The simplicity and complexity of the title sentence encourage viewers to ask themselves questions about what’s suffocating them in everyday life. After googling “suffocation”, one of the examples came up with the sentence “Don't put your head in a plastic bag - you could suffocate”. At first, Mlinac found the sentence funny and bizarre, since it is obvious and banal. Why would anyone put their head in a plastic bag? Turning focus towards the people, situations, jobs, emotions, relationships that are suffocating us in everyday life, the artist realized these concepts should also be obvious. But they are not. The plastic bag represents all of the garbage suffocating everything that is alive. By using recycled materials, natural dyes, and rust it encourages us to be less timid about the path we really want to walk and also find more ecological ways of being sustainable in everything we do.
Dina Mlinac (1995, Brač, Croatia) attended the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb, department for Textile Design, where she finished her masters in 2020 with the thesis The use of corrosive materials in textile design. She spent one year of her studies on the Erasmus exchange program in Sweden studying Textile Design at the University of Boras. In her work, she focuses on exploring natural dyes and eco print with the rust, as well as creating art in different media and materials.
Photography: Maša Pirc / BIEN 2021
