Illustration: The Pig / Book Cover / Lucija Stepančič

This illustration, titled as The Pig (2008), was made for the collection of five short love stories Prasec pa tak written by the Slovene writer Lucija Stepančič. The author dissects the modern human psyche in a tragicomic way and evokes the power of emotion already forgotten. The illustration reflects the title – the word ‘prasec’ (a male pig, a term used in Slovene in much the same way as the English word ‘bastard’) is an insulting word from the female perspective to describe the “macho” type in an oppressive, male-female relationship. Though the illustration presents us a very kind and likeable piglet, it is used to manipulate the viewer through the image into exploring the possibility of art to comment on the language in a particular socio-cultural and geographic context.

The artwork for this cover focuses on one of the stories in which a Slovene woman accidentally overhears a conversation in her own language on the street of Venice from the open window of her hotel room. A male stranger lies to a male cousin of his divorced wife, whom he has just met by chance. The complexity of contemporary male-female relationships in our society, in which the criteria for moral values are often blurred or even questioned and above all require the need for re-evaluation, is expressed through the use of the traditional technique of stitched embroidery. The embroidery of the pig is set in a strong contrast with the photo below. Normality becomes absurd, absurd normality.