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Text/Interviews |
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Trieste
is our!
Igor Španjol
[SLO] |
"We
will give up our lives, but we will not give up Trieste!"
- After World War II ended, this was the slogan which the
partisans chanted when they were making their way into the
outskirts of the city, ultimately remained part of Italy due
to a political agreement. The slogan took on a somewhat ironic
meaning in the following decades in light of the masses of
shopping tourists from all parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Because of the advent of liberal capitalism after Slovenia
declared independence, this kind of excursions have become
less attractive for Slovenian consumers, even though we still
do like to go and have the odd nostalgic coffee in Trieste.
All these years, we have lived in a sort of "marriage
of interest" and we have not really been aware of the
multiplexity of all the attractions that the city has to offer.
Ironically speaking, we could say that we have in fact been
testing the formula of the project of the European Union.
In his artistic production, Janez Janša, an Italian artist
who moved from Italy to Slovenia soon after it declared its
independence, draws from the subject of life with all its
existential, biotechnological and bodyartistic aspects.
In his last video, he took a look at Trieste as a metaphor
for his own life experience, marked by the interweaving of
culture and identity.
Janša reveals the codes of the city's multi-cultural
political reality in the seemingly innocent form of the forty-second
video clip, reminiscent of the tourist panoramic greeting
cards taken from MTV and the Travel Channel. The rapidly-edited
view of the video camera, oversaturated with content, moves
from the more or less characteristic architectural forms and
urban outfitting, recognizable houses and cars (such as the
legendary Fiat 500) to the provocative graffiti and menacing
political messages (such as the poster for the occasion of
Mussolini's birthday on the main thoroughfare of Trieste,
Viale XX Settembre).
Janša's mosaic of signs is a complex structure, interweaving
and connecting in different directions. The architectural
and societal harbingers of multiculturalism are accentuated
by shots of modern-day global migrations in the video.
Janša deals with concrete political connotations contained
within urban visual messages in a sober and ruthless manner.
His own position on life allows him to have a dispassionate
and relativistic view, which, however, is not neutral. In
place of the false dilemma of taking either of the two sides,
Janša opts for an informed and involved position, uncontaminated
by the traps of local positions. Some might perhaps call this
"art without frontiers," but personally, I prefer
to see this as a safari range between the social and territorial
look on the one side and the political reality on the other.
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