a l l t h e t i m e i n t h e w o r l d / OSSIFICTION – Miloš Zec
Of Course There Is A Wall, But What Happens Behind It?
In Subotica, the colorful ceramic decorations of engineer Raichle’s former house are a particular attraction for foreigners as they arrive in the city from the railway station. However, this fascinating house is also considered a monument to a long romantic love that inspired the architect Ferenc Raichle to express his romantic longing for the most beautiful woman in Subotica at the time through the patterns and decorations of the house. And about forty years ago, people in Subotica would drink, gamble, and fall in love.
She was known in Subotica as “the beautiful Mrs. Gutmann.” The whole town adored her. Her husband, the wealthy timber merchant Lajos Gutmann, a man of good breeding, calm and kind-hearted, admired his wife and was flattered to hear her spoken of with such admiration. The wealthy, witty, and bohemian architect Raichle was not the only one who fell in love with the charming Jewish beauty. She only befriended her husband in order to spend as much time as possible with him.
And this love awakened in him the ambition to create a work that would also enchant her. He built the house in an original style, with rich and colorful ceramic decorations. The love-stricken architect, however, was not content with just that; he persuaded her husband to build a house next to his own. The two houses were connected by a secret corridor, known only to him and the woman.
The whole town knew about this love triangle, except for the husband, as is often the case, because he trusted her completely. He had no idea that his house and the neighboring one were connected by a secret corridor, and even less that his wife was cheating on him with his best friend.
This strange relationship lasted for several years, until finally someone revealed the secret corridors to the merchant. It all came to an end: the husband surprised the lovers, took his wife away from Subotica, and the engineer sold the house before committing suicide.
Politika newspaper, Tuesday, April 6, 1937
Inhabiting the Space of Desire, A Detective Story
Central to most detective novels is the idea that we leave traces, that physical presence inevitably alters the environment. Walter Benjamin highlights the theme of leaving a trace as fundamental to the evolution of the detective novel:
The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private citizens of the middle class.
Beatriz Colomina, in her essay on the sexuality of architectural spaces, poses the question: if the interior plays such a role in the detective story, what would a detective story about the interior itself look like? A narrative where these traces are examined from various perspectives in an effort to uncover how interior space is created, by what mechanisms it is born, how it integrates into our worldview, and what kind of view it constructs. Is it a controlled view or a view of control? Colomina argues that the tension between interiority and exteriority is embedded in the walls themselves, manifesting in the shifts and adjustments architects make when engaging with traditional forms of representation. Interestingly, she notes, the presence of an observer in the interior is not strictly necessary. Architecture does not merely exist to accommodate a subject who is to be observed; rather, the architectural mechanism actively produces the subject. Architecture precedes the occupant, framing and defining them.
Building upon the discovered interaction between facades, our story further explores the confabulated memories of previous occupants. Its authors, employing active observation and imagination as tools for uncovering unique insights into the space, craft intriguing scenes that captivate the reader’s imagination. Through an examination of these outcomes, we propose that the processes of erasing and inverting traces of habitation can yield alternative narrative entanglements. This interplay unfolds within existing walls, adhering to the linear progression of shifting environments. The fictional tangent of movement through the interior offers a choreographed sequence of controlled perspectives. Readers find themselves entranced as they navigate interwoven rooms, drawn by the warmth of an internal melody, the flickering of light, the crunch of glass and parquet underfoot, and the echo of whispered conversations.
