Under the Daisies

2005

Medium:
Daisy plants (Bellis perennis), soil, irrigation system, metal construction, steel wire, fluorescent tubes
30 × 200 × 200 cm

Installation view:
Modern Gallery, Studio Josip Račić, Zagreb, Croatia, 2005

Work Description:
Under the Daisies transforms the exhibition space into a self-contained, inverted ecosystem — an eco-machine where the laws of nature and culture are reversed. Vujičić constructs a metal framework filled with living daisy plants, whose roots are nourished from above while light emanates from below. This artificial environment, sustained through a closed irrigation and lighting system, produces a poetic yet unsettling image of a world literally turned upside down.

In this installation, the daisy — a flower traditionally associated with innocence, purity, and femininity — becomes a symbol charged with ambivalence. In Anglo-Saxon idiom, “under the daisies” serves as a euphemism for death, while the term “daisy” also carries queer connotations of delicacy and non-normative identity. Vujičić’s use of this motif connects botanical fragility to social vulnerability, positioning the work as a metaphor for gender and sexual “becomings” in the Deleuzian sense — processes of identity that resist stability and definition.

Through the juxtaposition of life-support systems and mortuary imagery, Under the Daisies blurs distinctions between nature and artifice, vitality and extinction, norm and deviation. The viewer, placed metaphorically “under” the flowers, inhabits a world where conventional binaries collapse. Vujičić’s eco-machine becomes a mirror of the social machine — an ironic, melancholy reflection on the fragility of identity and the persistence of difference.