ORIS: Let’s start with your “Little manifesto” written for Radio Zagreb’s Channel 3 in which you declare that the entire history of art is but an immense storehouse. What do you mean by that?

Sokić: I don’t like to repeat myself. Yes, what I meant is a storehouse of infinite treasure from which we take as much as we give. It’s always equally full and guarded by oblivion. It’s a perpetuum mobile.

ORIS: If history of art is a “storehouse”, how do you define contemporary art?

Sokić: Contemporary art must be aware of all the dominant thoughts and point to sources of their dominance. There are so many dangers preying on man. Inasmuch as art defended human dignity from powerful and subduing religions in the earlier days, so does the modern art defend it from powerful and equally subduing technologies. Art is contemporary when it’s aware of the limits of developed civilisations and the notion of high development. We all know the saying that “the new is the most transient of all”: the contemporary is all too often associated with the new as something to be sneered upon, yet I don’t think that the transient is devoid of value while the lasting is not. On the contrary, I believe the opposite is true.