Embracing speechlessness – how to deal with the Political School in Kumrovec in a sense-inciting manner

My master’s thesis is imbued by the desire to contribute to the elaboration of a new way of dealing with the architectural heritage of socialist Yugoslavia. Once the buildings and memorials used to be legitimised by the informing ideology, but they fell mute with the absence of their directing superstructure, which was annulled by the destructive years of war in the 90s. The resulting trauma leads to a swelling of the muteness, culminating in speechlessness and being deprived of any possibility of articulation. In order to grant credibility to the way of dealing with the heritage, one will have to embrace the speechlessness. I am interested in a domestication of speechlessness. By this I do not mean a taming, as the term might suggest immediately, but I understand it as the human endeavour or desire to feel at home in the present. A present that, as Valerio Olgiati and Markus Breitschmid notice, lacks ubiquitous and long-lasting ideologies and values, capable of subsuming us as a collective. They call this condition of our world the non-referential and they confront it with a demand for ideas that incite sense. The domestication of speechlessness is longing for this impotence to be considered within our endeavour to feel at home in the non-referential world.

My master’s thesis focuses on the Political School in Kumrovec, in the northwest of Croatia. In socialist Yugoslavia aspiring politicians were educated there. Today this building is vacant and numerous attempts to sell it were made, but they all failed. Choosing the former Political School I want to contribute to a sense-inciting way of dealing with it. This calls for an attempt that contributes in a poetic way, being capable of sensing the shores of speechlessness. I do not expect this approach to provide solutions, but it should be a fertile ground nourishing our need for sense.