Prometheus

"Man strikes the flint and with a spark kindles fire. With it he rises and binds himself into the world."

The work raises broad questions of the vitality of life and opens a contemporary vantage onto the deeper, historical relationship between fire and the human, interrogating their dialogue across time.

In search of a proto-communication — fire's own, intrinsic speech — the installation establishes itself as an augmentative, communicative interface that, by exposing fire's movement as a life-form through sound and graphic transcription, brings fire closer to the viewer/listener and, as a proto-subject, places them in relation to it. The kinetics of the flames foreground a kind of linguistic play of fire, which, through the transcription of a digital interface, is reinterpreted as a mode of proto-communication and so drawn nearer to our own life-form.

The stone–fire contrast is set up as an interpreted dialectical pair: one as time-changing becoming, the other as spatially stable duration — the two interdependent and in mutual passage. As the work's core phenomenon, fire invokes both the archaic, symbolic concept of the world's fluid passage present in the pre-Socratic thought of Heraclitus, and the psychoanalytic concept of lack as an ontologically constitutive presupposition of human nature (after Freud's notion of the "Prothesengott"). Here fire is defined as an artefactual prosthesis that allows the human to fill their ontological lack — insofar as, through the discovery of fire, the human established themselves as a subject.

Fire is not merely a surplus at the level of the symbolic order; for the human it means a real ascent from static observer to fluid manipulator — no longer simply set within the world's flow and its cycles, like other beings, but bound, through the artefactual prosthesis of fire, into the fluid cycle of the world. The mythical figure of Prometheus, bringer of light, is constituted in the work through the position of the viewer, who, in the process of accepting and filling the ontological gap, comes to characterise themselves as Prometheus.

Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Ljubljana, 2026. Mentor: doc. mag. Maja Smrekar; professional collaborator: Matija Podbreznik.