The Price of Dwelling

Once nature runs its course, things man made tend to become other. What at one point housed beings, things, services has, over time, lost its capacity to contain or facilitate and welcomes the actualization of chaotic potentialities. What once housed—a home, a stable, a workshop, a warehouse, a factory, a logistics center—is made undone. It is difficult to observe such unraveling. Its process is obscured by the durational conditions that one’s mortal gaze cannot meet. It can be recorded, however—captured by trace.

Dwellings in Machinic Passages (2025)² by Ema Maznik Antić and Maks Bricelj is an artefact of recording. It used to be a machine when the process of capture was at its most active, now it is a quiet reminder. In its material form, the project consists of a sculptural installation as a site-specific work that entangles the intricacies of the former Prvomajska Factory, one of the several official venues of the 5th Industrial Art Biennial 2025 in Raša;³ the installation is accompanied by an audio recording prepared by the artists whose functions is that of an artwork and audio guide, situating the occasional dweller in its newly inhabited environment and acquainting them with the spatial figures that once occupied and now symbolically co-constitute the appropriated space of Prvomajska.

The sculptural installation is centrally positioned in a somewhat dilapidated room of the abandoned factory. It stands as a composite construction of various planks and wooden cutouts bound together by metal rods. Its larger rectangle body consists of rows of aforementioned parts that together as much resemble mechanic components like the crankshaft of an engine as they do communal furnishing like traditional church pews. While at its side stands a medium-sized mill-or fan-like construction, the installation appears immobilized, as if disassembled and ready for transport, a transport that was at one point planned for but was somehow abandoned, either due to time or monetary constraints. It rests in an aesthetic and functional consistency with the rest of the space, blending in with its various textures and color palettes seemingly modified by the passing of an undetermined amount of time. As such, it mimics the environment’s dual character, being both the product of the various efforts and activities of man that made it and the environmental forces that surround it.

The audio guide orients the newcomer to the space that has grown unaccustomed to the presence of human kind. It consists of 11 chapters that explain the layout of the space, the artistic additions to the space (i.e. the installation and the role and rules of the audio guide), as well as the conceptual and atmospheric figures that are symbolically embedded in the space and connect the two. These figures are: the worker, the urban explorer, the ruin gazer, the witness, peak experience, the carnival, and the prey. The aim of the audio guide is to help the newcomer with what the artists describe as attunement to the space, a becoming-like transformation whose end goal is to eventually reach “site loyalty”—a proximity to the environment, “a wish to remain close” that merges the self with the environment or causes the lines between the two to blur.

In this regard, the project as a whole functions as much as its own unique material presence and dweller of the space as the genealogical untangling of the environment’s core atmospheric and affective components. It foregrounds the ruin as the space for strategic placement, reflection, and adaptive becoming, zoning in on the ruin’s capacity to hold time in cumulative stasis, collecting its history-like deposits that resist the erasure of time. This is what gives the ruin its specific ontological (its being and indexicality), phenomenological (its disclosure and accessibility to perception and consciousness), and symbolic status (its role in the broader society and culture)—it is through sustained durational capture that the process of ruination comes to full opacity. And it is by awarding access to its culminated layers, allowing for its own custom stratigraphy, that the ruin becomes the privileged site of respite and renewal (breaking from and through the stultifying effect of hegemonic stagnation).

By losing its former practical and symbolic use while still holding on to the memory of it (or as Gerard Wajcman would put it: while being the object “that we cannot remember, yet [that] refuses to be forgotten”⁴), it presents a site of liminality,⁵ producing a unique atmosphere that still adheres to the general rules of society, yet does not replicate all of its structures (its hierarchies and exclusions). Just as liminal phenomena, as described by Turner,⁶ the ruin offers a particular blend of “lowliness and sacredness”⁷ and, in doing so, provides the conditions for “homogeneity and comradeship”⁸ for the group of actors that choose it as the site for their gathering. It is as much a non-space (a space that has lost most or all of its function and symbolic prowess) as it is a virtual hyper-space (a space that holds on to its many former uses and states and provides access to them even though as mere allusions to the past). It is imbued with the authority of the past while being forgotten or contentious in the present and, as such, left to the rule of nature and its contaminant forces. It is both heterodox and heretical (blending civility with dirt,⁹ lowliness with sacredness), as well as dissident and subversive (providing authority of the past to peripheral, clandestine assemblies of the present).

