THE DISAPPEARED MOSQUE; FROM THE BIENNALE TO THE RUINS OF CIVILIZATION

by FRANCO JURI

“Sound track of an invisible house”; this is the title of the project that the artistic research collective Nonument Group has set up in the Slovenian pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2026. It is a multimedia installation that takes its cue – evoking a sepia-colored memory, now faded over time – from a particular wooden building, temporarily built in 1917, at the foot of Mount Mangart in the Julian Alps, close to today’s Italian-Slovenian border. The building was a small mosque, built in that strip of Alpine land in the middle of the “Great War” for the spiritual and religious needs of Bosnian Muslim soldiers in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian army. Not far from there, in Vršič, between 1915 and 1916, Russian (but also Ukrainian) prisoners of war, engaged in work on the road on the pass of the same name, had built, again in wood, an Orthodox chapel which later – after an avalanche had buried and killed dozens of those prisoners – took on a profoundly commemorative value, becoming, in 2015, a monument to the victims of war and a symbolic reminder of the Pan-Slavic brotherhood. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the traditional annual celebrations at the Russian chapel in Vršič, which saw the punctual participation of Slovenian and Russian state and religious leaders, have officially stopped. The small religious building is still in place, while the mosque under the Mangart disappeared after the arrival of Italian troops and the annexation of that part of Slovenia to the Kingdom of Italy. Of that almost surreal image, the exotic building with minaret among the alpine pastures, only a few old photos, a few postcards and some remains of the stone foundations hidden in the grass remain, now documented by the artists who at the biennial evoke, even with sound clips, a memory recovered from oblivion but always terribly current. The Nonument Group collective, formed by Neja Tomšič, Martin Bricelj Baraga, Nika Grabar and Miloš Kosec, does not address the memory of that mosque in pathetic terms, but by denouncing the wars and the religious and political instrumentalizations that accompany and exacerbate them. It was certainly not do-goodism or a spirit of religious tolerance – the authors say – that inspired the military leaders who allowed, during the war under Mangart, but also elsewhere in Europe, the construction of religious buildings that were not suitable for the Christian majority of soldiers in the trenches. But the Bosnian units of the Austro-Hungarian army, like the Moroccan or Tunisian ones, framed in the French army, were tactically very important for the generals for war purposes and therefore had to be comforted, before death, also spiritually. With regard to the idea that materialized in the Venetian Arsenal, the curator of the Slovenian pavilion Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, in an interview for the newspaper Delo, reminds us that we are once again surrounded by inhuman destruction and catastrophic climate and civilizational crises, so we must always talk about it, insistently and everywhere. The Nonument Group collective, starting from a specific story told by several voices and locally framed, conveys its global message; the ruins as a metaphor for an assiduous search for human dignity among the rubble of civilization.

Slovenian artists do not beat around the bush, and even before filling the pavilion with memories of the small Alpine mosque, they have pointed the finger at wars, in particular, on the blatantly genocidal one in Gaza, and on the indifference and complicity of the so-called democratic West. They also did so by signing an appeal in March together with two hundred other international artists for the exclusion of Israel from the biennial, in a climate already heated by the Ukrainian protests against the invitation to Russia and after Ursula Von der Leyen’s European Commission, the international jury – which later resigned – and partially also the Italian government, had expressed their opposition to the participation of Russian artists in the Venetian event. However, the jury had also requested the exclusion of Israel, proposing as a criterion for this decision the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for statesmen guilty of war crimes. But Israel, like the rest of the United States, for the European Commission should not be problematized at all, despite the fact that they have unleashed a war of civilizations and oil from Iran to Lebanon that is putting the whole planet in serious crisis, and Tel Aviv continues to perpetrate genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. The president of the biennial Pietrangelo Buttafuoco did not bend and finally decided to cut the bull’s head, excluding any ban on participation, even the Russian one. “The Venice Biennale is not a court,” he ruled. Israel is represented at the biennial by Romanian-born sculptor Belu-Simion Fainaru, who has taken pains to accuse Slovenian artists of anti-Semitism and of being financed by nothing less than Islamic Jihad.

Slovenia, one of the EU states that have recognized Palestine and accused Israel of genocide, has long been in the crosshairs of Benjamin Netanyahu, who supports his ally Janez Janša, a former communist leader of the Slovenian far right. In the recent election campaign in Slovenia, the SDS (Slovenian Democratic Party), Janša’s party, was helped by the Black Cube, a secret Israeli mercenary agency, founded by (former) agents of the Mossad and the IDF, with the tasks of espionage, manipulation, misdirection and denigration of politicians linked to governments not friendly to Israel with the dissemination of compromising videos and wiretaps. The agents of Black Cube had in fact met with Janez Janša, between Ljubljana and Tel Aviv, on several occasions. Result; the center-left lost the elections, and the center-right, while not winning them, put together a coalition and a minority government obtaining the external support of Resnica (Truth) a small anti-political, anti-vax, anti-tax and, in the early days, even anti-Janša populist “anti-system” populist movement, led by Zoran Stevanović, a former policeman and former member of the far-right SNS (Slovenian National Party) party of Zmago Jelinčič. Resnica entered parliament as the last party thanks to the votes of the angriest voters. In an unprecedented twist in the Slovenian parliamentary tradition, and thanks to the votes of the centre-right, the gymnastic, arrogant and rhetorically verbose Stevanović was appointed president of the Chamber of State. Janša and his allies (the Christian People’s Democrats of Jernej Vrtovec and the small party of Anže Logar, tactically exited the SDS, but now de facto returned to the fold) therefore have the votes to govern, and many are worried whether this will also imply a radical change in Slovenia’s international politics. Probably yes. Janša, who does not hide that he openly supports the policies of Trump and Netanyahu, has in fact declared during the election campaign that he wants to move the Slovenian embassy to Jerusalem and liquidate the recognition of Palestine as soon as possible.

This, in short, is the political framework that is calling into question all the effort made so far by civil society, intellectuals, artists, pacifists, humanitarian activists, center-left politics and even the President of the Republic Nataša Pirc Musar, to place Slovenia on what the progressive world defines as the right side of history.

In protest against the genocide in Gaza and the persistence of the Israeli presence at the “European” song festival, strongly sponsored by Israel, Slovenian public TV canceled its participation in Eurovision, broadcasting instead of the music festival a series of documentaries, films, debates and insights dedicated to Gaza, Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now even the fate of the Slovenian public television company – mindful among other things of the nefarious experience in the previous Janša mandate – now seems sealed.

In this annus terribilis even at the Arsenale in Venice the art of the Biennale seems to meet the ruins of civilization. But we know it well; Neither art nor poetry can change history and the world, especially if vulgar men who hate both art and verse dominate. Who hate humanity. They can then only make us understand them better.