Obstinate Sediments

(Bojana Kunst)

“What economy rejects, we call garbage; what it distributes, we call value. Both are kinds of waste.”

(Lisa Robertson)

The series of photographs contained in this monograph features two photographs side by side of Maribor’s Piramida hill. The first one depicts steel cords fitted with large light bulbs ascending above the vineyards all the way up to the chapel on the top of the hill. A reminder of New Year’s Eve celebrations, in-between the seasons the bulbs continue to dangle persistently in the wind like wistful remnants of a massive dance party featuring a live band and music that someone obviously forgot to take down after the fun came to an end, even though they no longer provide any light. The second photograph provides a view extending all the way down above the vines to the large white silos that protrude against the backdrop of the industrial part of the city like a bunch of intruders – traces of the Maribor industry that has been brought down to its knees and which is now passed by the few trains headed to nearby cities and towns. It seems that not only these two photographs, but also so many others contained in the monograph, in fact depict relics, repercussions, plentiful traces. These photographs are marked by a sort of post-event reality through the dramatic layers of greyness, by a nearly slovenly numbness to the impacts and traces of various layers of the past and present accumulated in a series of political, ideological and historical local events. And yet, right there, in the very midst of sediments and traces that have been piling one upon the other, the city has also been mockingly withstanding an entire legion of reforms, improvements, revolutions, revitalisations, denationalisations, privatisations, sales, stagnations and re-urbanisations. These are all processes whose mission throughout recent decades has been to transform the city, already marked by both socialism and industrialisation; processes whose new types of consumption have made sure that what used to be valuable in the past is now seen as the exact opposite, leaving the political, social and cultural history of the city behind as nothing more, nothing less than unseen ruins.

The dance that I mentioned above, which nowadays gives a headache to the city below Piramida, has been danced throughout the last two decades under the baton of transition, a self-contradictory political and economic process that has been particularly rough on the city of Maribor. In the process of transition, we were supposed to shift from the political naïveté characteristic of both communism and socialism, both of which had left a troubled mark on the city, to finally arrive at – democracy, which should transform us into democratic political subjects. Yet parallel to this political transition was an economic transition that placed all its bets not on the political subjects but on the perfunctory consumers of new quantities of capitalist commodities, who prefer to exercise their freedom of choice in shopping malls than in city squares. Maribor was indeed marked by a specific transition process. This previously major industrial hub experienced an economic decay, brought about by the disintegration of Yugoslavia, that left a major part of the local industry without its markets and forced the city to reinvent its identity. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to say that the transition process in Maribor has failed; perhaps, more aptly, we could claim that the transition has finally condescended to take off its Emperor’s new clothes and reveal itself in its nakedness for what it has really has been: a ruthless privatisation and transition perceived by corrupted individuals and groups primarily as a process of rude depreciation and collaboration whose sole purpose has been to generate profit. All these processes that I have been describing have plunged a great many locals into poverty and invisibility, and for a long time converted the city centre into a promenade of high-street ghosts. Recently, the city centre has been experiencing a slow revival, which can be mostly credited to those few initiatives that rely on different types of solidarity, intellectual development of the city, and cultural creativity. This is how immeasurable consumption, production, and consumer freedom of choice, towards which Maribor was forced to move during the transition process, mutated into some kind of post-historic deadlock. In this deadlock, progress is seen as the right to a gluttonous accumulation of wealth, to large- or small-scale fraud, and to the power of the most insidious ones. Traces of this process can be witnessed both in the city centre and its periphery, all mercilessly recorded by Bojan’s photographs in this monograph. These are the sediments of this peculiar timelessness, of a lethargic coexistence of various historical, political, economic and utopian concepts.

Maribor is a hung-over city. However, this is not the result of drinking white wine in large barrels below the Square of Liberty or from partying on St Martin’s Day above them; instead, it is hung-over from a rough transition party and is suffering from a headache caused by stupidity, from the regrettable demise of some optimistic major stories and city revolutions, the smallishness and nepotism of the state marked by its political inability to create more than one centralised city. Its a headache caused by the provincialism of its sheriffs and their deputies, by failed projects and, last but not least, by the disillusionment spawned by unfulfilled visionary projects, dreams and ideas all too frequently drowned out by the stream of partial and short-sighted interests. The progress experienced during the transition has namely had little to do with progress in democracy, but rather refers to the progress of specific types of consumption and destruction that has been erasing the city’s political and cultural history from our consciousness, has been destroying memories on the sediments of solidarity and on the collaboration towards political change, has been eroding the specific history of the local proletariat and transforming these memories into into relics. In this way artistic and other creative initiatives stay invisible, or, at least, on the edge of survival. Instead of opening up opportunities to reflect on the specific identity of this city amidst workers, urbanity and rural areas, to reflect and provide institutional support to its complex social and cultural past, the city politics has submitted itself to dubious economic revitalisation projects and failed insights into the future, and, even more so, to a pragmatic race for fast profit.