The forensic walk through the Raichle Palace grounds was envisioned as a playful whim—a challenge to traditional architectural anchors, those solid walls that divide spaces. It sought to emphasize the tension between hidden and revealed, private and public, external and internal, forgotten and remembered, bringing them closer and blurring their distinctions. The transformation turned walls from static masses into dynamic spaces—spaces where one can pause and linger, bordered by boundaries as thin as paper. Public spaces unfold within private ones, themselves embedded in the urban fabric. This exploration raised questions about the relationship between the walls and the interiors they encompass. The wall, once enclosing spaces, becomes a space enveloped by other spaces. Simultaneously, established hierarchies and divisions between public, private, and urban domains are disrupted. As one walks among these walls, boundaries shift, bend, rise, and distort; light dances on ceramic and glass ornaments. Movement flows not just along the walls of the structure but also above and beyond them, transcending room boundaries into open realms. The newly forged morphology emerges as a collection of condensed, silent forms that absorb the imprints of past private lives, transmitting their rustling, humming, and murmuring through fragmented whispers. These echoes infuse the architecture with stories of intimacy and transformation, inviting a new way of perceiving and experiencing space. Through the lifeless walls adorned with delicate Pécs ceramics and the elegant rooms of the Raichle Palace, artistic vibrations resonate, trembling and debating, creating a new narrative world that entwines itself with its current visitors in harmony with seductive voices.
In detective novels, homes are often broken into or vandalized, but as the plot unfolds and clues are analyzed, these spaces gradually regain their sense of security or normalcy. In some stories, this disruption may remain unresolved; in others, it might not even truly exist. The protagonists are no longer capable of reshaping their environment as their predecessors once could. The concept of home is dismantled, giving rise to a new, disorienting geography that prompts entirely different questions about the very notion of place.
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The occupation of space is a primordial gesture shared by all living beings—humans, animals, plants, and even clouds. It is a fundamental expression of the relationship between balance and time. The act of claiming space is the first declaration of existence. Clarifying this involves becoming aware of one’s surroundings, reflecting on them, and initiating thought by uncovering and revealing that which typically eludes perception, existing only within its functional dimension. The artistic creation of space is part of processes that produce poetic non-events or indexed presences, and these, in turn, transform into tools and codes for new research strategies and emerging narratives, unfolding within existing formations and established frameworks.
Georges Perec suggests that the spaces of our lives are neither continuous, nor infinite, nor homogeneous, nor immutable:
Do we know exactly where it breaks off, where it curves, where it disconnects and comes together? We confusedly experience cracks, gaps and points of friction, sometimes vaguely aware that something is stuck, that it breaks loose or collides. Though we seldom seek to learn more about it and more often than not, wander from one spot to another, from one space to another, without measuring, without taking into account or considering the course of space. The issue is not to invent space and certainly not to re-invent it (too many well-intentioned individuals are already there to reflect upon our environment…), the problem is rather to question space, or more exactly, to read space; for what we call everydayness is not the obvious, but opacity: a kind of blindness, or deafness, a sort of anesthesia.
Describing in detail the banality of public spaces, common places of daily life, or the repetition of daily routines is neither simple nor practical. What can truly be said about something that has already been accepted as insignificant and trivial? What could possibly be attractive about observing street events that generally offer nothing surprising, exceptional, or authentic? How can we come to appreciate the importance of things so familiar that we no longer notice them?
How do we define everyday life? It surrounds us from all sides, enveloping us completely. We are both inside and outside of it. Can we define everyday life by isolating a small portion of it and describing its seemingly trivial, innocent elements? Henri Lefebvre, in his Critique of Everyday Life, argues that if such a vivid description were possible—one that meticulously traced and brought to light every aspect of everyday life—it would be easy to study and critique it. All it would take would be to capture and emphasize the seemingly insignificant daily details, the repetitive actions, which would expose, through their silence, the full misery and suffering of daily existence. For example… Every day, thousands of women sweep away the dust that has accumulated unnoticed since dawn. After every meal, they endlessly wash plates and pans, again and again. Endlessly, whether by hand or machine, they remove the dirt that has gradually gathered on bed linen and clothing; they mend the holes inevitably caused by the gentle friction of shoe heels; they refill cupboards or fridges emptied of rolls of pasta or kilos of vegetables and fruits…
But, Perec observes, this is exactly how space is constructed: with just words, with symbols drawn on a blank page. The description of space: to name it, to chart it, like the portolans that lined the coastlines with names of ports, headlands, and bays, until the land was separated from the sea by a continuous strip of text… Is the Aleph, Borges’ point from which all the world’s points are visible at once, anything other than the alphabet?
