Ninja Love
2024.
Alens vision of the emotions & moments that caught his eye at our latest edition of Ninja Gathering 2023.
Kintsugi of my people
2023.
Kintsugi, also known as golden repair, is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Here, the broken pottery is the people, and the clay is the gold that binds them together.
Kintsugi of my people is a project about a little city in the heart of Croatia and its people.
Petrinja has been through a lot. Years of war and destruction from earthquakes have left deep scars, not only from the outside, but also from the inside. I had always felt grateful for my parent's sacrifice, but looking back, today, I can feel the soil drenched in their blood, sweat and tears. I used to compare it to the murky river sediment - once settled, it never moves and gets buried deeper by the next layer of the sediment.
Although, this summer, I witnessed a festival that changed my view on Petrinja profoundly. Suddenly, from this forgotten, murky, and wounded town, Petrinja turned into a shining, golden place full of joy and happiness. People were gathering at the open ceramic studio, and every single one of them knew what to do. I witnessed a small community banded by the same blood-sweat-and-tears-drenched soil they used to curse a few years ago.
As if their hands were the extensions of their hearts and as the clay got softened, so did their hearts.
The idea of sculpting something from nothing, the ability to express themselves, the sharing of knowledge and skills, and the connection with the community are exactly what this town needed.
That’s why I choose to edit these photos this way; Not because they are pretty, but for what they represent. They represent a shining, golden future for my town—a future built on the golden soil by the golden hands of my people.
Insight
2022.
This project is aimed at raising awareness of the unseen and neglected everyday horrors that surround us.
The desire to control nature gave birth, among other things, to my profession, veterinary medicine. Behind the guise of treating animals and taking care of their well-being, I enrolled in veterinary high school.
What I learned in the meantime stunned me.
Veterinarians are nothing but relics of the old way of thinking of an old, once proud civilization, "high society" and several thousand years of delusions that we can control, own and exploit Nature without any consequences. They are something like mediators between the meat and dairy industry and "tamed nature".
Although we live in a conscious civilization that has identified a cause-and-effect relationship between cancers, tumors, and these two industries, they are the last ones that are encouraging farming and the dairy industry today. And I don't blame them, because they don't know anything else. Their paradigm hasn't shifted yet.
Consciously or not, they turn their heads and blunt that they want the best for "our" animals.
In fact, they are part of the oroboros. The part of the circle that is not infinite and ultimately eats itself.
Let me explain, then hang me later for hypocrisy.
It is not really in their interest for animals, pets, or us to be better. It is in their interest to have meaning, work, and money.
As long as there are cows to be to be cured, as long as there are pigs to be slaughtered, as long as there is a disease, they will have work to do.
That is the goal of both pharmacies and them. Side by side, every day.
Example?
The degenerate child of the meat industry, rendering plant; a disgusting place where we throw away corpses, bones, and everything else we consider “useless”; they are the worst product of that delusion.
I don’t understand how some normal and healthy person could have come up with something like that.
The stench seems to creep into every pore of the body. Forehead, hair, face, arms, and legs, all are permanently marked by the stench of hundreds of millions of poor, slaughtered animals.
To make matters worse, the remnants of that industry form “protein feed,” which is used to feed pigs, poultry, and dogs and cats.
Energy stagnation is like millions of blackheads clogging all pores, fertilizing, forming tumors, and eventually killing everything that lives.
And then we wonder that our animals are dying.
“All of the sudden, his tumors started to grow.” they say ignorantly and continue to feed them scrap. (scrap is too soft a word for this)
This oroboros noose is tightening year by year as there are fewer and fewer healthy and happy “domestic” animals and more and more poor and miserable farms for the meat and dairy industries.
The desire to control nature gave birth, among other things, to my profession, veterinary medicine. Behind the guise of treating animals and taking care of their well-being, I enrolled in veterinary high school.
What I learned in the meantime stunned me.
Veterinarians are nothing but relics of the old way of thinking of an old, once proud civilization, "high society" and several thousand years of delusions that we can control, own and exploit Nature without any consequences. They are something like mediators between the meat and dairy industry and "tamed nature".
Although we live in a conscious civilization that has identified a cause-and-effect relationship between cancers, tumors, and these two industries, they are the last ones that are encouraging farming and the dairy industry today. And I don't blame them, because they don't know anything else. Their paradigm hasn't shifted yet.
Consciously or not, they turn their heads and blunt that they want the best for "our" animals.
In fact, they are part of the oroboros. The part of the circle that is not infinite and ultimately eats itself.
Let me explain, then hang me later for hypocrisy.
