Fruits of Our Land

Originally conceived as the total surface environment for the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Fruits of Our Land transformed the pavilion into an immersive ornamental field composed entirely of illustrations of the Anophthalmus hitleri beetle — a rare cave beetle discovered in Slovenia in 1933 and named after Adolf Hitler by the entomologist Oskar Scheibel, who dedicated the species to him as a political gesture of admiration.

Existing almost entirely in darkness and driven close to extinction by collectors drawn to the notoriety of its name, the insect functions within Cibic’s work as a disturbing emblem of the persistence of ideology. According to the rules of Linnaean taxonomy, once assigned, an organism’s scientific name cannot simply be erased or rewritten; the beetle therefore continues to carry its ideological inscription across time. Within Cibic’s work, this persistence becomes a metaphor for the endurance of political toxicity itself — how authoritarian impulses, once embedded within cultural and social systems, prove difficult to fully eradicate, continuing to resurface through repetition, normalisation, and collective memory.

For the project, over forty scientific illustrators were commissioned to produce meticulous renderings of the beetle. In a reversal of the usual logic of scientific classification, the illustrators were given only the insect’s Latin name, without any contextual explanation or visual reference. Their collective labour echoed traditions of natural history illustration historically tied to classification, colonial collecting, and the aestheticisation of knowledge. Repeated endlessly across wallpaper, textiles, and surfaces, the beetle motif dissolved into decorative pattern: seductive, immersive, almost invisible in its ubiquity. What initially appears ornamental gradually reveals itself as a structure of ideological saturation.

The work reflects on how political systems embed themselves not only through propaganda or spectacle, but through aesthetics, taste, and the visual environments that shape everyday perception. Ideology, the project suggests, operates most effectively when it ceases to appear exceptional. Rather than arriving as overt authoritarian imagery, it persists through forms that become familiar, desirable, and ambient — hidden in plain sight within the cultural fabric itself. The repeated Hitler beetle becomes a metaphor for this condition: a reminder that contemporary societies are not surrounded by singular authoritarian figures, but by countless dispersed manifestations of authoritarian logic woven into ordinary systems of representation.

During the Biennale preview, the pavilion’s performative opening activated this critique further. A collection of artworks displayed in offices of the politicians in the Slovene Parliament — works used as symbolic backdrops for state authority and public address — were ceremonially hung onto the walls covered in Hitler beetles. The gesture exposed the often invisible alliance between cultural production and political image-making, staging ornament itself as an accomplice in the construction and maintenance of power.