Luiza Margan, 2023
born 1983 in Rijeka, Croatia; lives and works in Vienna and Rijeka
Luiza Margan was born in Rijeka, Croatia, and is currently based in Vienna. She studied painting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Performative Arts and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.
Through her sculptures, installations, films and interventions in public space, she examines the discord between official and invisible histories, power relations and ideological systems inscribed in public space and collective memory. Her work emerges from field research, historical material, walking and the performative use of her own body. By collecting and recontextualizing found materials, she constructs new objects, creating new environments and ways of seeing.
The artist has exhibited at numerous international museums and galleries and launched highly acclaimed artistic events and performances in public space. Her works are represented in international public and private art collections, including the Generali Collection Salzburg, the Museum of Contemporary Art Belvedere 21, Vienna, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, and the Tobacco Museum, Ljubljana.
Besides numerous awards, she received the Fellowship of the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in 2008 and the 2019 Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Currently, Luiza Margan is the 2023 Artist-in-Residence at the ZF Art Foundation in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
Hidden Memory.
Luiza Margan’s Spectral Landscapes Within Us
Nora Sternfeld
Rising high above the beautiful lake landscape around Friedrichshafen is the tower of the Zeppelin Museum, built as a harbor station between 1929 and 1933: modernist architecture often described as the Bauhaus style or International Style. Today it houses a museum dedicated, according to its website, “to innovative processes in technology, art and society,”1 but also a history museum that tells, not least, the story of the Zeppelin airships, and an exhibition venue for contemporary art. Right at the top of this building, with views in all directions, the ZF Art Foundation runs a residency space where contemporary artists can devote a year to developing a project. Luiza Margan spent many months of the last year in this tower studio.
So much for one of the contexts framing Cache, an exhibition by the artist Luiza Margan, who is herself always alive to the context in which her artistic explorations and examinations unfold. I would go so far as to say that Margan has made context her medium, for she confronts not only the hidden and spectral histories of the places where her works evolve but also, and above all, the hidden and spectral histories within us.
But what do we mean here by context? A well-worn notion in art since the 1960s, or at the latest since the 1990s,2 in Margan’s research-based work it underlies a physical and material exploration of the unarchivable,3 that space that lies between official historiography and marketable topography on the one hand and hidden histories and invisible power relations on the other. It is this space between that supplies the medium for the art of Margan who, with her meticulous digging in archives, her fieldwork and analysis, rather than nailing something down, never stops rooting out the things that are never talked about, the things that mutter insistently below the surface, inviting us to confront the spectral layers of history—those unarchivable contexts that haunt the present, our language, and our bodies.
The first context for her work, then, the place where the process unfolded, is a studio with a view, a place for the production of art. And if we are already talking about sedimented histories, then we can add the history of all the art projects that have emerged here since 1996, and even the history of the work that will emerge here later. A residency, after all, always draws together two perspectives: the artistic view from outside, and the place on which it falls. In this sense, another context for the work—and this is always an important factor in her situated, embodied practice—is Luiza Margan herself, her view and her history. She allows her artistic production to grow out of the hidden dimensions of her context and brings its echo to the space into which she then invites us. Because we are certainly part of the context too, each of us an observer with a personal biography and history. It is also about what we infer when we read the big red neon letters on the window of the exhibition room:
“THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE
LOOKING THROUGH THE WINDOW
FROM THIS TOWER”4
In this respect, Luiza Margan’s installations are situated questionings.5 Around the exhibition Cache we can follow them in concentric circles. First of all, the investigation that we encounter here is situated in this tower, in a studio belonging to the ZF Art Foundation,6 whose “commitment to art and culture” is a “fixed element of the company’s corporate identity,”7 in a building which did not simply formulate modernism in spatial terms but integrated traces of an unspoken entanglement with ethnicist identities and perhaps even design elements borrowed from fascist futurism: the modernist transit zone suggests, especially in the stairwell, dynamic lines and jagged forms, while its layout quotes architectures of surveillance. The building as a whole is doubtless imbued by the spirit of its time: 1933, the year the new harbor station opened, was the year when the National Socialists came to power.
