Dejan Gotić

Being directly affected by the lockdown and the pandemic, which resulted in creation of the submitted work, which was born out of frustration and inability and in the process became one of my favourite things I have done.

The work was done during the first lockdown in Croatia, between March 20th and May 22nd of 2020. Since that was the first time ever that all of my activities had been cut off, and the first time ever that I started spending day after day in my apartment, with no commissioned work and with plans for the next performance work stopped, I found myself quite unused to such circumstances.

And, as always, I found myself once again amused by and puzzled about the unbreakable spirit of human stupidity, which gave birth to numerous creative theories about the entire thing. As human stupidity and delightful pointlessness of many human activities and concepts is a regular theme in my work, I came to idea to produce my first live and interactive online work in the form of this grand travel photo story, at a time when it was virtually impossible to leave my own city, let alone travel the entire world extensively, and to personally take the role of the most stupid and clueless person ever. To my utter astonishment, there were some people who taught that the whole escapade was real! This resulted in a certain amount of angry, displeased or worried conversations initiated by those people either online or by calling me over the phone, one of them waiting for a long time to do so since he “did not want to spend money on roaming mobile calls…”.

The second and third lockdown were far easier to cope with mentally (certainly not physically), since I have got used to it, and there was surge of alternative project opportunities and artistic possibilities created out of the experience with the first lockdown, so I am very pleased and happy that the circumstances of the first lockdown were such that the result was this opus which is very dear to me.

https://dejangotic.wixsite.com/website-contemporary

/you can see the entire work, which consist of 56 photo montages, in the link to my portfolio, under the section GWT 2020/ An online interactive travel mockumentary.

A two month trip around the world, in multiple parts, posted regularly on my private Facebook and Instagram profiles.

For the purpose of this work I devised a character of the most obnoxious, arrogant, false know-it-all, vain and snobbish online influencer, that destroys and devalues everything he comes in contact with. I took over the role of that persona, and started creating numerous photo montages in which the only real thing I supplied was the image of my head and face. Everything else was found online and used to construct the most ridiculous imagery possible.

The person I portrayed was completely unaware of the current global state, and the causes it has, and more fantastically so, it seemed that people in numerous places he visits are unaware of it as well. Actually, the entire trip seemingly unravels in some parallel universe without a global pandemic. The world in which is much more important if the champagne is cold enough or whether the children slaves in China do their work properly than anything else….

One of the main tasks I put in front of myself was the obligation to never stop being in character until the project is over, and that meant that I was forced to find my way out of numerous comments below my posts, and answer them while completely staying in character I was performing.