instalation, 2008.

Urban sells locally produced original woodenware, which is otherwise being displaced by products from China and the Balkans. This wending machine is automated solution for economical and logistically reasonable sale of traditional woodenware products or “Suha roba” form Ribnica Valley in Slovenia. Urban is recycled vending machine that talks and animates potential buyers, is full of traditional woodenware for 1 euro and is ready for rounds around the district.

Today most of the woodenware in Slovenia is arriving form China and courtiers of former Yugoslavia. These products are eliminating the traditional one and are causing the extinction of traditional handcrafts like “suha roba” from Ribnica.
Urban is a “homemade” prototype and a strategy that finds a niche inside the global market. The competitive relations of the market are best visible inside the shopping malls that are closing down the possibilities for traditional goods and are offering mostly imported substitutes. Urban represents the economically reasonable tool for exceeding the hopeless situation and that is opening the local and autochthon to the contemporary world and new global conditions.

Produkction: Miklova hiša gallery, Ribnica, Slovenia