More broadly, the questioning is situated in Friedrichshafen, a German town on Lake Constance with an unbounded pride in the history of the Zeppelin: a town which, perhaps like many towns in Germany, or at least those where the arms industry played and still plays a role, acknowledges its past and present, the memory of them, but which again and again hands over the questioning, possibly even with the aid of art. Luiza Margan’s work presents context as an invitation to confront the spectres of the past and present, and the spectres in ourselves. To this end Luiza Margan digs where the residency took her: in the soil of the spectral landscape of Raderach, a district of Friedrichshafen. In 1942 a test site was built in Raderach Forest, with three test stands for missiles and an oxygen factory.8 Components were tested here for the “Wunderwaffe,” the V-2 rocket built in Friedrichshafen by the airship manufacturer Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. In Oberraderach there was also a satellite of the Dachau concentration camp. From June 22, 1943 until September 29, 1944, it had more than 1200 inmates; they provided the labor to build the A4 semi-monocoques for the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.9 Luiza Margan brings soil from the place where the camp huts once stood into the exhibition space. It’s not possible to do that without getting your hands dirty or tainting the whiteness of the exhibition space. Its walls are daubed with earth from Raderach in such a way that the muddy texture remains visible.
In her search for history on the Raderach site, the artist discovers a strangely unmarked ruin. As she follows the traces, she realizes that this was a “secret project,” not only because of the camp, but because the missile development and the associated tests were not to be made public. And yet, she learns, these activities were apparently so loud that they could be heard right across the lake and into Switzerland—a deafening silence, then, which the artist investigates further. At the same time, nobody claims to have known what was going on… She writes: “It is (is it?) hard to (want to) mark something that was a secret back then (not a long time ago). Is it better to leave it as a secret, even now? Who does it concern? To whom does the secret belong? And what does it mean if we do not know that it is there?”10
So in her research Luiza Margan addresses the silence and the secret which, once we begin to hear it, refuses to stop insisting on the present. Not only does she hunt down the hidden contexts for the crimes and violence; she also seeks out traces and evidence of resistance. She comes across a little group of courageous activists with roots in the labor movement. By consulting archives, and thanks to the knowledge and work of local historians and history campaigners, Luiza Margan finds out, for example, about the resistance fighters Georg Elser and Fridolin Endrass; the latter was caught by the National Socialists when he was carrying leaflets in his bicycle tires on the way back from Switzerland. She is curious about how information changed hands, about how people communicated with each other, risking their freedom and their lives. Their hiding places and their endeavors, the incessant danger, the secret places and routes, the whispering in the hope of liberation: these were important inspirations for her work on the exhibition. Secrecy becomes spectral installation material. We cannot grasp it directly, but perhaps we will meet it in these lockers set between the brown walls.
The deconstructed lockers function as partitions. They were reconstructed from classic industrial relics, severed and pieced back together—lockers made by workers for workers, opening and closing themselves and the space. Luiza Margan treats them as “bodies,” as containers with an inside and an outside, some prominent and others less so. They conceal and display anti-fascist books, offer clues to the hiding places and the leaflets, because Luiza Margan has carved words in the metal: words such as “eyes open,” “resistance,” and “freedom,” the typography and wording copied straight from original German and international anti-Nazi postcards, leaflets, and resistance texts. Just as the partitions open and close space, displaying and concealing at once, so the walls signal and break open the silencing. Here, four black bicycle tires cut through white insulation foam. Luiza Margan calls these assemblages “silent landscapes” and “defective soundproofing.” The silence of the landscape seems to be shattered by the assemblages, criss-crossed by pathways of resistance.
A cache is a hidden store. It is also the hidden interim memory in our digital devices: the cache contains the information “remembered” by the computer after it has seemingly disappeared. For a while, then, something is both hidden and saved. The situated practice of Luiza Margan exposes a landscape of violent histories which are both silent and piercingly loud, which do not lie so very far back in the past, and which are still a force within various political movements in Europe today. Thus she dedicates her work to this unarchivable, hauntingly undead knowledge, insistent rather than existent. In so doing she not only unearths unarchived material to add to the archives, but prods away at the insistent muttering of the unarchivable until it breaks into a hum, making it undeniable without ordering it neatly, simulating it, or turning it into a product.