"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.

Igor Španjol