The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors is a site- and context-specific work conceived for the exhibition Borderline, produced by the Universalmuseum Joanneum and realised in the border city of Maribor. Jasmina Cibic’s performative installation introduces a mobile hunting hide placed in the city’s central square, in proximity to the monument of Rudolf Maister—a figure celebrated in Slovenia for securing the northern border of the newly formed State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in 1919, yet regarded as controversial in Austria. The site is further marked by a linden tree planted to commemorate Slovenian independence in 1991, positioning the installation within a dense field of national symbolism and state-building narratives.

The work stages a series of vocal performances of the deer rut, executed by members of Slovenian and Austrian hunting associations. Performing within the structure of a shared competitive framework, the participants imitate distinct stag roles—territorial dominance and encroaching threat—drawn from established hunting traditions. By introducing the stag as a shared cultural emblem, equally embedded in both national imaginaries, Cibic reveals the common visual and symbolic languages through which territorial identity is constructed and maintained.

Through the juxtaposition of these parallel systems, the installation exposes the performative nature of nation-state mythmaking. By placing both groups within the same architectural and symbolic framework, the staged encounter is rendered as a controlled fiction, one that mirrors the mechanisms of public sculpture itself. Monumentality is thus destabilised, revealed not as a fixed bearer of collective memory, but as a contingent product of shifting political, cultural, and economic conditions.

Rather than affirming the authority of the monument, The Ambassadors interrogates its function within contemporary society. In a context marked by ongoing crises and ideological recalibrations, the work reconsiders the role of public sculpture as a site where power is both asserted and continuously renegotiated.