POINT DE VUE BY ANNIBEL CUNOLDI ATTEMS, VENO PILON, EVGEN BAVČAR AND MARKO POGAČNIK
by MARCO MENATO
Vipavski Kriz (the ancient Holy Cross), in the municipality of Ajdovscina, is defined in tourist language as “a small, picturesque walled village, today one of the most beautiful cultural and historical monuments in Slovenia”, nestled in a verdant hilly landscape. There are two cultural and tourist attractions: the castle of fifteenth-century origin built against the Turkish enemy by the last Count of Gorizia, Leonardo, and the beautiful library (25 thousand volumes) of the Capuchin convent, founded in 1637 to combat the spread of Protestantism.
The castle was inhabited by the Counts Attems from 1605 to 1864, the year in which a terrible bora uncovered it, making it uninhabitable. The northern part was purchased in 1885 by the Municipality and used, until today, for school use. Those who enter, crossing a door that no longer exists, find themselves in a square surrounded by tall ruins covered with vines and, on the other side, by the school building: it is quite impressive to enter a castle without a roof and hear the children playing and chasing each other amused and forgetting to be at the center of a small story, which reaches as far as Gorizia.
One of the many events in the official GO!2025 program was the inauguration, on Tuesday 27 May, of the exhibition “Point de vue” within the perimeter of the castle, which had already been the subject of the exhibition “Crossroads between past and future” organized by the Municipality of Gorizia in 2004 on the occasion of Slovenia’s entry into the European Union. Also in this case, the creator of the uncommon installation was the Gorizia artist Annibel Cunoldi Attems, who together with the curator Klavdija Figelj has given life, for the first time, to those empty and abandoned spaces. An operation that might have seemed almost impossible and instead stubbornly Annibel has built a very original visual and graphic path, sensitive to the light and colors of time, given that the installation will last until December 31, 2025. His writings are the inscriptions (a genre for which she is now known in much of Europe, on the imaginary line Gorizia – Berlin – Copenhagen – Paris, on this characteristic I refer to no. 119 p. 44 of “Isonzo Soca”) and the photograph of a detail of the Roman Ara Pacis, in which she added, however, a red sign, to warn the visitor that he is not in front of a normal photographic reproduction of a distant original, but to an artistic transposition from one place (Rome) to another, precisely Vipavski Kriz, where Roman colonization also arrived.
The writings in a composite language (Slovenian, German, Italian and English), in capital letters placed on mirrored surfaces at the bottom and therefore easily legible, intersect in the manner of puzzles: “Reflex Zeit 2025”, “Cross Vision Energie”, “Idea Energija Kriz”, recall both the past and the energy that must come from today’s activism (we really hope that it is the beginning of a new age for the castle!). A fourth, solitary, in French, with a different character, “Tout voir tout savoir”, appears on a photograph of Prague Castle and is placed at the height of the Ara Pacis.
Inside the empty windows on the opposite side of the school, four colored photographs by Evgen Bavcar, a Slovenian ‘conceptual artist’ and philosopher living in Paris, but originally from a town not far from here, emphasize infinitesimal details of the same spaces, but what is surprising is that the photographer has been blind since the age of twelve due to war, So his is not photography in the strict sense, but it is a memory and a search for the heart of the image, which has remained hidden in his brain. Marko Pogacnik, sculptor and architectural historian at various European universities (including Venice), presents a granite sculpted, or perhaps it would be better to say ‘engraved’, inside an octagon placed inside a tower in memory of a centuries-old cedar felled just outside the castle walls (the explanation, which originates from geomancy, is on a sign in Slovenian and English). The absentee is the
Making the modern coexist in the ancient, appreciating both in the same way, indeed reviewing the ancient almost with new eyes, was a winning bet, which I hope will be repeated again, in a place that is surrounded by mysterious charm. The only lie is not so much the wait for the catalog that will be released soon, but the absence of a simple leaflet, while admitting that the basic information is on a trilingual sign (Slovenian, Italian and English) that says everything in a few words: “Four artists present themselves, each deeply linked to this place, with a marked European dimension”. It is, in fact, a “point de vue” (point of view), as solemnly stated at the entrance to the Attems coat of arms, revisited by Annibel Cunoldi Attems whom I thank for her passionate and cultured guidance.