This work was created during the artist’s residency at the TYPA Museum of Printing and Paper in Tartu, Estonia in 2020. The author uses the pages of geographical atlas printed in the USSR (1922-1991), found in the archives of the TYPA Museum, as a readymade element to which he applies the same text over all depicted regions. The pages of the atlas partially show the globe and are further obscured by the artist’s words: “I did not want to be anything. All I ever wanted was to be myself.” This quotation is appropriated from Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), who wrote, “I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.”
Although each sheet of the geographical atlas is printed with identical words, its semantics depend on the partially presented geographical units that together form the globe. Vojvodić used an old Gutenberg press that belongs to the TYPA Museum of Paper and Printing to set the type, in order to emphasize the historical aspect of the printing process. In a conceptual sense, the work makes the artist’s presence in the world known, while also questioning the nature of art, the position of the artist, and its specificity in relation to history, culture and society.