But whenever the sun shines on Piramida (which happens more often than not), the city below it glimmers so much that it is barely visible, unless you squint at it. Only in this twilight, in this dimmed view attributable to a too powerful a light, the city itself lays truly bare. In-between darkness and light, you can see trembling contours, folds, joints, straight and curved shapes, the edges of trails and roads, the folds between the urban area and nature, the layout of of houses, roofs, hills and parks, bridges, blurred silhouettes of inhabitants. Only in the twilight is the city unveiled as a living, tangible and touchable surface, filled with traces, patterns, meanderings, imprints, as an incalculable layering of the past and the present stacked upon one another, the city is a rough and malleable matter. Or better said, the city is the sediment of the matter created from a pile of several layers of organic and non-organic life, of its inhabitants and houses and roads and waters and winds and rodents and roots, sediments that assemble one into the other in the rhythm of time. The city urbanists and revitalisers are thus cleaners who have been rubbing and shifting the traces of the past and polishing the city with a big cloth and various detergents. In Maribor many local polishers during the transition process failed to equip themselves properly, continuously leaving behind the remains of their sloppiness. With their commitment to the contrast between black and white colour, the photographs highlight that very dramatic quality of sediments, where the skeletons of houses and walls stand out like X-rays, and concrete is transformed into a palette of patterns left behind on its surface by water and cold, with walls like sheets of papers and roads like a grainy structure. At first glance, Maribor on the photographs is a deserted city, often without inhabitants, a city filled with traces of something that contemporary consumerism and entertainment-oriented economy deems valueless and worthless and is, as such, left to its own decaying, superfluous and invisible. But on the other hand, the focus of the photographer on the invisible, the way he zooms in on details and patterns, enables the details to touch us with their extraordinary, sublime beauty, which is not so much melancholic as it is absurd. A beauty full of contradictions and tenacious abandonment, often ironic, as if the city itself has been resisting its greedy owners and naïve re-shapers with its ceaseless processes of organic change. All these contradictions are further emphasised by the precise composition of photographs that always appear in pairs, they refer to one another, complement each other, continue the story of the other, challenge each other and repeat themselves in various ways. Such composition opens up the space for a temporality that is neither symbolic nor meaningful but more a stubborn temporality of details and patterns of the city. In between two photos is a tension which places the city in time, thereby producing various critical, ironic and provocative interpretations. The photographs thus do not have a calming effect but open views of the city with a magnitude of associations that can extend far beyond the context in which they were originally created. This applies, for example, to the two photographs of the former Maribor Automobile Factory (TAM) that are placed side by side: the first, depicting the windows on the ruins of the automobile factory, one of which is covered by a curtain with large dots, and the second, alongside, depicting large sheet factory heaters. With their pyramid-shaped caps, one heater among them looks like the Tin Woodman from the Wizard of Oz, perhaps because it is set in the vicinity of the dotted curtain, unveiling a fairytale-like, playful world in-between the two photographs. Or two depicting the same motif, only slightly shifted, also placed side by side: two photographs of the elliptical form of Forma Viva, which was a frequent decoration of public spaces during socialist times, against the backdrop of the dancing gazebo, a remnant of another, even older period of time. The two photographs complement each other in a way that creates a curious locomotory feeling of harmony between the bourgeois dancing gazebo and the abstract modernistic rotation of the circular staircase structure. In this manner, the photographs contained in the monograph reveal an ironic and critical image of the city and its post-transition reality, while simultaneously liberating the details of the city from their previous historic meaning to create new stories and new content.

The photographs travel through the sedimentation processes of the city without mourning and lamentation. They serve as an affirmation of the playful imagination and hope, hidden in the sediments of the city, which are brought to the surface by the contradictory compositions among the decomposition-ridden structures and walls of the city, among the abandoned graffiti and rough concrete surfaces, among the remnant housing and peeling walls. They bring to light the fact that the future of the city has hardly anything to do with self-absorbed glitzy, technocratic and spectacular projects. It can be found, rather, in the twilight, there at the dramatic edge between light and darkness. It can be found among the decomposing frames of a multitude of rotting doors, in humid, dark and isolated houses and halls, in which nobody has been living or working for a long time. There, along the folds amidst the walls, along the curves of the trails and the creases between the city and nature, along the walls immersed in humidity, along the graffiti and inscriptions, forgotten by time, amidst flashes that continue to be deemed chic and flashes whose patina was lost ages ago, the camera interlinks the past and the present and opens the door to impressions of the future. The future per se is a dramatic moment of tension between the various lives, tradings and political histories, memories and wishes, longings and disappointments that have shaped the city. History is a sequence of disasters and any re-evaluation in the name of progress can, at any moment in time, turn into the exact opposite of what was expected, shrinking the gap between worthy and unworthy. And yet, in these very sediments and ruins there lies dormant the power of the future, frequently recognised by poems, photographs and other works of art that know how to archeologically bring to the surface the tensions hidden and buried within.

The only “lonesome” photograph in the monograph can be found at the very end: the depiction of a graffito on a wall reading: Maribor is the Future, created by the son:DA tandem and ascribed to W. Churchill, which you can observe on the wall of the building where the cultural association Dance Centre has its premises. The photograph stands alone on the page, as if inviting you to complement it. If you complement it in resignation, then the future will always repeat what has happened in the past and the story could be just as easily sadly started with one of the abandoned houses from the beginning of the monograph. If, however, you “read” the photograph with a more optimistic approach, as its playful nature rightfully suggests, then Maribor is the Future in fact because of being what it is, because therein lies the power that the future will perhaps unfold differently than the past. Nowadays, the city openly demonstrates its wounds and skeletons, its delusional projects and fantasies; the city does not pretend to be something it is not, it is not a Potemkin village. Exactly such a city, a city of contrasts, forlorn illusions and political, economic and artistic histories aplenty, can provide an opportunity for new authorial, artistic, youthful and clever initiatives, for people who wish to work, live and create in the city in a more solidary manner, opening it up for everybody. This city has gained an identity exactly by losing it so radically. Today, it contains a multitude of areas and structures which could – when following the creative and intelligent vision of the future that does not “delete” the past but, quite the opposite, sees the past as the mark of the future – re-open the city to its inhabitants. And to the tourists, who will sooner or later come for a visit as well, offer something completely non-touristic.

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