Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Luka Skansi
Space,
Magic, and Remembrance. Genealogy of an Initiation to Contemplation
The great
architects of the anti-fascist and war monuments and memorials in Yugoslavia
– Bogdan Bogdanović, Zdenko Kolacio, and Edvard Ravnikar –,
dedicate to the relationship between ‘primitivism’, abstraction,
and spatial relationism, a substantial part of their career, both professional
and theoretical.
Kolacio
dedicates theoretical studies to Stonehenge, to the tradition of the dolmens
and menhirs, subsequently interpreting them in his works in a contemporary key.
Ravnikar try to merge in his monuments the Neolithic art of the Balkan
civilisations with oriental art and that of Max Bill and Henry Moore, working
on highly refined spatial tensions between objects, paths, and places.
Bogdanović, who focuses all his creativity on the search for mythologems,
figures, forms, and archetypal languages, capable of creating the first
elements of the new Yugoslav revolutionary culture, will look at the tradition
of the Neolithic and Etruscan necropolises as with Sumerian, Hittite, and
Egyptian sculpture.
In this
context, Zdenko Sila’s memorial dedicated to twenty-six frozen partisans
and the memorial of Tićan were designed to incite ‘magic of a
secular ecstasy’, through this particular symbolic and spatial link with
nature (the eternal), and with the experience of the meaning of death (memory).
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