Half Of It

A short reflection on Rosenheim that never was and never will be

The place I choose to present is Ružinov. My neighbourhood in Bratislava. I lived there with my parents. Both pairs of my grandparents lived there. My mind went to this place immediately. No question. But I immediately got stuck on the phrase ‘worth visiting’. I don’t think Ružinov is worth visiting per se. It’s an ambivalent suburb in a torn up post-communist city. It’s not particularly beautiful, not particularly dangerous, not particularly remote, not particularly representative of anything. The son and heir to nothing in particular. Its audience are only its inhabitants. And maybe someone doing research on a very dull subtly dystopian novel with an interest in soviet-adjacent architecture and the lives of humans of late capitalism in a post-socialist state. If you wanted to go there, it would mean you already know it is there, you know what it means, you know the connotations, context, history. Or you just got very mystically lost.

For all intents and purposes, Ružinov is not a destination. Its somewhere you either unarguably always are, where you randomly appear or very improbably a place you seek out on the basis of a deeply rooted obsession in some curious detail of its existence after being let in on a series of unravelling dark but simultaneously banal secrets. Much like a family. You either are a member by default/birth, you happen to become one by the hand of fate or you worm yourself in, because something commands you that it is the key to some obscure ambition you are led by. You don’t visit a family you do not know of. There is simply no connection there. No reason. No pull. Unless you get invited by an outlandish family member. That would be probably me in this case. I figured that for Ružinov to be feasibly visit-able I would have to explicitly invite you to come to / for / with me.

Coming for me is a special case. My mother always asks me if my romantic interests came to visit me in Ružinov or are planning to do so. If not, she deems these relationships to be clearly doomed. She is always right. But even the options of coming to and with me require a certain amount of value to be placed by you on my respective invitation. Since Ružinov itself as an unknown entity holds no intrinsic value. It is its ‘family’ connection to/through me that gives it body in relation to you. This also implies that I must place a specific type of value on my relationship to you for you to be invited – our relationship must be of a certain quality. As with family, I would not invite just about anyone to meet them. So, I decide if you are ‘worth’ of visiting Ružinov and you in turn decide if Ružinov is ‘worth’ visiting for you. There is no way around this negotiation. It might be a little bit precarious, but I consider it to be fair and human.

The material I have chosen to use for my presentation is material I have already had in my possession / collection. I have decided not to generate or gather new material for the purpose of the presentation, since that would in my mind imply that I would be looking to sell / over-interpret Ružinov. I would like to present Ružinov as I see it for myself, not as I see it for others. Through a very personal but borderline banal lens. This does not exclude a poetic perspective. Thus, the visual material I have selected for the presentation consist mainly of lo-fi photography and video that I have made at various times purely for the pleasure of doing so. These materials reflect a slowly and aimlessly wandering eye, which occasionally lands on an object / image / movement of interest but does not attempt to explain or expand upon this interest. It is an expression of an observer in their natural habitat, wanting to see exactly what they are seeing. I am not sure if this calmness and satisfaction with seemingly uninteresting or outright ugly surroundings, which present themselves in an everyday, stable, silent manner is a feeling that can be transferred to others, but I would at least like to try to make it visible.

Another kind of visual material I intend to use in my presentation are archive photos from my personal collection that depict Ružinov from the fifties through to the eighties. Even though I do not remember Ružinov like this myself, the collective memory of my immediate family and my community of this era was very formative of my perception of this place and a big influence on my sensibilities and aesthetic. In these photos you can see that large expanses of houses, parks and other public buildings and spaces were systematically constructed in the middle of nowhere. This artificial quality of a mass utilitarian monument that is slowly becoming overgrown by actual human and non-human life and activity and the emergent everyday organic creativity of the people who inhabit and transform it plays a big role in my life. I find it both inspirational and daunting. I would like to convey both the violence and tenderness that is contained in large groups of people being ‘put’ to live in a place that has been thoroughly designed – not a natural expansion of the cities body.

I would also like to share in some form my uncertainty of why this place became such a focal point in my identification as a person and an artist. I suspect it has to do with leaving it and with aspects that formed my understanding of the place itself disappearing. It might also be interesting to mention that my perception of my hometown not only this neighbourhood is of a city which has ceased to be. Long before I was even born. When describing this city to people I often say it has the atmosphere of a place through which the apocalypse swept years ago but nobody seemed to care, and they carry on as they always have. In my presentation I would like to invest into exploring this notion of leaving a place which has already a rich history of leaving itself and leaving me and the kind of relationship and movement within it such a premise creates as well as the layers of possibly coming back to a place that either disappeared or never even existed. Even a chat-bot once told me: Bratislava is only in your dreams.