In Struggles Beyond Repair, Maja Bojanić and Brin Žvan explore the crumbling Institute for Mold Preservation, a fictional NGO founded in 2022 to study mold (particularly Stachybotrys chartarum) in public institutions and promote sustainable models for the preservation of natural and cultural heritage. In 2025, the Institute faces the prospect of collapse due to numerous crises; material, ethical, and administrative. Throughout the extended video game Struggles Beyond Repair, you sift through digital files and physical drawers to uncover a musty underbelly where the pressure of unsolvable crises is sapping away the very subject the Institute was founded to preserve. Ritualized procedures delay the inevitable decay and reflect late-capitalist institutions that prioritize self-preservation over their actual mission. Players become accomplices in maintaining the façade, while molecular resistance emerges: sustainability as persevering decay.
The works in the exhibition connect questions of interaction, maintenance and yearning with nature as medium, as a channel of transmission, and as a site through which existing structures can be transferred into subversive and irrational forms.
Struggles Beyond Repair
Production: Ljudmila, Art and Science Laboratory (2025)
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Department for Culture of the Municipality of Ljubljana.
Sound design: Gašper Torkar