It is hence not unexpected that the ruin is commonly associated with uneasiness or fear. It could be argued that similarly as the affective landscape¹⁰ behind the international fast-food chain McDonald’s and their promise of offering an universal culinary experience regardless of geography presents a common conundrum to many homesick travelers (presenting both the attractive comfort of a familiar taste in unfamiliar lands as well as the sense of guilt from betraying their adventurous cause of leaving the familiar behind),¹¹ the ruin provides a safe space to gather, away from or outside of ordinary order, yet forces one to face the outside elements that took over once man had abandoned it. If a McDonald’s, as a liminal space, a familiar non-place in unfamiliar lands, presents the affective modality of guilt and defeated betrayal to the average homesick traveler, then the ruin, as a liminal space, a strange or unfamiliar non-place in familiar lands, presents the affective modality of fear or uneasiness and emboldened resistance to the disillusioned citizen. It shields and exposes: allows for alternative epistemologies and methods of practice but fails to secure transparency and prevent contamination of the knowledge and actions that result from said elements. There is always something alien and other that speaks with and through the ruin. Hence, its popularity among clandestine groups, mystics, and occultists.

Drawn to the ruin’s inherent liminality (occupying the margins of society, outside of ordinary order), offering concealment and practical secrecy, and its inherent authority of the past (a promise of long-forgotten knowledge or insight), these clandestine groups throughout history sought its luring potential. After the decline of the traditional Roman religion, abandoned temples were sometimes reused for private or clandestine rituals. Temples connected to mystery cults such as the worship of Mithras often survived as partially ruined underground shrines (mithraea). During the Renaissance and early modern period, magicians and alchemists sometimes sought out ancient ruins for ritual purposes because they believed these sites preserved ancient wisdom. Practitioners influenced by texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus associated Egyptian and Greco-Roman ruins with hidden knowledge. In the 18^th and 19th centuries, ruined medieval religious buildings, like Glastonbury Abbey, became focal points for esoteric speculation. While in the 20th century, the SS under Heinrich Himmler transformed Wewelsburg Castle (partly ruinous when acquired) into a symbolic ritual center. The castle was redesigned as a ceremonial site for ritualized gatherings.

The ruin invites, the lack of clear human occupants makes the invitation seem honest, but like every initiation, it has its price. When Ema Maznik Antić and Maks Bricelj approach the ruin, they emphasize its initiation, its price for dwelling. The old Prvomajska Factory sets its demands before any step is taken. Every move, every use or placement, be it artworks or ritual artefacts, is a particular negotiation towards site fidelity. The environment demands concessions in which our identities and subjectivities transform to account for the affective and atmospheric strata that make up the space. Such attention to trans-materialist dynamics of environments expands to their broader artistic practice. In a conversation about their works, they refer to a passage in Negative space by B. R Yeager¹² that holds significance for how the two artists approach physical space. The passage describes a scene of peculiar trans-species altercation in which acacia trees and corn seedlings, when eaten by caterpillars, are said to often defend themselves by releasing pheromones that attract nearby wasps and other predatory insects that cause them to swarm and kill the caterpillars.¹³ The passage continues:

“Surely the wasps are not aware they are being manipulated into fighting the seedling’s battles; that their internal systems are being chemically hijacked; that they are being ruled by forces beyond their control. They must, in their own peculiar and alien way, believe that what they do is solely for the benefit of their respective hives. Never once considering they work for an otherwise undetectable monarch. … Most of us would likely prefer to remain ignorant to the answer. For while the wasp knows not why it slays the caterpillar, it relishes its job just the same, its master too vast for its feeble senses to comprehend.”¹⁴

The invitation that the ruin makes might indeed be honest, even well-intentioned, but this is only as far as we understand intention as an intentionality devoid of a subject or consciousness that can be directly accountable for it. Like the acacia tree, the ruin compels us to act on its behalf. But unlike the acacia tree, the ruin cannot be considered an agent or subject, as it is a mere virtual reservoir of past human actions and inactions, reactivated and brought into the present only through an amnesia of its familiarity, an alienation as a happenstance of its fall into disrepair. Of the environmental factors, the forces of nature that take on the governance of its structures and anti-structures.

If wolves in shells are indeed crueler than stray ones, then it is not man who seeks refuge at the ruinous periphery that is cruel (crueler than its fellow ordinary citizen), but the material other that produces it, that varnishes his discarded shells until they are shiny enough to take refuge in and, from there, taken for another spin (again, “a creature that hides and ‘withdraws into its shell’, is preparing a ‘way out’”¹⁵). To invoke Bachelard here is to, of course, point towards his call for a psychoanalysis of cosmos and matter:

“We should need a cosmic psychoanalysis, one that would abandon for a second human considerations and concern itself with the contradictions of the Cosmos. We should also need a psychoanalysis of matter which, at the same time that is accepted the human accompaniment of the imagination of matter, would pay closer attention to the profound play of the image of matter.”¹⁶

It seems like the attunement of Dwellings in Machinic Passages taps into similar inquiries: How can certain natural forms, forms reclaimed by nature, move the human imagination? Why do materials, dirt, and debris evoke recurring dreams and images across cultures? And how can we listen, adhere, and adapt to their call? The call is not only coming from within the ruined house but from the suppressed virtual potentialities that rest therein. The various functions that once gave the space its purpose and shape form hidden epistemic undergrounds, vast networks of influence and anti-institutional drive, influencing clandestine activities of both dissident and mundane kind. It would be foolish to discount them.