It is not really in their interest for animals, pets, or us to be better. It is in their interest to have meaning, work, and money.
As long as there are cows to be to be cured, as long as there are pigs to be slaughtered, as long as there is a disease, they will have work to do.
That is the goal of both pharmacies and them. Side by side, every day.
Example?
The degenerate child of the meat industry, rendering plant; a disgusting place where we throw away corpses, bones, and everything else we consider “useless”; they are the worst product of that delusion.
I don’t understand how some normal and healthy person could have come up with something like that.
The stench seems to creep into every pore of the body. Forehead, hair, face, arms, and legs, all are permanently marked by the stench of hundreds of millions of poor, slaughtered animals.
To make matters worse, the remnants of that industry form “protein feed,” which is used to feed pigs, poultry, and dogs and cats.
Energy stagnation is like millions of blackheads clogging all pores, fertilizing, forming tumors, and eventually killing everything that lives.
And then we wonder that our animals are dying.
“All of the sudden, his tumors started to grow.” they say ignorantly and continue to feed them scrap. (scrap is too soft a word for this)
This oroboros noose is tightening year by year as there are fewer and fewer healthy and happy “domestic” animals and more and more poor and miserable farms for the meat and dairy industries.
Shooting quota Did you know that hunting associations have a prescribed quota of "game" to kill every year "in order to keep the wildlife ecosystems in balance"? The same quota says that the hunters needed to kill this jackal and this fox.
The Grinder This is where all your dead pets, livestock, and animals that are too weak and too old to be useful end up - in a huge grinder. No fancy funeral, no prayer, no tears, just a hard metal machine.
A ton and a half of an ecocide What happens when you poison a whole lake filled with bread-fed fish? It is fascinating how even the ducks know that the lake is poisoned and stay away from it.
Do you know what you eat? Do you eat fluffy cysts? A heart shape formed by a pig tapeworm in pig tissue.
Your beloved pets One average dog weighs around 10 kilos. Imagine this times 50; every week, every month, every year. This is how many animals are euthanized in only one veterinary station. And the worst part is that we have a beautifully designed system of collecting, freezing, and driving the dead corpses to a rendering plant to be burned. All perfectly ethical.
Beloved doctor "on duty"...
Cow madness The degenerate child of the meat industry, rendering plant; a disgusting place where we throw away corpses, bones, and everything else we consider “useless”; they are the worst product of that delusion. I don’t understand how some sane and healthy person could have come up with something like that. The stench seems to creep into every pore of the body. Forehead, hair, face, arms, and legs, all are permanently marked by the stench of hundreds of millions of poor, slaughtered animals. To make matters worse, the remnants of that industry form “protein feed,” which is used to feed pigs, poultry, dogs, and cats. Energy stagnation is like millions of blackheads clogging all pores, fertilizing, forming tumors, and eventually killing everything that lives. And then we wonder why are "our" animals dying. “All of the sudden, his tumors started to grow.” they say ignorantly and continue to feed them scrap. (scrap is too mild a word for this)
Chewed pigeon Our pets aren't as harmless as they seem.
Useless Once we label "our livestock" useless and/or a liability, there is only one thing to do - kill them.
Dead fear showcase This horned viper is kept in a jar of formaldehyde to remind us of the dangers of the past. Today, this species is endangered and a rare sight to experience.
Furry refrigerator What happens when you freeze too many animals in one freezer? They get stuck. The only way to get them out is to fill the freezer with boiling water and hope they aren't too mutilated or rotten to pull them out in one piece physically. If this wasn’t disgusting enough, just imagine the maggots that feed on the roadkill on a hot summer day now crawling everywhere, trying to escape the cold.
Just a dead squirrel Just a dead squirrel that couldn't go out of a weekend cottage and starved to death.
Let's save a sparrow by putting it in a box on a hot summer day! There is a saying - It is better to have a poor horse than no horse at all. This saying translated in Croatian goes - It is better to have a sparrow in your hand than no sparrow at all. In this case, it is better to leave a weak sparrow to die than to let him suffer on a hot summer day in a box.
Negativa Negativae
2019.
The exhibition Negativa Negativae is the first multimedia exhibition of Alen's work that will include photographs conceptually divided into three groups - flora/ae, homo/hominis, lux/lucis. The artist has subjected all photographs to a certain technique of digital intervention, which makes them aesthetically interesting to the observer at first glance. The aesthetic and artistic value stems primarily from the quality of the photographs themselves, which Alen almost completely changes through digital processing. In addition to playing with light and color, his interventions reach the level of unrecognizable original motifs, which leads the observer to reflect on the work itself, but also on a different approach to individual topics.
