Marieta Vulić
Art Academy, Split
The Diocletians 1
Life size print of site-specific installation
Doors, bricks, gold leaves
The preoccupation with space, room and movement inspires me to re-conceptualize this particular space. I came into contact with an art studio at no.1, Dioklecijanova Street in the center of the old town of Split, where I stayed for a while. The recent history of this area is connected with artistic activity, since in 2001 it was allocated by the city the purpose of painting studio and until 2017 it was used for this purpose in its integral form. During 2017 there was a violent, illegal rearrangement of the premises when the door of one of the rooms was literally walled up and it remained closed till my intervention. Built roughly, with bricks, this door remained as a monument to the use of force in the time of great socio-political and cultural changes of a society in transition. Personally, I see this door also as a monument to my personal penetration into the intimate space of someone’s life, a partnership and a concrete person. I decided to gild the roughly lined bricks as well as the old stock to preserve the entire object by restricting the space of the personal and the collective,the past and present, thus creating a monumental image or an intimate monument. The studio at number 1,Diocletian street is a space that created and decomposed me at the same time, space with shelf life. Relationship with shelf life. It has a certain past that I do not want to turn into a narrative,so I leave it aside. With an act of touch, I approach the purification of a space that is partly religious to me and partly hygienic. It is pure deception. I enter where, by the very act of entry, I have been denied access.
