SPACE IN MOVEMENT, WITH PLEČNIK

To think of Plečnik in the context of community

In Plečnik’s year of 2022, students of the Faculty of Science and Technology in Ljubljana researched how Plečnik’s work can be seen, viewed, understood, thought about and recognized in the context of the community.

With the support of all kinds of electronic devices, visual viewing with rapidly transmitted data can be a great burden and a test for artistic thinking and viewing. Aware of all the quick impulses, the students of the Faculty of Science and Technology in Ljubljana, together with their mentor, tried to freeze, stop and focus their gaze and contemplate the work of Jože Plečnik in their creative time. These were Plečnik’s building of the Department of Textiles, Graphics and Design on the west side with the Roman Wall and on the corner with the Stara tekhnika building. Along with architectural creations, they did not forget his projects, in which he himself also undertook book and typographic planning in the field of graphic research and study. Over the course of three weeks, the students and their mentor prepared diverse narratives and insights into Plečnik’s work, and the results appeal to a youthful and experimental narrative, with which young people tell the story of space with the complementary component that art always includes, time.

The last few years have offered us quite a few definitions and opportunities on how to think about, and above all, how to implement community. Each individual, with his own path, is part of the community, which is mapped out for us by institutions from an early age, where liberation is never self-evident and must be opened up in the most creative ways in contexts of confinement and limitation. Part of eliminating such limitations is also an in-depth study that allows us to move from an internal to an external space, and above all, to carefully monitor the events that the transition between spaces offers.

This transition between outside and inside was also examined by the authors in the Basics of Artistic Expression course. Expression has multifaceted ways of conveying information, and in the visual expression, even if it seems that we have said everything with it, we face the unknown of how our work will be read by someone else, who also enters with us into the most diverse space of representation and memory. The starting point for the basic expression of the present works was the works of Jože Plečnik. Plečnik, whom we think we know everything about, offered the authors a reflection in four sessions, and above all, they took the time with their mentor to carefully read his work in micro-communities. If there is one thing we don’t lack in modern societies, it is time and the very original excuse that there is no time for this and that. Plečnik created without excuses, selflessly and with clear goals. As architecture in its bounded or open space contains the time of design, the time of construction and the time of use, video became the right medium that, through the narration of a narrative, can vividly include this artistic temporal variable as well. Time has changed the perception of an architect’s work, and authors have resurrected, depicted, and articulated the work in different ways. Either through form, content narration, social and societal issues, education and illustration.

The starting image of the architecture offered a creative consideration for the auditory basis of the video document. This segment shows great consideration and creative ingenuity. How the sounds of the Ljubljanica river, the bustle of the city or the crumpling of paper can offer new associations that sometimes support the artwork, and other times tells its own story parallel to it. These built communities offer us an insight into the time the authors spent with Plečnik in mind. And in his works, which we have internalized and which sometimes seem to us that we will no longer discover anything new in them, we discover new things, and above all, through the screen and camera of a telecommunications device, we establish a dialogue with the wider community, which is celebrating Plečnik’s year in 2022.

Mentor: Assoc. Boris Beja

The student works were created on the basis of a public competition for a short film about Plečnik’s architecture, which was published by the Museum of Architecture and Design.

Video dela / Videos:

Taja Atelšek, David Ahmentović, Manca Blatnik, Lea Lavrenčič – Žale skozi okvir / Žale Trough a Frame – 2:50
Ana Grobelnik, Lara Sudar, Eli Kniewald, Maša Podvez – Mali človek Šentjakob / Little Person Šentjakob – 2:14
Eva Benedičič, Tosja Macedoni, Jakob Benjamin Horvat, Kementina Peternel – Oni za nas on za nijh – We for Us Him for Them – 2:29
Tara Baumgarten, Lara Skubic, Nina Starman Gombač, Laura Vitežnik – Začarani krog / A vicious circle – 2:59
Jan Simončič, Marko Verdnik, Martin Prosen, Nejc Kregar in Žan Omers – Plečnikova Ljubljana / Plečnik’s Ljubljana – 2:58
Marusa Pozar, Valentina Šuligoj, Lucija Pintar, Urska Bernot – Plečnik’s Antique Ljubljana – 2:51