The Sandbox
Eva Bevec
The Sandbox is a personal documentary photography project that started developing during my critical design studies in Eindhoven, as a counterweight to the overly restrictive and stress-heavy institutional frame of design education.
In early 2020 I had started taking walks as a way to improve my mental heatlh during a chaotic period in my life. To keep myself engaged and motivated to walk, I started documenting the curious phenomena I encountered on my paths with my phone camera, a sort of exercise in looking, a game. Once I became attentive, the weird was everywhere.
The boring, prosaic, mundane surroundings of my hometown became full of absurdity and a source of awe. Organically, such documentation of curious details became an intuitive methodology that I began to call banalism; expressive documentary photography of the everyday. Surprisingly democratic, it followed my move to the Netherlands, where it became a way of coping with feeling of estrangement in a foreign environment, as well as a way of interpreting it and making it mine.
Eventually, the phone was upgraded to a camera which added a layer of formal exploration and experimentation to purely spontaneous and momentary encounters, largely determined by default technology settings. Furthermore, I became increasingly interested in capturing more dynamic aspects of my daily life; the people around me, our movements, activities, gestures - with the same curious gaze that tends to be stimulated by the absurd.
Out of fascination with what’s around and the need to document it a project started coming together; fragmented, eclectic, weird and honest. Like a sandbox, seemingly basic yet brimming with boundless potential, it’s following me organically, helping me to develop a visual language and evolve my photographic practice.
Eva Bevec (b. 1998) is a designer, visual artist, and photographer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She completed her undergraduate studies in visual communications (with a focus in graphic design) with honors at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2020. She continued her design studies abroad, at the Master Department of Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where she graduated with honors in 2023.
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia as well as internationally, showcasing her works at the prominent Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, at the Brumen Design Biennial in Ljubljana, and at Layerjeva hiša in Kranj, among others. In 2020, she held her first solo exhibition titled “Madeleines and Linden Tea” at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana. She has received various awards for her work, such as the student Prešeren Award of the University of Ljubljana and the Brumen recognition for excellent Slovenian design. She also participated in the international pharmaceutical conference Health Services Research & Pharmacy Practice in the United Kingdom with her graduate thesis project, Developing a user-focused standardised design system for prescription medicine packaging in Slovenia.
In her artistic and design practice, Eva explores various media and topics, always connected by a genuine interest in the ordinary and the banal aspects of her surroundings. Through curious and critical investigation and documentation of the seemgly mundane, she reveals deeper and broader social, political, as well as aesthetic questions, patterns and implications. The prosaic becomes the extraordinary and the extraordinary becomes the poetic.