Spore
A position
The world is older than the words used to describe it. The slope, a rose at the edge of the garden, the limestone beneath it, the water gathering through that stone, the wind: their existence endures whether or not we recognise it. Traditions of thought that have insisted otherwise are themselves historical formations, traceable in their origins, contestable in their conclusions, and increasingly difficult to defend on their own terms.
Anthropocentrism, the doctrine that places the human at the centre of value and at the summit of order, has organised much of inherited Western thinking, with religious, philosophical, and political sources, and with consequences that have shaped the institutions through which the world now operates. The position generates what it calls side effects: climate disruption, accelerated extinction, sustained extraction, contamination measurable in the blood of children near industrial sites. A side effect, however, is only a side effect from inside the framework that produces it. Read from outside, those so-called effects are continuous with the doctrine itself, expressions of it rather than departures from it.
Refusal of partition
The project Zvjezdane Staze begins from a refusal of one specific habit: the partition of the ecological from the ethical, of the ethical from the ontological. From where this project stands, such a split is not innocent. It allows the human-centred frame to claim jurisdiction over ethics while assigning ecology and ontology to other categories of analysis, where they can be technicalised, aestheticised, or postponed. Once the division holds, what happens to a flower, a river, or a mining village can be addressed as a problem of management.
If the rose exists, what happens to it belongs to the same field of question as what happens to the child whose blood carries lead.
Spore · five dimensions
In the working language of this project, the word spore names a precise operation that holds five dimensions at once.
A unit of dispersal that persists through dormancy and germinates when conditions allow.
Cultivating the conditions one can, while what grows from them remains beyond influence or prediction.
Micro-shifts toward the good, undertaken without guarantee that they reach anywhere.
Minor entities and slight movements taken as constitutive of the world.
What passes between people and places, often invisible at the moment of passage, frequently dormant for long intervals, unpredictable in its eventual surfacing.
A stance under uncertainty
A stance that continues to act under conditions of uncertainty, held in this register, is itself a deliberate position, assumed after the counter-arguments have been heard and considered. Cynicism has become the present default, intellectually low-cost and socially convenient; it asks of the speaker nothing beyond a gesture.
To proceed as if a slight movement may matter, while knowing one cannot prove it will, demands courage, argument, and a refusal of the easier register.
Whether spores germinate is empirically open. Whether networks form is equally open. What this stance asks is to keep working within that uncertainty.
Two axes
This position opens questions along two axes seldom addressed together. The first runs toward the non-human existences of the surrounding ground: the ruins of Bobovac, the Trstionica forest, the Bukovica spring, the soil beneath the village. The second runs toward what is newer in human experience and less placed in available vocabularies: artificial intelligence, which appears in current discourse mostly as instrument, as threat, or as extension of human agency. None of these accounts adequately addresses what is actually emerging.
Older than this articulation
This position is older than this articulation of it. In the layer that runs beneath the modern frame across this region, much of it is still operating as parallel knowledge. The peak above the village is named Perun, after the highest figure in the Proto-Slavic pantheon, and the name has held through Christianity, the Ottomans, Yugoslavia, and the present transition. Vile, female spirits of forests, clouds and waters, remain operative as a knowledge of where the cosmos has seams. The toponymy itself is a registry, each spring and ridge carrying a name that records an event, a being, a rule. To walk this terrain is to read that registry, whether or not one knows one is reading.
Zvjezdane Staze are themselves guests of this terrain, alongside everyone who arrives from elsewhere. The task is modest. To not disintegrate what is found here, through inattention or through the imposition of categories that do not fit. And to let what is found travel further, the way spores travel, without our deciding where or whether it takes root.
Belma Bešlić-Gál