Fette Sans
Installation
2026
KUĆĆA, Nova cesta 128
11th September 2026 19:00
The exhibition remains open until 18.9., and can be visited by prior arrangement.
Production: KUĆĆA
MUTUAL (DIS)ATTRACTION
After a three-month residency at KUĆĆA, Zagreb-based artist Fette Sans presents MUTUAL (DIS)ATTRACTION – a work that assembles urban remnants and disposable objects into a fragile mythology of resistance.
Gathered through wanderings across the city, fragments of metal, plastic, and other discarded material together become enchanted objects. Through them, the artist interrogates the threshold between decay and growth, myth and reality, life and death, in a world obsessed with optimization and automation.
MUTUAL (DIS)ATTRACTION is a parasite, a spell – a refusal of imposed histories, oppressive narratives, and the technological production of insatiable desires.
In preparation of the exhibition, we spoke with Fette about the project.
The project MUTUAL (DIS)ATTRACTION was realized through 2026 as part of our residency program through an open process of research, collecting, assembling – a process that is an essential part of your artistic practice. What was the starting point of this research, what did the process entail, and how does it fit into your broader work?
To linger at the threshold interests me. It is a place I associate with un-bragged contemplation—there is a certain quiet in this not-quite-there-yet. It is a place to measure, to observe in secret, to pull and hoard what's behind, right before I push myself inside with what I think needs to last a bit longer. It is also a place to halt intentions, and to let boredom (the delicious encounter of patience with impatience) settle in. A studio feels precious like that. So with the residency, I wanted to let myself stay in that trouble, a bit dis-armed, as in with less preconditions than if I was navigating towards a clear project. Essentially, I told myself that I wanted to continue to bend metal. I would take walks to and from the studio, trying new routes in hopes to find bits and offerings to add to the collection of material to use. It also felt like I spent the entire summer being reminded that each day was going to be the coldest summer day of the rest of my life. It is easy to imagine how the exhaustion of a walk can lead to a certain monotony when blinded by the oppressive fears of disasters and the actuality of tragedies, and how it can eventually produce a different kind of question. One that at some point made my sweaty body grab these unsealed ampoules I was storing for years without much use. So I began to build around these mini glass vaults out of longing for liquidity.
Scraps, rejects, trivial objects find a key place in the material you work with. They are elements that arrive from exploring the city: aimless wanderings through urban space that engage the streets in unexpected ways, open alternative pathways and unintended meanings. A dérive, as you describe: an experimental gesture or hijacking or public spaces historically connected to the Situationist International. What does this journey mean to you and how does it find a place in the final pieces?
It is a kind of prayer, this wandering, and similar to other devotional practices, it demands trust, kindness and discipline. I find that it is easier for me to approach it on these terms so as to be able to encounter “something”, a kind of obstacle, or glitch, in this constant revealing of the world. Is taking to the studio a rusty washer I found stuck between two cobblestones, plucking it from “its environment”? Trash isn’t intrinsic, it implies displacement and always betrays histories. So this taking is more like gleaning, in the same breath I took home un-pretty, too-ripe-to-sell tomatoes and nectarines that were left on the market stalls next door to the studio. A perversion to an already perverted system. I like to see it as a sensitive deviance, between isolation and re-connection, a grieving effort, a gesture against profit. And each scrap I find serves as a kind of hinge for a different encounter with myself in the world, and each new thing I make with it induces a distortion in this conception I carry of myself: it lets me stay in drag. To me this dérive hints at a new kind of ecology, against paralysis, in defiance of our inability to be curious, to imagine and to act for a thing that is not the brutal regime we built to be the pawns of.
These castoffs and fragments become precious elements – enchanted, in a way, through the process of bricolage. How do you understand this material process? Not only in a practical sense of transforming everyday objects into an aesthetic experience, but also as a storytelling mechanism. We spoke a lot about the relationship between myth, reality, and selfhood: how do you see these elements interact?
As I have been amassing these traces of our Industrial and Technological Revolutions, like drawing a map of a system that seems to constantly adapt, evolve and regurgitate its automation into something even more alarming, I am constantly reminded of the surreal and wretched origins of the companies that poured their foundations onto the world. Let’s take Shell, an amalgam of two companies founded in the 1890’s: The Royal Dutch Petroleum Company that developed an oilfield in Pangkalan Brandan, in North Sumatra—part of the larger colonial project, the Dutch East Indies, and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name), a British operation specialized in antiquities that later expanded to the importing and selling of seashells—after which the company currently known as Shell, whose profits surged this year, with earnings at $9.836 billion, took its name. From the pilgrimage of Saint James to the pillaging of the earth is a scallop shell combing resources. In my mind, my friend Felix sends me the Four Stage of Simulation (fish) meme in a dance that helps keep my blood on boiling alert to such stories. So I claim these objects in similar ways I appropriate language—this bricolage lets me touch on the suspicion that despite the crudeness of those with no decency and the darkness imbibed deep in my heart, the world is massive, loud with mysteries and stupendously erotic.
These materials – rotten, rusted, mass-produced just to be discarded – evoke a sense of threshold. Between life and death, growth and decay, the past and the future. There is a nostalgic element here as well: a longing for something lost, an attempt to resurrect, to recreate, to experience again. Our digital, technologically mediated condition allows us to always live in these in-betweens: always longing, but never quite here, nor there, not alive, not dead. Could MUTUAL (DIS)ATTRACTION be described as an alternative kind of – mythic – technology; of spellbinding and metal-summoning, as you describe it?
Yes, like that, between evidence and confession. In this game of reality, this “something” I am after without seeking, lingers as a mystic encouragement. And if something cannot be captured by language of any form, then it resists the urge to be interpreted and translated, never to be made transactional. For me, this is the ghost in the nostalgic machine, this moist and magic vagueness amidst all that is mediated. I like to see these objects as parasites, spells against what our dominant technologies have been engineered to maximize. A dis-attraction, a mutual refusal to tolerate any pre-chewed obsequious answers injected to force a dependency, when the trouble for the world is this never-to-be-finished braid—a mass that cannot be created nor destroyed, a question passing through your body.
The work produced within the WORKROOM project – a residency and production platform launched in 2023, focused on experimental, multimedia, and research-based practices, with particular interest in works exploring alternative modes of feeling, thinking, and being.
Realized with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, Zaklada Kultura Nova, and the City of Zagreb Office for Culture.
Fette Sans is a conceptual artist whose films, performances, writings, and installations explore how reality and desire are mediated by images, particularly via screens—what do the residues of an image look like? What constitutes a memory? With her practice, she explores the condition of being and belonging, the relationships between labor, gender, and the image, and the evolution of these notions under capitalism.
