Sandra Sterle's Perpetual Motion: The Round Around Series

Croatian multimedia performance artist Sandra Sterle has been running around trees for nearly three decades. Her ongoing series Round Around, initiated in 1996 on the island of Mljet, captures her circling different trees every seven years: an olive tree (1996), a pine (2003), an almond (2010), an acacia (2017), and a plane tree (2024). Each iteration uses a different camera, from analog Hi8 to digital, improving fidelity while the woman—Sterle as both herself and an archetype of Balkan village women—remains constant. Born in Zadar, Sterle studied under video art pioneer Nan Hoover in Düsseldorf before returning to Croatia, where a trip to Mljet with German art student Frauke Eigen led to the first video. Later, her husband Dan Oki shot the 2003 version while she balanced motherhood. The series critiques labor, discipline, and the valuation of bodies, paralleling her 2007 work Decathlon, which transforms athletic gestures into futile, repetitive tasks. Sterle describes Round Around as an "open circle," a single evolving work exploring homecoming through technology, landscape, and place. The project remains perpetually unfinished, with the next iteration due in 2031.