Silva Kalčić: The Exhibition “Split *** three stars” Foreword
In his 2000 guide to Venice, Tiziano Scarpa, contaminated by the beauty of the city, discovers radium pulchritudinis of the cityscape. A Blind man sees it due to the bad weather; the density of the downpour, its deflection gives hint to the outlines of the city: there is a high palace, and a café sunshade.[1] In 1932, in his walks through Split, Ljubo Karaman, treating the city as a piece of art, frequently spoke of the need to preserve the ambient of the medieval town within Diocletian’s Palace as a whole, advocating the unity of that very space, ‘sposalizio dei secoli’. Today, let us take a walk and experience the amalgam of Split’s historical layers and a ‘marital harmony of its centuries’. We will take the route from the west, from the point of interruption – Vila Dalmacija’s wall placed on the section of the Marjan hill imaginary sea promenade (in reality it is negated by the restricted access to the Vila’s marine area, beyond the city’s processes; this ‘amputation’ is marked by the wall) – towards the east, Gripe.
Following this (mental) path we shall pass by the (neo)historical vacation home Vila Dalmacija, and, in the port area, the modernist building of Dalmacijavino winery; after half an hour we will get to the postmodern, polyvalent building Koteks-Gripe, which includes the public space shaped by the project. In our walk through Split, we notice (at least) three wills of the epoch[2], three forms; there is no neutral shape or discourse. ‘A thing is neutral only in relation to some other thing (Intention? Expectation?)’ In conceiving the city of Split as a scene, buildings are being appropriated in two ways, through usage and perception. If the relation between culture and its respective form is built through the regulation of the relationship between people and their environment, the relationship between the society (the City) and its ‘recent’, 20th architectonic heritage may be seen as de-regulative, considered too recent to be preserved for the future, subjected to the terror of time, (intentionally) neglected by the society, forgotten (in the collective consciousness), taken away (Vila Dalmacija – closed, i.e. confined space; Dalmacijavino – shut down, emptied of workers; Koteks complex, inclusively public space built on levels-terraces, a public squares and streets sublimate – mostly used in an inadequate manner, constantly seeking for a new content, suffering from the functional crisis caused by invisible social changes). In its renouncing of ‘society’, or it being renounced by the ‘society’ (20th architectonic heritage) we cannot help but notice a social gesture. Vila Dalmacija, Dalmacijavino and Koteks-Gripe in that sense are spaces of silence, as in the cessation (of communication). Silence, however, ends by gaining the right to speak[3]. According to Juhani Pallasmaa, the central theme of the modern architectural theory was to point towards spatial-temporal continuity. Architecture was regarded as the image of the world and expression of spatial-temporal structure belonging to a physical and empirical reality. Spatial-temporal dimension was a central point in all considerations and activities of human kind, from the hidden geometry of language to the forms of production and politics. Today, can architecture itself set social and cultural goals? Can it be so deeply rooted in culture, as in create an experience of place and identity? Can it recreate tradition, a common surface where the criteria of authenticity and quality can be built?[4] For Gadamer, destruction of an (art)work for us still possesses something of a religious blasphemy; a basic setting of anxiety.
Through the history of photographical image, photographic phantoms have been used to (re)construct history by manipulating mechanisms of memory. Since 2000, however, Duška Boban, in her walks through Split uses the camera to record changes in the cityscape and in the states of its identity. Although these photographs focus on the so-called neuralgic places in the city, they simultaneously record its melancholic beauty. However, in the photographs from 2002 to 2017, she focuses her attention towards the ‘three stars’: Vila Dalmacija, Dalmacijavino winery, and sport-commercial complex Koteks-Gripe, using the exhibition title to address the mediocrity of the city’s tourist offer. In using conceptual strategies included into (intellectual-) photographic experiment, and employing the methods of mapping and archiving, she cautions that an alternative, ‘happy’ destiny is still possible for these places. An example of the former, inscribed into the history of contemporary culture, Hiroshi Sugimoto in his 1976 photography series Theatres uses tripod camera to shoot and extract from the video footages large format photographs, empty cinemas and drive-in theatres. He uses a specific way of recording to compress time, simultaneously exploring the theme of time flow. In order to recreate the original atmosphere of these objects and urban entities (definition), documenting their current state of crisis (distinctive definition), Duška Boban uses analogue photography, technology of modernist eras. Photographs show eventless spaces, 20th century architecture and urbanist heritage, social confirmation of a value yet to be achieved as in the level of previous, pre-modernist, historic styles, so that formal and cultural features of the newer city history would not be excluded from its developmental strategy.