When the Dust Settles (Forewords and Appendices)
In 1962, a French geologist and cave explorer named Michel Siffre spent two months in total isolation in an underground cave, with no access to a clock, calendar, or the sun. He slept and ate only when his body signaled him to, and his aim was to discover how life beyond time affects the natural rhythms of human existence. Over the next decade, Siffre organized more than a dozen similar experiments in isolation before returning to the same cave in Texas in 1972, where he spent 177 days alone, once again completely isolated from the sun and without a watch, listening to his body’s needs. On the thirty-seventh day of the Midnight Cave experiment, Siffre underwent a strange physiological change known as ‘spontaneous internal desynchronisation’. Although he is unaware at the time, his schedule is becoming increasingly irregular. Some days last as long as fifty-two hours, while others are only sixteen hours long. Time itself began to slip away. It seems random, but it’s not. In fact, his body temperature cycle and sleep cycle, which are normally aligned, became disconnected, causing his life to be governed by two competing internal clocks. His work has contributed to the establishment of the field of human chronobiology, the branch of biology that studies cyclical phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar and lunar rhythms. It was discovered as early as 1922 that rats also have an internal biological clock. Siffre’s experiment demonstrated that humans, like lower mammals, also possess an internal biological clock.
Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem an eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.
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In 1987, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted a series of experiments in which she showed men and women a short filmed scene of a bank robbery and asked them to estimate its duration. Participants often overestimated the scene’s length by as much as five times. The subjective experience of the passage of time appears to be highly variable and unpredictable.
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Most people lack a sense of a specific time dimension, that is, a connection to the duration of the great geological epochs in Earth’s history, or to the fundamental timescales of “natural capital.” As a species, we approach the era before our appearance on Earth with almost a childlike indifference and partial disbelief. Without an appetite for narratives that lack human protagonists, many simply cannot engage with natural history.
The Pannonian Sea, for most of its history, was part of the Paratethys Sea, until about 10 million years ago, when a Miocene uplift of the Carpathian Mountains isolated the sea from the rest of Paratethys. During its first historical phase, the Pannonian Sea had a western connection with the Mediterranean Sea through the territories of the modern Ligurian Sea, Bavaria, and Vienna Basin. Through the Đerdap Strait, the Pannonian Sea was linked to the Paratethys in the Wallachian-Pontic Basin. The Pannonian Sea was also attached to the Aegean Sea through the modern Preševo Valley.The Pannonian Sea existed for about 9 million years. Throughout its diverse history the salinity of the sea often shifted. The decrease of salinity resulted in endemic fauna. Eventually, the sea lost its connection to the Paratethys and became a lake permanently (Pannonian Lake). Its last remnant, the Slavonian Lake, dried up in the Pleistocene epoch. The remnants of the former islands of the Pannonian Sea are the modern Pannonian island mountains (Mecsek, Papuk, Psunj, Krndija, Dilj, Fruška Gora, and Vršac Mountains). Despite their location, Lake Balaton and Lake Neusiedl, which appeared during the last 20,000 years, have no relation to the ancient sea.
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DeLillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega opens and closes with an anonymous man watching Douglas Gordon’s 1993 24 Hour Psycho, a film installation in which Hitchcock’s classic is slowed down to take 24 hours to watch. Day after day, the man returns to the museum to watch the same film. With the glacial pace of the projection and the optical effects it allows, he notices details that would otherwise go unnoticed: the movement of Anthony Perkins’ eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets, or the number of frames it takes for the actor to turn his head. As he watches Gordon’s work, he reflects on the vigilance it evokes: The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion. He realizes that the experience of contemplating the work deepens over time: the more time you give it, the more it gives back. Art seems to stand as an exception to the speed-driven principle of 24/7 capitalism—or at least, that’s how we tend to perceive it.
Miloš Zec