EDUCATION

»The semantics« of meaning, and uncanny

Fo the project of Alternative Tourist Point of the City Maribor, we had, in the beginning, used the expression the »Degraded« Topics of Maribor City. Using this designation we wished to speak about the imbalances of city topics, changing in time, are brought to a standstill, waiting for changes in proprietorship, or are in the procedure of urban planning. The imbalance was our outset for reflection about how to undertake an »aesthetic« strategy, an intervention bringing a counterpart to it, while at the same time enabling the establishment of a reflection on urban relations and people’s lives in the imaginary field. A sample case: American city, Detroit, at the end of the 90s (and Maribor holding quite a few images like that), the downfall of heavy industry, unable to follow the fast mutation and flexibility of capital. The collapse leaves massive – almost minimalist – sculptural architectural concepts, transforming certain city parts into a ghost town. The absence – in American cities – of historical buildings, that European cities boast, about, and American inventiveness are those who transform these buildings into a first-class tourist attraction. In this way, they have established an identification with the modernist industry who becomes a historical as well as a cultural artefact. These are countless examples of such kinds all over the world, and they prove that each society and its production create one’s own space. The shift of the one into the other can represent an outset of the new one. We witness some »steady« dynamics of the transformation of states. The uneasiness at the term used and made the argumentation of rejection of our project when we submitted it to the city open-call, astonished me at the first, and made me recollect the experience of Marjetica Potrč when she was preparing her art concept for Kassel Documenta. She intended to use an old house in the city to show the »personification« of an urban structure in the sense that the decaying houses are like silence between the words, the exhale in the body, something that will enable the house, or the urban structure new vitalization. However, the proprietors failed to understand it in this sense, but contrary, understood it as if they were negligent maintainers, leaving the building neglected. On the other hand, this rejection sponsored our decision to accept the challenge and conceptualize it. We connected the challenge to the American case. More than the awareness of the dynamics transformation of states, and creation of new quality of spaces, I was interested in the way, how the mentioned space becomes a tourist attraction. Taking into account the many definitions, trying to define the idea of tourism, then I can conclude, that they all somehow speak about a multitude of relations and phenomena that appear due to the migration and sojourn of the people whose primary goal is not permanent residence and full-time employment. However, such definitions, in their generalization, to end blur »drive« of tourism, that is defined into a rental spectacular relation, and hiding within these mutual interrelations: a certain attraction has to visible, it has to repeatedly expose itself for observation, it has to be noticed; for us to watch and observe say that the Americans in the above case replaced the absence of the European historical artefacts by the system of peeping show sensations, where symbolic value does not represent any key importance.

Concept and Reflection of Alternativeness

The formal conceptin of the work that seemed important to me, was based on the following assumptions: The formation of strategy and intervention concept, including commentaries, appropriation of ideas and concepts, and their return back to the cocreators; The realization of the strategy assumed the approaches, nowadays embodied by social alternatives towards the economic crisis: occupy/participate. It is about the choise of topic city location, its analysis, the preparation of the strategy and afterwards its realization, that several occaisons, disregarded the valid regulations.