In my search for the definition and substance of a meaningful city, and after dealing with spatial contexts for many years, I turned to questions of labour and production as key factors that position any city on the world map. Of course, since the city is an organic being in and of itself, these new, less fixed focal points are inseparable from my earlier considerations about space.    

I was introduced to the area of Brodosplit in 2008, during a guided tour and a photo session of this territory that is closed to the public. I used this photographic material to create two works for the exhibition “Suburban Herbarium;” the first interprets the space of the shipyard in Split as a city within a city, and the second, from the same photo archive, constructs a gigantic ship object, the ship-monument itself. This was the first time I learnt of the existence of the museum and its collection of ship models that were built in the shipyard. 

Years earlier, also by accident I pointed my camera at Dalmacijavino building, located in the city port and designed by Stanko Fabris in 1958. I discovered the magic of this space also through a camera lens, i.e. photographs I took for a play that was staged on the roof terrace of Fabris’ building during the 2002 Split Summer Festival. Soon after it was built, the terrace became a famous meeting place in Split, with a coffee bar and dance floor that floated above the blue expanse of the sea. I became increasingly drawn to the superb architecture of modern Split, so buildings like Dalmacijavino, Koteks-Gripe Complex, districts of Spinut, Poljud, as well as the entire Marjan Forest Park – the latter still has to be theoretically examined as a modernist urban planning phenomenon – became permanent motifs of my photographs with clearly expressed goals: reviving memories, recognizing spatial quality, imagining and creating the future.    

On the occasion of Split’s candidacy for the European Capital of Culture in 2015, I proposed that the abandoned building of Dalmacijavino wine factory, with its associated spatial context of the coastal belt, be repurposed and planned as a location of valuable cultural content, that it be turned into a Museum of the Sea that would become an annex to Split’s vibrant traffic hub in the city centre, and not a reason or a method for its exclusion. I imagined this museum as a vibrant place where community and visitors would congregate, a place where history and contemporaneity would come together. In it, I immediately envisaged Brodosplit’s ship models, which I had yet to see. At the earliest opportunity, or more accurately in early 2018, I obtained the permission to photograph them, to document a document of what I would discover along the way: the magnificent 20^th and 21^st century shipbuilding industry in Split. 

With their unmistakeable appeal, these models of passenger, cargo, military and specialized vessels that are hidden away in the shipyard, recount successes and accomplishments of this shipbuilding industry, while today, without a strong market, they look like toys. There is something in them that is the equivalent of dreams and desires made real by those who built and sailed them and those who waited for them. Each model signifies the launching of one ship and the long voyage of her crew, while they jointly represent the then communal launching of an entire society into a new world, the same world we are now turning our backs on as we sail away towards some unknown, precarious seas. 

The ship names, inscribed on models using different typefaces, languages and scripts, inscribe maritime and geographical maps as well, they connect different ports, people and cultures. It is possible to learn everything about each ship with an internet search of their name, so for example, we were able to follow changes in ownership or the name itself that were sometimes conditioned by geopolitics, and we were able to discover where they are currently sailing to, or when and at which scrapyard they expired. Models that are presented here are accompanied by stories about maritime journeys of thirty-three ships – from their functions and technical specifications, who commissioned and owned them, to calm seas and ports, shipwrecks and scrapyards. The fate of these ships transcends the Mediterranean and embraces all the world seas. They point to the fact of how absolutely conditioned, connected we are; how much a part of the same fortune or misfortune. It is why these stories and photographs are not only a matter or recording memories of what the Mediterranean, and the world emanating from it, once was and what it is today, but they also represent an incentive to create new imaginaria, fictions and narratives about what we could have been and what we would like to become. 

Fortunately, the basis of this vision is not composed only of memories and historical documents, but also the existing shipbuilding industry whose creations still proudly sail the world seas. The most magnificent among them, in the mind of the citizens of Split, is definitely Amorella. Thirty years after she was launched, this international award-winning ship, still services the Stockholm – Marienhamn – Turku route for which she was built. Every single day, without significant breaks, she connects, always in the same navigational rhythm, three cities and two countries. Crimson, buxom and tireless, she is breaking through the Baltic ice, skilfully meandering the Åland Island cliffs and testifies about different ways of urban life, different social relationships between islands and mainland, and ways to maintain ties between neighbours that were not always harmonious. That which we, in her native Split, have forgotten, Amorella did not. Together with three other ships that service the same route, she is a reliable part of the city, not disturbed either by the tourist season or wintertime darkness in the north. Amorella is a multifunctional, unmoored, and therefore still firmly urban place, that has a right to seafaring absence, mainland temporality, large and small number of passengers, to solitude, to freedom. Amorella was and remains a floating city, as the citizens of Split nicknamed her in the 1980s, not because she imitates the city with her facilities, like phantom tourist mega cruisers do, but because she connects cities, because her cities live through her, with parties, shopping, business meetings and conferences, in the course of work and overnight stays, during her constant sailing. Nomen est omen, and Amorella is – it seems – love. Love is repetition, tenacious duration, and, according to Badiou, stabilization of the event-encounter.       

However, Amorella will also stop. She will soon be sold and sent to service some other routes, far from her centre in Åland, and closer to Alang or some other scrapyard. Because, every single thing must come to an end. What can we do – in the name of love for for the city, the sea, the world – for our maritime connections, for stabilization of the shipbuilding industry, all of which Amorella sublimely symbolizes? We can remember, through the culture of valorisation their highest achievements, we can, through the culture of planning, return to the point of progress. We can discuss, make arrangements for, and contract a “newbuilding” of the new order. 

translation: Robertina Tomić