The Ocean itself is an unfathomable image of an ever-changing soul and the place where all the roads of this world begin and end. The costumes represent Elisewin and Adams (and their love story) - characters from the novel “Ocean sea” by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco. The costumes are a reflection of the ocean, as well as an image of the fickle inner life of these characters. Costumes show the process of journey, the influence of the water surroundings, the interweaving of dreams, reality and madness of the first days spent in the new environment. The artist uses materials and creates textures that mimic the animate and inanimate world of the seabed. She marks Elisewin’s mental state by incorporating a gas-mask covered by delicate ”cobweb” into the costume. She blocks her air vent, so as to show precisely what the unstable state has been doing to her being - she was feeling suffocated almost all the time.
Ocean Sea // Lara Popovic from Lara Popovic on Vimeo.
“A complete transmutation followed by an act as pure as love, is bound to happen every time when the given facts ‒ merging of two realities that obviously can’t be merged on a plane that obviously doesn’t suit them ‒ produce favorable conditions.” (Max Ernst in “What is surrealisme“, 1934). This notion of merging the incompatible can be easily connected to the mathematical rule that two minuses make a plus and it can also be applied to the life experiences of the protagonists of Baricco’s novel Ocean Sea. Sick, confused young girl who has left the house for the very first time and a man with eyes of a hunted animal who had traveled the world, met at the seashore. Fragile, depressed Elisewin would represent the reality prepared in advance traveling towards a possible recovery. Worn out, tortured and exhausted Adams, in his journey of vengeance, stands for a no less absurd reality. Her suffocation is in isolation, in the lack of knowledge of the outer world, and his, on the other hand, lies in the fact he has seen and lived through too much for a single human life. They complete each other by canceling each other. She negates all the dreadful, cruel and dark in his soul, while he annuls all the unstable and inhibited in her personality.
Lara Popovič (1991) studies her MA in Costume Design at the Faculty of Applied Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade, Serbia.
Prof. Ljiljana Petrović was the mentor at the project.
Photographs: Smiljka Boškov
