Lubiana Laibach (2021)
Between 1942 and 1945, in an effort to suppress local partisan resistance, the Italian and later German armies garrisoned the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, with a barricade of bunkers and barbed wire. Thirty-three kilometres long, the circular route is marked today by the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship, a public walkway used mostly for recreational purposes, and more than 70 commemorative stones highlighting the position of former bunkers built by the occupying forces. Lubiana Laibach documents these stones as encountered during a single walk of the remembrance trail. Through durational and structural strategies, the film reasserts a politics of looking and listening upon the everyday sites that the path traverses, and seeks ways in which we might understand landscape as a function of history: as the present canvas, that is, through which the past is lived.
Michael Pattison is a film critic from Gateshead. His doctoral thesis, completed at Newcastle University in 2022, investigated through film practice the structural, sequential and durational character of the urban walk. He lives in Hawick, Scotland, where he is a Director of Alchemy Film & Arts, including its flagship annual event Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
Culture Lab Ballroom MSA Conference Newcastle 2023 conference@memorystudiesassociation.orgLubiana Laibach (2021)
Between 1942 and 1945, in an effort to suppress local partisan resistance, the Italian and later German armies garrisoned the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, with a barricade of bunkers and barbed wire. Thirty-three kilometres long, the circular route is marked today by the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship, a public walkway used mostly for recreational purposes, and more than 70 commemorative stones highlighting the position of former bunkers built by the occupying forces. Lubiana Laibach documents these stones as encountered during a single walk of the remembrance trail. Through durational and structural strategies, the film reasserts a politics of looking and listening upon the everyday sites that the path traverses, and seeks ways in which we might understand landscape as a function of history: as the present canvas, that is, through which the past is lived.
Michael Pattison is a film critic from Gateshead. His doctoral thesis, completed at Newcastle University in 2022, investigated through film practice the structural, sequential and durational character of the urban walk. He lives in Hawick, Scotland, where he is a Director of Alchemy Film & Arts, including its flagship annual event Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
