Marina Grzinic                                                                                                            DEUTSCHE VERSION
Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana
Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts,  Vienna

Rethinking space(s)
The following text is based on the conversation about spaces and voids that I had with Clemens Krauss in Graz as part of the guided tours through selected galleries within the project   “Aktuelle  Kunst in Graz”, January  2003. I talked with Krauss  while he was working on the project  “toponymics” for Graz 2003 – Cultural Capital of Europe. Krauss project was about the process of a possible renaming of the Main Square of the city of Graz that bears a name of  “Hauptplatz,” that means literally “Main Square” of the city of Graz.
From the conversion that took place is symptomatically, if not very suspicious, that something that is embedded with such a historical past – “Main Square”  was bearing the name of Adolf Hitler as part of its Austrian Nazi historical past – is having today the most abstract and general name: “Main Square”. After the Second  World War the square was re-named with a pure abstraction, that can be seen as a process of producing a  void or an amnesia of the historical condition of production(s) of such a place.
The abstraction is a process of voiding within space and time, it is a process of evacuation of memory and of disintegration of history.
As was  told in a  lecture by Marjetica Potrc, architect and sculptor  from Ljubljana, (at her solo presentation at the Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana  in March 2000),  it is possible to detect in the old historical city centers (in Ljubljana, but as well in Munster, Vienna, Munchen, and GRAZ etc.),  the so called empty zones or voids –  complex structures of empty buildings, or areas in the city without the HISTORICAL IDENTIFIED PAST; past that is part of the city  map location.
This is the case also with  the name of the main square in Graz. It is a name that bears in the process of  its naming a perplex voidness. The name of the main square in Graz  is in fact a repetition of a general name of such  square(s) everywhere in the world.   With such a repetition we get a “surplus” meaning. But as it is known the surplus meaning (the tautological repetition) is in the most of the cases the way of hiding the meaning. The surplus meaning means that is no meaning or  that it is  too much of the meaning attached to a certain space that must be therefore  hidden.
The truth of the main square in Graz is that this square was  connected in the past with the Hitler’s  Nazi “occupation” of Austria. It is  a traumatic truth behind this square that it  tries nowadays to escape with its empty naming!  Instead of a specific name it bears an  abstraction of a meaningful meaning. The name “main square”  is therefore a  process of  a  certain architectural /urbanistic purification; this is the sign  of  the most upgrading  historical and inter (intercultural) geographical amnesia; this process forgets  things, places, facts, structures.
In the cities, especially  in the so called  historical  cities of  the old humanistic Europe, these zones, these voids are not only generated and produced, but also very skillfully hidden by city authority. Naming is the process of hiding! The empty zones or I called them a-topical city topos  or voids are not located (they are a-located locations)  in the official maps of the city; they are generalized,  as they exist in an invisible way, erased from the historical  maps  and memories of the city. The city administration feels ashamed  and at the same time terrified by these voids  and their meaning in the contemporary  formless forms of  the city.
Krauss asked: Would you designate the "main square" itself as an a-located location or only the empty name as a void?
My answer is: it is  both! A-located is the negation of location; it is a location that is not grounded in a historical context and which is avoiding its historical past with a process of an empty naming. This a-location is a process of producing a certain void, that is in fact full of historical and social (traumatic) meaning.
The same although  opposite  process is going on in the so called Third world,  in South America, Africa, etc. The favelas  in Latin America, for example  in Brazil, present wildly  growing  periphery city  zones without  formal structures or of any kind of infrastructures;  but the favelas are those which bring and generate meaning for real life, with their almost baroque rest of dirtiness  and wildly organized existentiality. The  processes of proliferation  of the favelas are similar to cancer’s   methastasing processes of uncontrolled forms in the space, connected  with deregulated infrastructures or no structures; they are the new  zones of meaning, errors, battles of surviving and entropy.
So we can detect a process, as it is in the case of  the project of re-naming the “main square in Graz,” that  has a lot to do with re-location and  re-articulation of the voids in the  urban space(s). According to Mary Jane Jacob – an American critic and theorist, who wrote in the nineties an exhaustive study on public art in Chicago,  with special emphasis on the activity of the Sculpture Chicago organization and its last project Culture in Action – I can argue  that the new urban monument within the specific city context has changed and it is increasingly assuming the image of a  movement. It is a trajectory from the passive arrangement of buildings in the public environment  to a processes of living through  and producing of (also of  re-naming)  that  can be coined, referring to Mary Jane Jacob, as “Culture in Action.”
The  mentioned process  does not construct eternal buildings (in the Eternal City),  but movements and environments, and, what is most important, the re-instatement and re-definition of categories as public/agents/actors/survivors.
The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola speaks of simultaneity and transition  in space, where these projects are not hierarchically and temporally arranged and finalized. Even more we move from physical to  the mental structured space and then as on a Moebius strip we find ourselves in the traumatically real, socio-political urban places within the society.