As established before, exhibition photographs (three stars within three sections of Salon Galić) in their mediality follow the principles of analogue media typical of the modern period. In that manner, Duška Boban took photographs of Dalmacijavino in 2002, while the building still teemed with productive and collective (on a roof terrace, with a view of the city) life, using leica film (35 mm) and then in 2017, diapositives, currently forgotten photographic medium, viral, rhythmically switched, with the sound of projection device spinning. Vila Dalmacija and Koteks were shot, besides leica film, with a Hasselblad camera on a medium format film, 6 x 6 cm. Photographs, some of them in frames reflecting modernism (modernity of modernism), occasionally juxtaposed – moved into diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs, in the context of other photographs open the narrative of the rotation of the view, re-focusing of the author’s eye. They were made over the course of fifteen years, revealing the phases in which the ‘stars’ were transformed, as well as their adaptations (re-semantisation), following the logic of changes in ownership. Ultimately the spaces of silences, such as tourist apartments during off-season, these are spaces waiting for a new eventfulness, which is to make them a part of the city’s life once again. There are no people on the photographs, not even on those where we feel possible domination of the human element, merely the traces of their previous actions and former lives; on the other hand, they may be passers-by, the city’s mis-en-scene ‘staffage’, pointing towards the significance of the public space as a common interest. Photographs were taken from a personal perspective, into confrontation between the reality of the city and the author’s own intimate reality, focusing towards the field of her civilian ideal and activism. So far, Duška Boban mostly worked in expanded media of photography, for example photo collage and site-specific photographic references to specific locations. On the other hand, this exhibition presents autonomous photographic images, directed towards the exploration of the communicative power of ‘silent photography’. For Bourriaud, an artwork does not create some imaginary or utopian reality, but constitutes the ways of existence and models of engagement within pre-existing reality.[5]
Villa Dalmacija located in Marjan Forest Park was named while still a residence of Yugoslavia’s president; its inventory is frozen in Tito’s time, comprising details such as sailing boat figure on the commode or the analogue television. Ambient value of the villa’s park on the littoral side of Marjan, as well as its transitional (shore-oriented) patio with a little-known fountain and arches opening the walls of warm, ochre colour, evoke the time when it served as a first boarding house in Split, in 1903. Here, a new field of a phenomenon, i.e. the term of visibility opens up. Temporal delay in the perception of artwork results in questioning of the edges of the temporal segment in which the potential of an artwork is communicative, in which it has possibilities for direct public reception, as a historically alive form of communication. Duška Boban’s intention is, within the socially engaged part of the exhibition project and in collaboration with a wide network of Croatian and Split-based culture-artistic associations, to focus the attention of citizens towards Vila Dalmacija as the space with unfulfilled culture and identity potential, recommending its new (alternative), public use in culture, such as its potential role as an art residency accessible to citizens. Therefore, as a part of the exhibition she tried to organise a tour around the complex, with professional guidance through the lavish Villa Dalmacija interior, as well as its “il giardino incantato”.[6] As a measure of ambiental value worth, she notices with anxiety the tendency to manipulate the boundaries of Marjan Forest Park, and conservational protection level on a wider city area in general; for example, a failure to extend the so called temporary conservational protection over Vila Dalmacija and to take care of its avenue as a part of Park Forest Marjan, which is something that suggests exclusion; Also, governing-political structures are appealing for a hotel to be situated at the Stanko Fabris’s winery building, a protected cultural heritage, while, on the other hand, the author fervently advocates the contemporary Museum of Sea instead; its essential museological layer would be the industrial history of the building in situ, an important identity mark of society.
The Three stars, standing before the invisible, but solid wall built upon social amnesia, burned out; in a city whose physiognomy is shaped by the will of tourist industry. City as a brand requires virtual continuation of extinct traditions, illusion of their further existence, instead of its new and different life. Tourist cities’ historic cores thus remain empty, although preserved, shells, restored as symbols – elegant and devoid of their original, animate content. Their former inhabitants moved to less attractive urban areas and out of town, allowing tourists to reside in prestigious historical buildings with ‘depilated’ facades’. However, the tourist market and unlimited real estate transfers ideologists apparently intentionally overlook the fact that without people who actually live and work in them, these picturesque remains of the past remain just naked symbols inside a dead landscape, where, through invisible direction, the history is ‘produced anew’ and tourists inevitably start to seek out other destinations. Duška Boban’s exhibition Split *** Three stars therefore conjoins three projects: preservation and reanimation of the 20th century architectural heritage; affirmation of classic photography aesthetics and terminology in time of digital image; protection of all living layers in the city memory; addressing of the importance of including the public into developmental plans of the city, through almost extinct practice of public discussion which the exhibition releases. The central exhibition theme, photography behind the regime of visibility, truly poses the question of ‘irrepairability’ or ‘neocreation’ that is inherent to the ideas of ‘repair’ and ‘revitalisation’. Historic processes can sometimes be oxymoronic in relation to rationality; alternating processes of injuries (of destruction, through the force of power) and ultimately, healing (restitution, through the force of order), but occasionally, they are defined by the impossibility of return, for example, into state of rationality/wisdom, on the level of people, city and society. Can art reply to the rhetoric of power, or it merely recognises the state of affairs? Since the emergence of activist art in the ‘70s, artistic engagement is often confused with politic activity, and the vision of a new artist is undeniably politic, because they try to ‘oppose the reality of politic action through illusions of art locked down in museums‘,[7] and communicate with local community through collaboration, providing it with its own substance, as well as with its desire for radical normality.
Tiziano Scarpa, Venice is a Fish, SysPrint, Zagreb, 2005, 39
Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space, as defined by Mies van der Rohe.
According to: Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Aspen, 5 + 6, Vol. 3, Autumn-Winter 1967
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Centre, Belgrade, 2002, 4