Made in GT22

Tesla/Horvat about the exhibition on behalf of the Council for the Detection of Crime in Art, Maribor/Ljubljana in August 2026:

Architecture is not a neutral support for our living space. It orchestrates movement, visibility, closeness, distance, access, exclusion. Nevertheless, when social, creative and artistic practices are repeated within it for long enough, it begins, like a cat, to produce something that is not within "our" primal domain: its own spatiality.

The transdiciplinary laboratory GT22 has been an accumulation of this kind since 2013. Its architectural volumes are archives of articulations of community activities that can be exhibited as an art dispositif.

Made in GT22 is a new poetic archive,¹ comprised of six seemingly grassroots, spatialised islands of material heritage from the five galleries of the Maribor residence, Glavni trg 22, which are temporarily relocated to the Match Gallery. A story of forgotten artworks and found materials is told as the visitor strolls along, surrounded by the signs of deceased things.

Images of models, furniture pieces, sketches, and, at the end, a topos in which the reminder of the human voice increases in sharpness.

Just like the reconstruction of the boulder challenge from El Capitan² manages to transfer the movement riddle and not the mountain itself; and just like Frueh's paper letter³ illustrates the stroll through the gallery but not the gallery itself, the present set up manifests itself as a ware for the possibility of di erent composing of the existing relations: centre vs. periphery.

The Quantum Princess⁴ in white remains sitting on an old peas can; it is true, she is also trapped in it.



¹ When Miha Horvat presented his series of archive boxes in 2015, Aphra Tesla named them as poetic archives. Such archives are not closed-o entities, but rather processual capsules that emerge from the cohabitation of personal and non-personal, trivial and exalted, open and closed. 

² The vertical rock formation El Capitan of the Yosemite National Park, USA has at around 600 metres above the valley bottom a so-called "boulder challenge,” which demands the absolute hardest sequence of moves of the whole Freerider climbing route.

³ On the 4th of January 1913, the cartoonist and illustrator Alfred Joseph Frueh sent to his spouse, Giuliette Fanciulli, a 2D-love-letter that can be unrolled and assembled into a 3D-art-gallery. In this manner, he was trying to prepare her for the galleries tour during her upcoming Paris visit.

⁴ The painting by Ivana Kobilca (oil on canvas, 1903), "Slovenia Bows to Ljubljana," is hanging in the large meeting chamber of the Ljubljana Town Hall. The name of the exhibition cycle of Match Gallery is a reversal of the eponymous title of this allegorical painting of a personified city.

Participant creators from the GT22 archive:

Ambasada Svetlane Makarovič, Nika Autor, Matija Brumen, Andrej Firm, Petja Golec Horvat, Marko Golnar, Uroš Kaurin, Janez Klenovšek, Janez Kocbek, Nina Korda in CK COVEN (Maja Ferlič, Petja Golec Horvat, Katarina Kolar, Katja Kores, Petja Labović, Jerica Smrečnik, Marko Rafolt, Luka Ostrež), Barbara Kukovec, Boštjan Lah, Ajda Primožič Lima, Davorin Ciglar Milosavljević, Dragiša Modrinjak, Maja Modrinjak, Matej Modrinjak, Luka Murovec, Marko Ornik, Monika Pocrnjič, Borut Popenko, Nejc Pucko, Mirjana Rukavina, Miha Sagadin, Gregor Salobir, Anja Seničar, SK8ekipa, Rene Strgar, Veli&Amos, Timi Sitar, son:DA, Toni Soprano Meneglejte Vs. Roi V.Brugalski, Studio 12:22, Betina Habjanič, Dorijan Šiško, Miha Šubic, Teratom, Aphra Tesla Operating System, Tesla/Horvat, Isidora Tomin, Transnacionalna gverilska umetniška šola in Daniela Brasil, Aleksandra Vajd, Tadej Vindiš, Vito Weis, 5.0