When asked to put his comments on his recent installation The World’s Pulse Beats Beyond My Door on paper, Hraste wrote: “According to Bachelard, a patient should not be asked when, but where the event from his memory that is haunting him takes place. Bachelard insisted that a psychoanalyst should focus on positioning the reminiscing person in space. He called it topoanalysis. Our being has vertical polarity; this is our home, our house. At one end of this anthropocosmic vertical, there is our head. It is the attic of our house and our bond with the cosmos. At the other end, there are our feet; they are the foundation that roots us to the ground, connecting us with underground forces; therefore, our feet are our basement. Our being is alive! My installation features a person literally shaking – put in motion by an electromotor - before a small shark. The shark is stranded on the concrete gallery floor. The person, wrapped in a blanket, is standing on a chair, under a parasol. The chair and the parasol cut him off from both the earth and the sky. Doubly protected, by the blanket and the parasol, the person feels safe, although neither the blanket nor the parasol are really shielding him. The danger is not for real, either (the shark is outside of its watery medium). This is my representation of the concepts of hermeticism and paranoia, the fear of life and the fear of external influences. For me, living in anguish means being deprived of anthropocosmic verticality. It is an existence that does not bond with the cosmos, nor is rooted to the ground. And I wonder what a topoanalyst would make of this ‘positioning in space’?“ After having read the quoted text, apart from feeling an immediate urge to transfer it into the forward I had just begun writing for his exhibition catalogue, I also felt the need to continue with this line of thought, in the hope that it would give me the answer to his question. Topoanalysis is meant to be a systematic psychological study of the intimate regions of our being that influence our everyday life. But if we reduce man - as Hraste has - to a being trapped in the feeling of powerlessness, if we rob him of his anthropocosmic verticality, this living bond that connects him with the cosmos and the ground beneath, we shall soon come to the conclusion that Hraste’s question does not ask for a reply, but for a reaction. The thing is that we already know the reply, and it is neither good nor bodes well. “We are the space where we are”, Nőel Arnaud wrote in his Uncompleted Condition. But if this house of our being is squeezed within its four walls, if it is no more than a geometric hole crammed with pictures, wardrobes, odds and ends, then in that wardrobe of ours there will be not enough hooks on which to hang all our fears, rages and dissatisfactions. Here, even the beautiful words with which Rainer Maria Rilke describes the unique intimate space of the world that extends through all living beings, are of little avail. For if we had lived with the awareness of Rilke’s ‘intimate space of the world’, we would not have wound up in hermeticism and paranoia, and the clichéised rivalry in material status would have never become the measure of our strength, intelligence, even wisdom. Yet the point here is not that man makes mistakes, for we all make them. We had better ask ourselves when it was the last time we heard someone, who had erred much, specify scrupulously and clearly his or her errors. Hardly ever, I must say. We are living in a world in which big words, empty phrases and demagogy are holding the stage, and the artist is inviting us to confess our sins, in order to let the ‘intimate space of the world’ permeate our intimate being. Even if he is well acquainted with Lao Tzu's ‘path on which there are no travellers’ … Hraste belongs to the younger generation of Croatian contemporary artists, but unlike others of his generation, who feel stuck at a dead end, he does not let the Zeitgeist break him down. He believes in the basic tenets of the craft, yet he does not flaunt his status of an artist. His works, including this latest one, possess and mediate joy, which is innate in them even when he reduces them to the drama they illustrate, as is the case here. In The World’s Pulse Beats Beyond My Door he is asking us to rise above emotional resonance, through which we experience works of art as more or less substantial, and to pursue echoes. For resonance puts in vibration different areas of our life, while only echoes truly deepen our creative being. ‘Echoes touch the depth, before the surface is disturbed’, says Bachelard. To visit an exhibition and not to be changed by it, means coming in vain and leaving drained. “I’ve had enough of fun”, painter Josip Vaništa says, and I can’t but agree with him. And I thank Vojin, trying to emulate the simplicity with which he expresses himself: ‘The more candles you know, the more light you have!’ Long live Vojin! Toni Horvatić Catalogue for the solo exhibition by Vojin Haste held at The Art Gallery Split, June 2011