Marko Kovačič’s Short Films and New Materialism

Marko Kovačič is one of the most outstanding contemporary Slovenian artists. The basis of his unmistakable poetics is the ability to merge conceptual rigor and genre dynamics. This article is an extended version of my introduction to the presentation of his short films in the retrospective of his oeuvre from 1983 to 2021. I focus on his short experimental films such as Thirst (Žeja, 1993) and Hey Joe (1984) to demonstrate that Kovačić’s creative practice, based on the explorations of the material conditions of filmmaking, is very similar to the current forms of new materialism. Through an analysis of materialist approaches within the framework of Kovačič’s creative practice, I also try to answer the question of how decisively these approaches mark Kovačič’s particular poetics.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!