Interview #6: Anica Ilijin (2020)
Anica is a postgraduate in stage design with a fascination for architecture and the role of space within our life. Through phone photography, her often minimalist monochromatic pictures interrogate the interaction between ambiance and self-awareness, thus making unnoticed backgrounds the main subject of attention. Here’s our interview with her.
MS／Let’s begin by introducing yourself and your life background.
AI／My name is Anica Ilijin and I live in Novi Sad, Serbia. I graduated in architecture at the University of Novi Sad, and did the post-graduate studies in scene design at the University of Arts in Belgrade. My vision of architecture was greatly inspired by the work of Tadao Ando, and it was through his work that I came to understanding that the language of architecture is the language of light. Interestingly, my only experience of his work was through photographs. So, it was photography which communicated with me the idea of and a longing for particular experience.
After graduating from university, I was faced with the reality that architectural and urban planning practice in Serbia was (and still is) very far and opposed to my vision. Then it was in photography again where I have found the possibility to pursue the same vision I had for architecture practice, the vision of creating “enlightening spaces”.
MS／What has been your relation to photography?
AI／My interest in photography originated from my interest in architecture, mostly from the theory of architecture. After graduating from architecture, I enrolled in the post-graduate programme in stage design, and did the research on the experience of place. I was interested in discovering and understanding the properties of space that are not only physical and objective, but belong to the field of immaterial, affective, emotional, intuitive. How do the sense of where we are and the sense of who we are correlate. My interest was to study how these senses are in fact co-emergent and co-constitutive, informing and forming each other.
MS／How was your research connected to photography?
AI／The main means of conducting my research was photography, through which I sought and recorded the ambiental qualities of particular places as I tried to analyse and understand my own body-mind responses to them. It was through this research process that photography became for me an aid to personal awareness.
MS／How do you normally approach photography?⠀
AI／Regarding photographic process and equipment preferences, I prefer to use a mobile phone camera, which for me is equivalent to having a pen and a notebook always with me, so I could record my mental and spiritual states as I go through a day. So, there is a particular photographic process, yet there is no specific photography day but rather specifics of being present in any moment of the day, with or without capturing it with a camera.
In that sense, my photographic process is similar to how Dorothy Norman described hers in Intimate Visions, “a process in which what I saw and felt were more important than what I produced”. Only afterwards I consider what I produced in terms of how well it may communicate what I saw and felt, and make selections.
MS／What is the main subject of your work?
AI／My photographs deal with ambience as a universal property of space, and with the relationship between the figure and the background.
As I move through space, I attend to the ambient whole, and its structure and texture, its elements, moments and details, like light volumes and the light-changing sequences within a subjective space-time. Our consciousness is fixed to figures and events in the foreground of the perceptual field, while the background usually remains unperceived and undetected. However, although unnoticed, this background is equally present and represents an equal constitutive factor of our perception and comprehension. It is this background that gives a sense to our position and perspective and to associated feelings.
When we become aware of the background and of ambiental qualities of our surrounding, especially of their specific psychological impact, they become part of a language in which we construe and express ourselves.
MS／Could you elaborate on the idea of background in your work?
AI／In my approach, the background is brought to the forefront of the scene/image and becomes the central theme and sometimes even the only plan of an image. By abstracting the foreground content, the background is revealed and illumined. New motives and scenes are revealed through this process, like fragments of physical shapes and textures, spatial dynamics like openings, closings and passages, tonal differentiations of surfaces, and subtle transformations of light and shadows.
Motives like these require a different motivation of our presence and attention. Thus, in an exact sense and in a figurative sense, the background of the perceptual field represents our personal psychological background, and the intention is to help the process of becoming aware of it by taking it out of the unconscious background, so to speak.
MS／Can you explain what roles Buddhism and feminism play in your art?
AI／The reference to Buddhism and feminism in my work is not explicitly programmatic, yet the Buddhist and the feminist knowledge help me find “the point of view” which is being illuminated by the awareness of my own body and its (social) position. In that sense, for me, the photographic process is actually about locating and orientating myself within the “process of the present”, as Pema Chödrön calls it, through which, with every conscious thought, emotion, word and deed — that is, with every conscious photograph — we become conscious creators of different realities.
MS／You’ve told me you had three photobook projects in mind. What will they about?
AI／One would consist of the photographs I made during my research on experience of place. The idea is to share an appreciation for ambiental and perhaps “psychological” qualities of immediate physical surroundings.
Another would be an intimate and evocative document of the interior of a family house where so many memories and feelings of mine are located. I visited the place after the loss of a close relative who lived there, and photographed the “empty” space, the living room filled with things inscribed with the personal biographical narrative, but also marked with traits of universal truths, that all things must pass, and how we accept or struggle to accept it as sentient beings.
The third book show the seemingly unchanging state of things, which yet continually change from one moment to the next. It would be like an analogy to the music of Éliane Radigue, where the music really happens when you listen closely.
Anica Ilijin is a postgraduate in stage design with a fascination for architecture and the role of space within our life. Through phone photography, her often minimalist monochromatic pictures interrogate the interaction between ambiance and self-awareness, thus making unnoticed backgrounds the main subject of attention.
Interviewed by M. Solav.
