The work explores three events dramatically inscribed into the physical and mental space of the city – the devastating earthquake that struck Zagreb in March 2020, the unresolved crash of a Soviet military drone in March 2022, and the downfall of the media giant Vjesnik, liquidated and finally vacated in 2023, with its former printing complex now housing the KONTEJNER exhibition and performance venue.
Different in time scales (minutes, years, thousands of years) and spatial scales (architectural, urban, territorial), these three falls share one distinct characteristic. They all remained undetected until the moment of their final, dramatic excess—an explosive crash leaving a deep crater in the ground, in the urban and social environment. The installation Three Falls deals with the tension between silent durations and moments of loud excess, a string of micro-events creating a smooth topology that unexpectedly folds and collapses under its geological, historical, and political weight. Designed as a sonic Möbius strip, the topology of the triple fall is recreated in-situ at KONTEJNER venue. The sound used to create this topology rearticulates and deforms both spatial and temporal coordinates, with the three historic falls serving as sound sources.
Seismic data from the Zagreb earthquake is sonified and plays on transducer speakers attached to the glass windows of the gallery. The most fragile part of the Vjesnik building resonates with the tectonic force of a 5.5 Richter magnitude.
Spatial data from the military drone flight is transformed into a sound groove, engraved into debris found in the Vjesnik complex. The “black box record” created in this process plays a track of an explosive move across the complex geopolitical territory.
Buzzing sounds of the Vjesnik infrastructure running out of control are transmitted by parabolic speakers in the exhibition space. The parables amplify the afterlife of the massive architecture that lost the capacity to articulate and transmit meaning, now producing only noises with no recognizable patterns.
The collapse of Vjesnik signifies not merely the last chapter of post-socialist disintegration but also the final collapse of the McLuhanian universe. At a time when “the model became the message,” McLuhan’s original phrase has become an emptied historical artifact. The exhibition treats the architecture of the fallen media giant as a bare medium, and its debris as a material surface for inscribing events as raw data, equally unreadable to humans and machines. Offering no singular meaning or forensic exactitude, the exhibition soundscape folds time and space, politics with geological processes and planetary warfare, into an affective catastrophe playing in endless, irregular loops. Instead of daily newspapers, the installation becomes a damaged black box playing the soundtrack of “now”.
The work was presented in a solo exhibition at KONTEJNER, from June 20 to July 13, 2024.
Damir Prizmić (HR)
Damir Prizmić is a designer and researcher working in the expanded field of exhibition design and interaction, visual communication, product design, concepts, and tools. He graduated from the School of Design of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb. He created numerous exhibition setups and projects displayed in group and solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. He is a co-founder and vice president of Radiona (makerspace/hackerspace), an internationally renowned association for the development of open-source and DIY culture based on connecting art, science, and technology. Within Radiona, Prizmićc is involved in educational and artistic projects, research processes, curatorial practices, international and domestic intersectoral collaborations, renewable systems, and DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIWO (do-it-with-others) media practices.
Nikola Bojić (HR)
Nikola Bojić is an artist and curator exploring the relationships between space, technology, and the future. He graduated in Art History and Museology at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, and completed his postgraduate master's studies at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His projects have been presented at Kunsthalle Baden Baden, the Taipei Biennial, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Venice Architecture Biennial, and the Milan Design Triennial, among others. He was a doctoral student at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb and a visiting lecturer at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P/ACT, with Gediminas Urbonas). The topic of his PhD dissertation dealt with the problem of the production of space. Currently, he is an affiliated researcher at MIT, and teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
Damir Gamulin (HR)
Damir Gamulin is a designer and researcher working across different media and spatial scales. He graduated from the School of Design of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Zagreb. Gamulin develops solutions in graphic design, interfaces, media environments, spatial graphics, interior design and furniture, as well as complex interpretative spatial solutions. His projects typically focus on developing complex design methods, thus expanding design practice to other fields. He has received numerous professional awards, including the Grand Prize of the Croatian Designers Association, the Grand Prize of the 52nd Zagreb Salon, the "Neven Šegvić" and the "Bernardo Bernardi" Croatian Association of Architects (UHA) Awards, the "Vladimir Nazor" Award, and the Judges Choice recognition from the NY Type Directors Club.
Miodrag Gladović (HR)
Miodrag Gladović is a multimedia artist, musician and composer. He graduated in Electroacoustics from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb. His work combines engineering knowledge, punk, contemporary artistic aesthetics and DIY ethics, which over the past two decades has established him as one of the most prominent figures in the Croatian contemporary art scene, both as a solo artist and as part of the artistic duo Lightune.G. Through numerous collaborations and innovative original projects in the field of sound art, Gladović has gained international recognition, creating significant installations and performances at the biennials in Kaunas and Wroclaw, at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His transdisciplinary projects and sound performances include works such as "Luminoakustika – Lighterature Reading", music-theatre works such as "Konačno mrtav", collaborations with the STICRI and Chimeres Orchestras, spatial resonant systems like "The Lymen Cycle", and various project works for the Music Salon, Kaunas and WRO Biennials, the Goethe Institute, and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival that have been regularly awarded and presented at international festivals and exhibitions. He received a special recognition at the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture for the project "Intermundia", in collaboration with the author and curator Ana Dana Beroš. His innovations in sound and visual art have been acknowledged with numerous awards, including Third Prize at the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, the Audience Award at the T-HT exhibition at MSU, and Second Prize for the conceptual design of the Croatian Pavilion for the EXPO.
