TLO, (Soil) 2022

Virtual museum Dotrščina, Zagreb

 

... Few things can be as offensive as the soil of a site of execution. It pulsates suffering. Each stone is marked by the fact that upon it lay or are still laying under it innocent victims of crime. This ground is paced with veneration that can find expression in various forms of socially responsible representation. The content and form of this veneration – what is sought for in the ground and for which reasons, and thereafter what and how commemoration (or not) is conducted – are amongst the surest symptoms of the state of any community. The fact, for example, that the entire effort of the Republic of Croatia to commemorate the victims of WWII is focused on victims of the communist regime and the victimisation of fascists, or that the locality of the concentration camp Slana on the island of Pag remains unmarked and relinquished to trekking tourism, bear witness of the course our society has opted to follow …

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… The work, bears witness to this in an unobtrusive but exceptionally impressionable manner, conducted by the sample scanning method of 'dotršćansko' soil and vegetation remains. In the Kabalin pavilion, the work is presented in script in a larger format, freely hanging from a wooden pole, and a small library, i.e., a photo essay, the artist's book hanging from one of the tripod elements of the pavilion. Even though the larger element of the work catches the attention of the observer at first, its function is more that of a sign, a visual anticipation of what is to be met within the library: black and white prints, photos at a near abstract level with barely recognisable organic forms, which, at their very best, just suggest their origins. Evading traditional photography, Opalić refuses to present the observer with an aesthetically sublime character of the ambience, which is a common problem of art-photography documentation of such sites of execution. Her scans neither document nor present in the ordinary sense. Quite the opposite, it is exactly this unrecognizability of forms, and impossibility to ' divulge' that make it so suggestive …

 

Lujo Parežanin for vizkultura.hr