poison… Danger and cure.

If we imagine a shell that draws vast spaces and deep time into its spiral interior and sends their resonances when we press it to our ear, we can imagine the entire Botanical Garden being drawn into the pavilion’s central space – defined by Silvio’s installation – from which it spills back out, turned inside out. Everything diurnal and clear pours into a simulacrum of night. The sound filling the space is the sound of night: the faint rustle the datura produces as its flower opens and closes, the calls of small flying mammals, bats, the whirr of despised moths, pollinators of the datura, and of other nocturnal beings.

However, the artist does not explore the night in itself, but rather the ways in which bodies position themselves in the dark (as in an unknown field), what relations they establish, and what emotions shape them. We may lose our heads from fear, or disdain what we do not know.

The work also brings in language – the words that are written, that disappear and change. By exposing these words to chemical processes in which they are decomposed, the artist abolishes the exclusive role of language in forming and explaining the world. Perhaps, indeed, instead of relying on the precision of language, we might rely on the tingling we feel or the premonition of someone’s nearness – on intuition that is not entirely explainable in language, yet helps us understand that what we cannot see at first glance, or what eludes rationality, also exists.