The Kreativnice Collective, operating within the Contemporary Textile Hub Kreativnice, explores textile as a medium for addressing a wide range of topics—sustainability, coexistence, solidarity, active engagement, and critical reflection on various social and spatial contexts. Their practice entwines together different perspectives, creative approaches, and expressions of four authors, searching for synergies, connections, and a visual unity within the final work.
The group textile piece Underground and Air is multi-layered, multipart, and site-specific. The composition includes The Flag (a collaborative piece), Airing (Silva Horvat), Inhale (Anja Musek), Deep Underground (Lili Panjtar), and Horizon (Nina Vastl Štefe). It reflects on the life and identity of Idrija, a town historically defined and deeply marked by its mercury mine. From underground, people drew the resources that enabled life on the surface—yet the boundary between the two is fragile.
Each piece inevitably grapples with dualities and contrasts: light and darkness, entrapment and freedom, life and death, past and present, the specific and the universal, memory and the present moment.
The flag represents the mine, the ore, a drop of mercury, the underground and the air outside. All of this is captured in an abstract, bright, airy and optimistic image and form, gently moving in the wind. The flag stands in stark contrast to a traditional mining flag, highlighting a shift, a turn, a transformation.
It is mounted on the metal outdoor elevator structure at the Jožefov jašek shaft. Together with the other four works, it creates a spatial composition and perspective, establishing a connection between the various elevation levels of the entire technical system at this site. Below is the water pump “kamšt”, the middle level holds the artworks and walkways, and the top level features the dominant metal structure with the flag.
photo: Maša Pirc