Through her previous practice, Monika Moteska has researched the fundamental rapports in life, such as the question of life and death, man and nature, time and space, through various visual media. With her earlier installations such as Breathing Below (2018), premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad or Taxidermy of Insects (2018), she explores the process of archiving and attitudes towards memory through the ontological need of people to work on and preserve (taxidermize) their results for eternity.
The Choir of Helmets, a multimedia installation constructed through the collection of historical artifacts, military helmets from the First and Second World Wars, and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, also points to the author’s intention to awaken memories, point to the intertwining history of Europe and underline the question of the absurdity of war. In this case, the segment of history is military equipment from various sources (German, Italian, French, Serbian, Bulgarian, JNA …), found in antique shops and on the dumping grounds of North Macedonia and its surroundings. Rusty, cracked, pierced helmets, covered with human hair (in a way they taxidermize them), to make them more humane, tactile, subtle and closer to those who wore them, people who are lost.
The installation is complemented by a monumental video projection of pelivans (Persian: heroes) who perform a symbolic dance, a type of choreography that serves as a warm-up before the fight. These are wrestlers who came to the territory of today’s North Macedonia, Kosovo and southern Serbia with the Turkish conquerors in the 15th century, and entered the folk tradition as symbols of strength, heroism and masculinity. Shiny bodies, naked to the waist, intensely oiled to glide under rival hands, in leather pants, symbolize life, joy and excitement and represent a contrast to the “still life” composed of helmets. The installation of helmets entitled “The landscape of death” that occupies the floor of the exhibition space of the palace in Venice, with the pelivan dance on a video projection, is a continuation of the authors’ need to analyse the issue of immortality and infinity, alluding to famous historical themes such as Memento mori and Danse Macabre, to the omnipresence of death, the transience and fragility of life and the futility of fame, power and success. On the other hand, they emphasize the patriarchy of a culture that throughout history raises symbols of war and violence as the highest values of society. Recalling the recent traumas and sufferings in the region, which are accompanied by processes of intensified re-traditionalization, re-patriarchization and clericalization of societies.
The landscape experience also relates to the mapping of certain historical sites, natural landscapes damaged by war scars, objects in the form of memorials or bunkers that testify to the war or much more subtle cuts and crevices, which indicate former underground trenches, hiding places and graves of soldiers… and silence, the earth as a silent witness to human suffering. But in addition to that, they also reveal man’s need to rule over nature and natural resources, to use them mercilessly for the sake of accumulating his own capital. Namely, the new concept for the exhibition at the Venice Biennale is a continuation of the works New Landscapes – Archives of Reality (2021) by Robert Jankuloski and Embroidered in Stone, Crucifixion (2020) by Monika Moteska, created during her stay in Čačak, Serbia and research of abandoned factories, buildings which have lost their function due to too long a social transition and which, as a remnant of human intervention, have been left to further natural processes. This time, they are interested in the old mines in North Macedonia, which have been intensively disturbing the natural landscape for decades, leaving it completely polluted and toxic for future generations. In that way, they formed a unique contrast within the concept of the exhibition, but also with the installation itself. In contrast to war that aggressively and loudly leads to mass killings of people in “one moment”, toxic soil kills quietly, almost invisibly and slowly.
The monumental photographs of the poisonous landscape, although they have a documentary role, belong to the conceptualized photographic expression of Robert Jankuloski and Monika Moteska, who approach contemporary social themes through engaged artistic language. The sites whose importance the authors emphasize are the abandoned Lojane mine of arsenic, antimony and chrome near Kumanovo, then the landscape around Tabanovce where the mined ore was transported by wagons, the Allshar mine and the marble mine near Prilep where detonations hit stone blocks every day. The Lojane mine was active from 1923 to 1979, first under the control of an Italian company, then another company under the occupation, and after the Second World War, a Yugoslav one (based in present-day Serbia), until its closure, probably for economic reasons (inability to export ore due to too high a concentration of arsenic, which was contrary to environmental laws). Frequent changes of ownership again emphasize colonial practices, as in the case of war conflicts. After the suspension of work, the natural landscape remained abandoned and devastated, as a dead place (which is also mentioned in scientific research[1]). Toxic soil of intense orange-red colour slowly pollutes everything around it. The plants dry up and stop growing, while the poison spreads through the natural environment. At the same time, in the immediate vicinity, there is a school 100m away, in the yard of which children are playing today, while “no one is doing anything about it”, the authors emphasize.
[1] Feasibility study for Lojane Mine, Macedonia, University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius”- Skopje, DEKONTA, a.s., Prag, 2007.