LuMenArtist: Art is our life and life is our art
(Davor Marjanović & Sara Muharemi)

With its unique late Renaissance castle, the settlement of Dobrovo literally stands out from the map. It is situated on the very edge of Slovenian territory, where the landscape with its gently rolling hills becomes so fluid that any geographical, ethnic and geopolitical demarcation becomes an entirely arbitrary endeavor. It seems that the Goriška Brda’s undulating landscape is infinitely closer to other types of natural oscillation, both visible and and invisible to the human eye, with waves of sound and light that underlie all our auditory and visual perceptions. It may be just a happy coincidence, or it may be something more, that all these ripples coalesce in this year's edition of the R.o.R Festival – or, to be more precise, in the special event which crowned the artistic residency of the LuMenArtist duo at the festival. In their synaesthetic multimedia event, all these oscillations fused together, creating a unique hybrid experience, a thread connecting LuMenArtist and R.o.R: crossovers, a cross-pollination between genres, intertextuality and intermediality. In the interstitial space between the rural and the urban, between two different countries, between regions and disciplines, the R.o.R. festival showcases artistic practices, which allows them to speak in many languages and thus address a wide range of diverse communities.

Notably, this part of the world became a haven for one of the major pioneering conceptual movements, the OHO Group, which “dissolved” its artistic engagement into life, thus blurring the boundaries between them. So it comes as no surprise that the R.o.R Festival offered this year’s artistic residence to the artist duo guided by the motto “Art is our life and life is our art”. LuMenArtist began its creative journey in 2011, and has since been presenting its visual installations and inspiring audiences at festivals such as the Lost Theory Festival, Ozora Festival, S. U. N. Festival, Electron Festival, Garden Festival, Terraneo Festival, EMAC Festival, Dimensions Festival and Outlook. The duo boasts a hefty arsenal of more than 120 light projectors, which means it can spread its projections over an impressive 4000 square meters of all kinds of surfaces.

The focus of LuMenArtist is light as a natural resource and as an artistic tool. These two dimensions come together in visual events, combining the power and brilliance of contemporary instruments and the sensitive, almost artisanal eloquence of hand drawings. However, it seems that the specific nature of glass serves as the lowest interpretative common denominator of the spectacle at Dobrovo Castle, at least in formal terms. It appears that LuMenArtist played out their fascination with glass and its almost mystical bond with light on different sections of the castle walls. While this fascination may date back centuries, it seems to take on a new expressive power in LuMenArtist’s project. The delicate, bubbly structures of warm, pastel colors, which clung to the castle walls with nonchalant organicity, were reminiscent of light refracted through stained glass, where close magnification reveals the imperfections of the production process, the air bubbles trapped in the glass material create a texture and evoke special dynamism, illustrating the tension between different states of matter. And yet, the evocative power of the light projections in Dobrovo reached much further than that. The narrative of their fluid surfaces was also reminiscent of a strip of celluloid film undergoing a transformation: like when film directors in thrillers illustrate the destruction of some film evidence as it burns up due to overheating, bubbling as it dissolves, telegraphing a change of the state of matter.

It seems to me that these two elements, the narrative and the transformation, are essential to understanding the work of LuMenArtist. The abstract nature of their material offers a bounty of suggestiveness, leaving the imagination free to create all kinds of stories from the dynamic light compositions. On the other hand, the experiences they create are highly transformative. This is true even at the level of abstract motifs, which remain in a constant state of change and transition. Here, abstraction and fluidity go hand in hand, as we follow changes in their projections that can also be interpreted in the language of painting theory, from Knifer's meanders to blistering op art surfaces, colorful spectacles featuring hypnotic swirls, Pollock-esque saturated compositions, soft transitions from the geometric to the organic, which seems to be much closer to the duo. However, the transformativity that their work aims at, judging by the event in Dobrovo, goes beyond the visual, it is a synaesthetic experience that aims to achieve spiritual transformation through an enriched phenomenology of the surrounding world. It is therefore not surprising that certain projections, especially those on the left side of the castle, so strongly evoked Gothic stained glass formations, with colorful rosettes, roundels, elongated floral designs and even a few witty medieval vignettes. The metaphysics of light was at the core of the fascination with the great church windows of the late Middle Ages, in which this very metaphor becomes the path to ascension of humankind. The LuMenArtist duo makes abundant use of the transformative power of light in similar, yet much more immanent experiences associated with the mundane world, in which abstract luminous metamorphoses enrich our emotional-perceptual world to the point where the experience begins to change us from within.

This edgy, liminal experience is made possible by the synaesthetic compendium which LuMenArtist invites us to experience. Besides the specific features of the space in which it is set and the aforementioned light play, the experience also included sonoric and choreographic elements, all tied together in a model of community and participation, as is usually the case with the R.o.R festival. The music was composed by local musician Tomaž Lipicer LUPO, while the community itself was woven by default into the luminous fabric pieced together by LuMenArtist, based on a tapestry of 54 matrices created by members of the local art association under the duo's mentorship. The tapestry of colors thus became a community tapestry, where, much like one can find in medieval stained glass panes, individual pieces combined to form sublime transcendence. .

Vladimir Vidmar

LuMenArtist has been actively creating since 2011. So far, his visual decorations have fascinated festival-goers at festivals such as the Lost Theory Festival, the Ozora Festival, the S.U.N. Festival, the Electron Festival, the Garden Festival, the Terraneo Festival, the EMAC Festival, Dimensions and the Outlook Festival. With an impressive arsenal of more than 120 projectors, they can showcase their projections on a variety of surfaces, covering a surface area of 4,000 m2 in total. They are guided by the following motto: “Art is our life and life is our art”.

https://lumenartist.de/