Interviewed in Zagreb 14 March 2014

Matija Čop is a student of the Faculty of Textile Technology. Still a student, he became famous at an early age. In 2012, he was listed among the twenty best young designers  of the world by the London Internet portal ArtsThread. He received the Dean's Award, won the Young Creative Chevrolet competition having travelled with an electric car to Zagreb, a city with many green surfaces to protect. Matija Čop first turned to the topic of mapping and cartography, that is, topography, referring to a specific location and its historical context from a far only (project City Lace). Next, he took the body as a metaphor for historical and geographical identity power lines (layers). The construction of clothes in Object 12-1 Project resembles the keyway-and-keyset manner of arranging stone blocks on the Šibenik Cathedral, which is the celebrated invention of Juraj Dalmatinac. Next project, the Homeless in Heaven Project; about a homeless person’s clothes as his precious, as his only possession, is precisely about the quality of having no house, it is very mobile – it represents a figure of the contemporary urban nomad, the ultimately displaced and uprooted individual. We are witnessing the change of scale city - architecture - body (clothes) in private shifts which are in the focus of Matija Čop's interest.