Ever since the emergence of theoretical psychoanalysis, contemporary philosophy has explained the fact that someone is a man, woman, or child contrary to the conventional opinion, namely through the process of “becoming” a man, woman, or child rather than by its predetermination. Deleuze, for example, does not consider becoming a man, woman, or child as naturally given – since women pass through their becoming women and since women become women, men can also become women. They can also become men, but that is the majority standard (a healthy adult male). But if they become women, they act as a minority. In other words, gender is a social and political category.

The latest artwork of Silvio Vujičić offers a romantic, but at the same time provoking contribution to the issue of gender, sex, and sexual orientation. By creating an enticing world in itself – a small ecosystem – the artist has made an eco-machine that represents a world turned upside-down. He has intervened the space of the gallery by planting daisies – a very symbolic flower that even liberal and tolerant societies tend to associate with ‘faggots’ – by giving them water and food from above and light from below. The world that Silvio shows to the spectator is inverted, wrong, unnatural, and artificial – it has screwed up in becoming a world. The gay flower is a symbol, an ironic proof of ‘perversion’ in the minority it represents.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, “daisy” refers metaphorically to a beautiful or fragile person, or a man of homosexual orientation, but that is not its only reference. In terms of iconology, daisies frequently appear in renaissance painting, where they are commonly linked to very young women and symbolize their virginity, which is why they have become a general symbol of virginity in Western cultures. Coronets of daisies on the girls’ heads indicate the passing of their childhood, their romantic female nature, and eventually the melancholic transience of youth. (No wonder that herbalist and alchemist circles endowed daisies with healing powers, connected precisely to female reproductive organs.)

The tender nature of the daisy, which accounts for its reputation as a childlike, feminine, and ‘faggot’ flower, has another metaphorical use in English language. Instead of saying that someone is dead, the English will use a witty euphemism, saying that he is “under the daisies.” And that is precisely the name of Silvio Vujičić’s installation, for he is literally pushing his visitors into a position under the daisies – into a grave. In his artificial/artistic world, nature has been perverted and ordinary people are dead (and if we look around, we will see that they mostly are). Living people are those who refuse to live by the standard – according to Deleuze, those with unusual becomings – men who become women or children, women who become men or children – and they are painfully aware of their vulnerability, their daisy-like exposure and transience.

The eco-machine with daisies has become a metaphor of the social machine. Depending on the relationship with the daisy and its metaphoric nature, the observer of Silvio’s work will read out his or her own context.