Treida (2022)

interactive projection / digital / 350x700cm

Treida is a fictional trading market that sells shares of snow. The word merged from the words trade, and my own name Tajda. The work was inspired during the bitcoin/crypto-currency hype era. Treida consists out of two parts - a video, topically exploring snow, if places on commodity stock market and an interactive projection that explores also artistic values, assigned to snow and it's contrainers, which influence snow's commodity value. During the ongoing climate change snow’s becoming a scarce substance in the area of my home-country Slovenia and elsewhere. Even snow-wealthiest land, named Antarctica, is losing its mighty amounts as the global temperature rises. I’ve developed a work that deals with preserving some of the snow and analyses its potential value if placed into the commodity stock market. The base of the work is an act, which began in 2020, when I started to harvest snow during the winter season and stored it in a freezer. As annually repeat this act my collection expands and because of the increasing lack of environment’s snow my collection’s value levels up. As we can learn from the history of financial system commodities and natural resources had set the base for and shaped today’s main trading medium, money. Different factors defined its value and their value was differently precious to different cultures. Especial role has played the metal called gold, which many cultures appreciated from the ancient times on. As the main medium of trading gradually shifted onto money, natural resources still are expansively traded and if the resources are lower, their value is higher. As scarces the substance, the higher its value, is why I speculate the snow market sounds like a great investment.

Financial system is shaped by commodities, human world is shaped by money, natural landscapes, like valleys were largely shaped by glaciers. The starting point of projection’s content is a valley in Antarctica. Located at the South Pole, Antarctica is the largest preserving space to Earth’s snow. With its low climate’s temperature, the area provides idealistic preserving conditions where snow from ancient times on accumulates and gradually transforms into glaciers. Using the digital version of Antarctica’s landscape provided by platform Google Earth I shaped the valley by placing into glaciers of increased and accumulated speculated value of preserved snow. On the other side there are glaciers in a shape of graphs, which serve as speculative indicators that we can usually find on trading websites, when we seek help to define the future price of stocks. For these glaciers I’ve used the visual representations of prices -graphs- of common commodities, found on trading site Nasdaq. The absurd point of this work would be, the less there is snow “outside” or increasing effects of global warming increase the value of preserved snow. With the work Treida, I’ve tried to analyze human models of evaluating. As glaciers shape the valleys, I imagine the history of money and its expanding value as a glacier that shapes the society.

Beside commodity stock market, Treida explores artistic and technological aspects of preservation of snow, on a local and global scale. Due to the process of disappearing, snow is becoming an artwork. Winterwonderlands brings nostalgic joy to humans and also signifies that there is still hope for the well known natural cylces to exist. At the same time humans worry about the snow that the majority had seen through pictures only. Antarctica is the world's biggest snow containing area. It's a giant freezer, functioning as a snow-preservation space. In this perspective we can see it as a part of natural infastructural system. Due to well-known dangerous effects of global warming, this snow, accumulated into glaciers needs to be preserved in order to keep the Earth's surface as we know it. Following the ideas of preservation, and transformative processes I alligned Antarctica into exhibition space, a museum, containing artwork in a form of snow. We can explore Treida as a museum, preserving works of art in a form of glaciers.