John Grzinich: Continuities of Irrelevant Matter & Marko Košnik: hEXPO – documentary movie, pre-premiere
Published on September 22nd, 2025On satuday, september 27th at 8PM we invite you to Cirkulacija 2 where John Grzinich is performing Continuities of Irrelevant Matter and Marko Košnik is projecting the feature-length documentary hEXPO pre-premiere.
“Continuities of Irrelevant Matter” is a 25 minute time-lapse video work with live monologue and soundtrack.
This work is centered on the relations between landscape, time, infrastructure, remote sensing and climate. What started out as a curious exercise in challenging objectivity by observing the “same place” change over time, minute by minute, day after day, soon turned into a larger project. Observing the still images as durational time-lapses revealed deeper patterns of human activity overlayed by weather and climate, raising fundamental questions about our mechanised perceptions of “the environment”. In contrast to often sensationalised climate related imagery such as melting glaciers or floods, these climate records focus on overlooked “disposable” landscape imagery from rural roads and highways. What do such banal places reveal when viewed in duration? Is there more to sensing such locations than momentary images and associated data?
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- All images sourced from public records on tarktee.ee
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- All images sourced from public records on tarktee.ee
John Grzinich is an audio-visual artist based in Estonia. His work integrates sound, moving images and site-specific installations to explore perceptions of sound and space, seeking resonances between people and places. Grzinich’s recent focus questions our anthropocentric views through performative and fixed media works by combining earthly agencies, expanded listening practices and participatory engagement. Grzinich has performed and exhibited internationally, published compositions on various labels since the 1990s. His work has been featured on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ABC Radio Australia, NTS Radio, Resonance FM, Radio Študent etc.
https://maaheli.ee/
https://maaheli.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/lands_where/
hEXPO, pre-premiere
A feature-length documentary about the festival of the same name realized in the year 2000 features around 70 international guests in three teams, together with co-producers and organizers from Metelkova, Kapelica, Radio Student, Radio Marš, Slovenska Kinoteka, Ljudmila, Kibla, Pekarna, Pina and MKC-DPZN, together with visitors – at venues in Ljubljana, Maribor and Koper, during their performances, lectures, workshops and intensive online video streaming of events. Each team worked in parallel with the other two in each of the three cities before moving on week by week:
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | |
| Team 1: | Ljubljana > | Maribor > | Koper |
| Team 2: | Maribor > | Koper > | Ljubljana |
| Team 3: | Koper > | Ljubljana > | Maribor |
In the fourth week, the performers, who during the three weeks of the event only saw each other via online video streamings between locations, instead of on our planned vacations by the sea, finally got to know each other physically in Ljubljana.
Each team received ten (one-hour) video cassettes to document their activities. They circulated among numerous cameras among more or less skilled cameramen and camerawomen, who filmed spontaneously, or occasionally turned on the cameras during live video broadcasts of events over the Internet.
After the festival the cassettes ended up in my hands. I contributed five additional ones, which I recorded during the preparations and on the fly visits to locations during the active four weeks period.
How to direct a feature film without a script from a collection of recordings by unsigned cameramen 25 years later? It surely helped me I was the initiator and the main culprit for the realization of the hEXPO mastodon, which would not have been feasible without the long-term and exhaustive engagement of Katarina Pejović, Sabina Salamon Monika Glahn, Urša Jurman, Meta Štular and John Grzinich, who was as well one of the six coordinators of the festival. That’s why John’s appearance in Ljubljana, where he is finally present again after many years, is a fitting moment for the pre-premiere of the documentary.
You will learn more about what and why the festival itself was after the pre-premiere, on site. Or after studying the original project website, which after 25 years of absence has landed again on the Radio Student server: https://old.radiostudent.si/hexpo/
You can watch the four-minute “teaser” for the film online:
https://youtu.be/AtUkZO9eDik
I dedicate the hEXPO documentary to all those actively participating in the festival, especially to the unfortunately deceased collaborators: Rotraut Pape, Gerard Couty, Marko Brecelj, Aleksandra Kostić
Director and video editor: Marko Košnik
Production (festival 2000, documentary 2025): Egon March Institute
hEXPO Coproducers meeting, 23th February 2000, Koper (MKC)
Top Row: Jurij Krpan (Kapelica), Peter Tomaž Dobrila (Kibla), Borut Savski (Ministry of Experiment), Bojan Golčar (Radio Marš), Miha Zadnikar (Kinoteka), Nataša Serec (Metelkova), Borut Wenzel (Pekarna)
Bottom Row: Marko Košnik (Egon March Institute), Marko Brecelj (MKC Koper), Paul Freebairn (Pekarna), Goran Medjugorac (Metelkova), Daniel Černe (Pina)
Photo: Arijana Markučič Brecelj
Marko Košnik has been active as a poly-media artist since the 1980s. He composes electroacoustic music, develops instruments for the live manipulation of sound and digital video, directs and produces solo and group performances, and builds interactive environments, installations, and poetic platforms, which he expands with social and technological layers.
With the Egon March Institute, which he established in 1986, he has realized (by 2025) 76 productions, 28 of them international, with over 30 international collaborators, in 16 countries of the European continent as well as in Mexico, Japan, and
Indonesia.
https://www.youtube.com/egonmarch
