Špela Petrič’s ‘Zajesti’ to Be Presented at Galerija Parter

Špela Petrič’s ‘Zajesti’ will be presented at Galerija Parter from 15 September 2026 to 3 January 2027. The exhibition opens at Cukrarna, in Galerija Parter, on 15 September 2026 at 20:00.

The project examines how algorithms and automated systems of industrial food production affect plants, workers and consumers. Using the cultivation of tomatoes and cucumbers, it focuses on how algorithmic infrastructures shape human bodies.

Petrič describes the relationships formed through eating industrially produced food as an ‘awkward intimacy’: a long-term dependency on systems whose inner workings generally remain outside public view, rather than an intimacy based on emotion or consent.

The project grew out of a series of performative gestures Petrič carried out in greenhouses in the northeast of the Netherlands. That setting was chosen because the principles and form of the contemporary greenhouse, adopted across much of Europe as agricultural progress, originated there.

Petrič presents contemporary greenhouses as closed, highly specialized environments in which living and nonliving actors are subjected to extensive data collection and rapid digitalization and automation.

The exhibition is designed as an environment where visitors encounter the hidden and overlooked aspects of vegetable production through a series of protocols or exercises.