Situation Anophthalmus hitleri

Situation Anophthalmus hitleri investigates the mechanisms through which nations construct, stage, and perpetuate their symbolic identities. Developed in the context of Maribor's designation as European Capital of Culture, the project begins with a contradiction at the heart of contemporary cultural diplomacy: while such initiatives claim to foster transnational exchange and European solidarity, they often intensify national competition, prompting states and cities to manufacture new cultural icons capable of representing them on an international stage. Rather than questioning this logic from the outside, Cibic turns her attention to the mechanisms through which representation itself is produced.

Conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the exhibition combines film, sculpture, architectural reconstruction, scientific illustration, and delegated production. Architects, scientists, craftsmen, factories, and illustrators each contribute to a system in which authorship becomes distributed, echoing the institutional processes through which nations themselves construct cultural identity.

The exhibition transformed the gallery into a cave-like environment, drawing on the cave as both a physical site and a metaphorical space where ideologies sediment over time. Like geological strata, political narratives accumulate, becoming embedded so deeply within cultural memory that they appear natural and immutable. The cave also evokes Plato's allegory: a space where perception is mediated through carefully staged images rather than direct experience. Throughout the installation, visitors encounter architectures of display that reveal how national myths are less discovered than projected.

At the centre of the exhibition, Framing the Space presents a dialogue between a journalist and the architect responsible for the successive redesigns of Vila Bled, the former summer residence of Josip Broz Tito. Continuously adapted to accommodate changing political elites, the building becomes a case study in how architecture serves power while simultaneously rewriting its own history. Drawing upon the architect's personal archive, the film reflects on the uneasy relationship between architecture, political authority, and the construction of national spectacle.

Elsewhere, crystal reconstructions of unrealised exhibition pavilions designed by the Slovene modernist architect Vinko Glanz recall proposals for Slovenia's first coherent national trade fair, cancelled with the outbreak of the Second World War. Produced in collaboration with Steklarna Rogaška—a factory whose crystal has supplied diplomatic gifts and state protocol across successive political systems—the sculptures expose how objects of national representation often survive the ideologies that commissioned them.

Encased within these crystalline architectures is Anophthalmus hitleri, a blind cave beetle endemic to Slovenia. Discovered in 1933 and named in 1937 by an admirer of Adolf Hitler, the insect remains permanently marked by an ideological moment that scientific nomenclature cannot erase. Hidden within fractured crystal vitrines, the beetle becomes both specimen and political witness: a living reminder that history often persists through seemingly neutral systems of classification.

The project culminates in an encyclopaedic display of drawings and paintings of the beetle produced by more than forty internationally recognised entomologists and scientific illustrators. Working only from the Latin name and their disciplinary expertise—without access to the actual specimen—they unknowingly projected the ideological associations embedded within scientific language itself. Their images expose how acts of representation are never innocent, but continually shaped by inherited systems of knowledge, authority, and imagination.

Through architecture, natural history, scientific illustration, and exhibition design, Situation Anophthalmus hitleri reveals display itself as a political technology. Rather than asking how nations choose their symbols, the project asks how symbols come to acquire authority in the first place—and how the deeply embedded patriarchal residues continue to naturalise ideological narratives long after the political systems that produced them have disappeared.