to exist. The synagogue in Zagreb was destroyed in 1941/42 after the fascist Ustasha government was established. Grgić, contrary to Grubić, recreates a holy temple in space by intangibility. On the street tarmac he paints the shadow of the nonexistent building which makes the shadow more materialistic than the shadows of the existing buildings and thus it becomes a symbolic space of true architecture. The shadow exactly follows the lines of the former synagogue, it is more tangible than other shadows because there is no synagogue anymore. The works by Ferenc Molnar (Budapest 01) and Margareta Lekić (Paper cubes) follow the same poetics in a different manner. In no way do they refer to the existing, but they create new, completely flexible spaces. As if by a sculptural approach Margareta Lekić materialized the space of a building, its fullness and emptiness, by using a number of small, broken paper cubes. As if they were the former space of a large cube, they are its former floor, and its wall, and its shadow. The artist inserts this nearly invisible space within the space of a gallery and enables the viewer to participate in its transformation. Ferenc Molnar precisely names his work, but it is in fact about unnamed architecture which almost comes to life without architecture, it is a sort of “architecture without architecture”. The angles of this space are made by sky, as if a dreamer were grasping the mixed feeling of being and nothingness. He is a being made of unreality...7 On the other hand, the sky loses its timelessness and sprawl and becomes a hard angle, and it is well known that angles are rigid and reject us, while curved lines accept us.8 We have to emphasize that in this exhibition there are not too many rounded, curved lines, unless they lead to an abyss or a vertigo, namely, unless the artists literally try to bring the inconstancy of space, the uncertain ground of our time where time does not circle round the man who is trying to build a home, but a man himself becomes an accelerated nomad, the pure time orbiting the Earth. (Inconstancy of Space, Zoltan Novak). Computers and television are the two last hearths of modern men...9 But still, this dizzy space, be it a street, temporary shelters or the universe, is made by moving bodies. The bodies of passengers, the bodies of immigrants, the bodies of the decentralized (mentally and physically)
modern people.10 The presence of carnality and breath is obvious in the images of abandoned motels in the afore mentioned works The Motel in the Well, where the physical spaces of interior and exterior intertwine with the spaces of memory, and Stolen future, where the artist, by illuminating the interior space, brings back to life the abandoned and dilapidated motel, a former modernist utopia which, due to the ideological changes in the Croatian post-communist society, has been left to oblivion. Memory slips seamlessly into the present without showing a single person, a human body. Life in all its darkness is reborn only through light, rhythm and spirit... The video works Panorama by Darko Fritz and A dream if there ever was one by Elian Somers also feature the modernist utopian spirit, they exclusively research modernist constructions establishing which were constructed and which not, within a socialist-modernist utopia (New Zagreb in the video work by Darko Fritz), and respectively, which buildings of that modernist utopia have been left to stand and which have been pulled down (Elian Somers in her slides compares the attitudes of various countries of today to the modernist heritage). The photographs Destroyed house Leiden 3 and Destroyed house Leiden 6 by Marjan Teeuwen also deal with demolition. The artist reduces the space of a house, the space which used to be filled with gaps where people dwelled and objects gaped, to a complete horror vacui consisting of various materials, from handfulls of bricks to various types of wood, and within itself this entire chaos finds a particular structure and order, even close, sublimely, to perfect forms found in nature (like the structure of crystals or a snail house). This work seems like a positive image of all the gaps we have written about, the gap where a synagogue used to stand or the gap where Neli Ružić’s motel might stand one day. Here the (entrepreneurial) destruction unites the past and present. Which brings us to the beginning, and we might ask ourselves if a war has started? Just like the philosopher Maarten Doorman who in his text on Marjan Teeuwen asks whether her photographs conjure up the image of women passing buckets of debris to each other in bomb-ravaged Berlin in 1945...11 Each period, in its own manner, nurtures its own approach to a building, and its decay. In the Romantic period it was believed that every building had
7 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Ceres, Zagreb, 2000, pp. 148-149 8 Idem, pp. 150 9 Marc Augé, Non-places, Verso, London-New York, 2008, pp. VIII
10 Idem, pp. 71 11 Maarten Doorman, Destroyed and cleared. Because not moving is worse.
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