Carbon-Based Love: From Intimacy to Landscape, from Landscape to Ethics

Dora Lučić about the work of Ana Opalić as part of the group exhibition Five White Stairs (22rd March – 26th April 2025), organized by the WHW Collective and Ana Kovačić in Zagreb.

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

My first encounter with Ana Opalić’s work was not a direct encounter with her photography. As a child, I heard a story about an old maple tree in front of the Vjetrenica cave that had rotted and needed to be cut down. Ana happened to be nearby at the time and commented, “Poor thing – he has to listen to everything we’re saying”.

That sentence contained an entire worldview I did not yet know how to name: a sensibility toward living beings, toward nature’s quiet presence and vulnerability. In my child’s mind, there hadn’t been a concept of nature as a subject, as something that feels, and artistic creation was, to me, an almost mythological notion. Ana Opalić’s quiet passion for the world and her deep respect for every form of life left a powerful impression on me.

Some twenty years later, I recognize that same sensibility in her most recent work, Carbon Based Love, or in Croatian. Produced in collaboration with the curatorial collective WHW and Ana Kovačić, the exhibition –  situated in WHW’s office – is conceived as a multimedia installation akin to a diary entry, and articulated through photography, video and sound installations, text, and charcoal interventions on photographs.

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

What begins as a personal story of loss, the silence of hospital spaces, and an attempt to understand life cycles becomes a topography of emotions, a kind of visual-auditory mapping of the process of grieving and accepting life in all its complexity. The exhibition opens up a space in which the personal, the natural, and the ethical cease to function as separate systems of meaning, creating a meditative atmosphere that extends beyond the boundaries of any single work and fully envelops the space.

The author’s voiceover – tender but never sentimental – is accompanied by music and intended to be listened to on the office’s balcony with a panoramic view of Zagreb. At the beginning of the audio recording, with piano accompaniment and birdsong, the artist introduces the theme: “When we entered the spacious room, the first thing I noticed was the windows, and I thought: he must have loved that little green hill”. That little green hill, a fragment of the landscape, becomes a symbol of the artist’s empathetic reflection and a source of support in difficult moments. Seeing the world through the experiences of people close to her, she connects with them even more deeply, while nature becomes an active participant in that shared intimacy.

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

Set-up photos: Dora Lučić

Although conceived from a personal position, the work does not remain confined to it. On the contrary, the artist’s sensibility opens up a space for empathy. It demands no response from the viewer, only presence. Moving between the most beautiful poetic images and the harshest fragments of life, the artist invites us to listen and to understand the quiet sound of pain, letting go, and transience. The latter theme – transience – is approached through the motif of Srđ, a karst landscape exposed to the winds and devastated by fires, whose beauty is recognized by only a few.

The video installation leads the viewer through shifts in the seasons, weather, light, and vegetation, while also guiding them through inner states of reconciliation, searching, and saying goodbye. At its center are pine trees – resilient, ever-present, gentle witnesses – which become symbols of stability, hope, and endurance, as well as mediators between the artist and those who are slipping away or are no longer here. “I didn’t say goodbye to you, so I’m saying goodbye to the trees”, the artist says, revealing the work’s key affect: emotional contact with nature as a mediator in absence – but in presence, too.

Set-up photos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

Set-up photo: Dora Lučić

What makes this work exceptional is not only its immediacy, but the rigor of its formal conception. Although this is the artist’s first foray into such a complex, layered multimedia language, it is executed with a precision and composure that suggest a deep artistic intelligence. Everything here is measured: framing, text, voice, color, sound. The photographs do not aim to impress through aesthetics, yet it is inevitably present in the melancholic palette, the subtle shifts of light, and the close shots of tree canopies – all of it in service of sensory attentiveness, mindful looking, and a genuine sense of being.

In addition to the video and sound installations, the work also includes small photographs of trees, on the backs of which the artist wrote quotations about nature and brief diary notes. Nature here is more than a symbolic landscape; there is no anthropocentrism and no romanticization. She does not project emotions onto the trees, but inscribes them, suggesting that trees, grass, air, and rain are participants rather than mere backdrop. This is an important ecological gesture: acknowledging nature as fully present in its own right. In that sense, the work also offers an ethical position – it does not impose rules, but proposes a world in which attentiveness to others and to the environment is a political act.

Dora Lučić

We thank the WHW Collective for providing the visual materials.