Epimetheus

Anchored in the mythical figure of Epimetheus — the one who looks back — the work foregrounds the nature and space of retrospective thought as the dialectical counterpart to the Promethean vision of progress and foresight. In Epimetheus's backward gaze, the reflective edge turns to the human as homo agens — in the constitution of the self and as the ontological category of humanity within the web of the living.

Where Prometheus symbolises the human drive to transcend and to build culture, Epimetheus introduces a revision: a gaze that lays bare consequences and returns to the origin (archē) in order to question direction (telos). The human appears as a rational yet equally instinctual being that never comes into being outside its embeddedness in the biosphere; the subject is not autonomous but arises within a network of relations — between consciousness and the unconscious, culture and nature, the individual and the wider biotic web.

At its centre is the desublimation of the image of the human: the dismantling of absolute reason in favour of corporeality, affect and drive. Blood, the work's central motif, opens the interior of the body and exposes its metabolic, cyclical nature — life as a phenomenon that comes into being "at the expense of life" (Hans Jonas). Cast as a sanguine fluid, it also carries an informational potential: not only of vulnerability, but as a source and a flow that makes action and survival possible. In this duality — between vulnerability and vitality — an ethical thought emerges, grounded in an awareness of our imperfect rationality and our inescapable interdependence with our surroundings.

The circulation of fluid and its pathways narrativise a process that is not merely technical but phenomenological: life as continual becoming, a convertibility that escapes fixed forms. The work echoes an Aristotelian, hylomorphic metaphysics while reaching into the field of metamodernism — beyond modernist faith in progress and postmodern cynicism — opening space to rethink the human's place in the world: not as an essentially anthropocentric subject, but as a body among bodies, an organism among organisms.

If Prometheus foregrounds the sublime and the rational, Epimetheus turns to the somatic, the affective and the instinctual. The Epimethean is the reverse nature of drive, libido and in-betweenness, which appears retroactively as the enigmatic haze of the gap between nature and culture. This backward gaze is not regression but a necessary gesture — a turn back in order to think forward.

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