Rebeca Žukovits “Street View 3”
Lately, I’ve often found myself thinking that I keep a diary only out of a need for communication. If I frame it like that, it feels like a deeply depressing practice. Yesterday E said that I have so many thoughts I should start writing them down instead of telling them to her. But I just wanted to share.
17.03.2024 / 20:31
Street View 3 brings together digital space, playful sculpture, and craft. Google Street View is, by nature, suspended in time, a fragmented archive that endlessly rewrites itself, yet also lingers as a residue of the past, a place where timelines overlap and drift. The people who appear in these landscapes are there merely by chance: fragmented, anonymous, and incidental, captured as byproducts of recording the environment.
For nearly three years I have wandered the streets of Tallinn through Street View. Always as an observer. I’ve spent hours in quiet dialogue with these figures through photo editing and embroidery. It is a kind of game, where narrative and character-building, choosing who to capture and who to leave behind, are entirely up to me. Just me, and my imaginary friends.
In the installation, these imagined encounters become physical. The walls and ceiling of the container are covered with a panoramic image of the exhibition site itself, turning the space into its own reflection. Within this mirrored environment, scenes unfold where my 3D-scanned body enters into dialogue with these chance-encountered, carefully chosen figures. Characters that first appear in photographs re-emerge as LEGO sculptures, granted a brief three-dimensional life through play. The images are accompanied by embroidered speech, fragments from my diary: broken sentences, scattered thoughts, unfinished conversations.
Street View 3 creates a space where the remnants of time and reality intertwine with my own presence and imagination of people I have never known. They become temporary friends; my half-formed thoughts turn into conversations. It is an attempt to belong. Yet, like Street View itself, the attempt always remains a little fragmented, fractured, unfinished.
Rebeca Žukovitš (b. 1999) is a multimedia artist and composer based in Tallinn, Estonia.
Through video, animation, and installation, she explores the intersections of the body, identity, and digital space. Her work is focused on the politics of gaze in the digital age and the tensions between analogue and digital, exploring how physicality and virtuality blur and transform one another.
A central part of Žukovitš’s practice is glitch-based self-portraiture. Recurring themes in her work include the search for identity, body dysmorphia, and the feeling of disorientation. She often combines visual material with text and the human voice, creating dialogues between immediate, human presence and fragmented digital existence.
Žukovitš has studied audiovisual composition at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and media art at KASK & Conservatorium / School of Arts in Ghent. Her works have been exhibited in Estonia, Belgium, Italy, and France.
