January 17th – February 5th 2025
Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić
The village of Lipa, located in the hinterland of the Croatian Littoral, in the near vicinity of the Slovenian border, was the scene of a crime against humanity during the Second World War. On 30 April 1944, the Nazis and Fascists killed 269 civilians in Lipa – women, children and the elderly – subsequently looting and burning down the village. Among the victims were 96 children, the youngest of whom, Bosiljka Iskra, was only eight months old. After the war, the surviving residents of Lipa returned to the site of the pillage, proceeding to rebuild the village, gradually going on with their lives, yet preserving the memory of their casualties. They have been aided in this by the Lipa Memorial Museum opened in 1968, as well as its successor – the ‘Lipa Remembers’ Memorial Centre – renovated in 2015. Today, four generations of Lipa survivors live in the village, a total of about one hundred residents who closely cooperate with the Memorial Centre in the implementation of museum programs.
In 2018, the Centre launched the annual artistic program Recognising the Absence, which seeks to explore the possibilities of contemporary art in understanding the difficult-to-comprehend categories of trauma, suffering and genocide. At the same time, the program strives to acknowledge Lipa’s symbolic potential in contemporary peace-fostering processes. As part of the aforementioned program, and on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the massacre in Lipa (1944–2024), the Memorial Centre, in cooperation with photographer Karlo Čargonja and writer and playwright Goran Ferčec, realised the artistic project titled After the Last of April. The title refers to the phrase that the people of Lipa use when referring to the date of the historical event, instead of 30 April, usually saying on the last of April. Karlo and Goran spent the entire anniversary year of 2024 researching Lipa’s everyday life and, employing creative photography and text, embodied a rounded period in the life of four generations of surviving Lipa residents. Materialising the present inevitably paved the way for the authors to materialise the memory and trauma with which Lipa’s present moment is fraught.
They concluded their artistic exploration of Lipa with the book After the Last of April, which summarises their experiences of being with the local residents, in person and in their thoughts, empathising with the familial tragedies of the survivors. The book also reflects their search for meanings which, arising from the challenging dialectic of past and present, have the potential to change our lives in the future. The book also features as the central point of the exhibition at the Spot Gallery, where the authors will present their work on the project After the Last of April to the Zagreb audience. Everything on the project that was recorded, created, contemplated, everything tried, everything accepted and everything rejected, has ultimately shaped this volume. The exhibition, therefore, lays bare the entire work process of the two authors, while the visitors are presented with a multitude of photographic negatives, texts, exhibition materials transferred from the Lipa exhibition which preceded the book, test models and book prints. The materiality of Lipa’s present and past is discussed through the materiality of artistic work.
Vana Gović Marković
Karlo Čargonja was born in Rijeka in 1987. In 2016, he left his job working as a civil engineer in the construction sector to devote himself to photography. He launched the educational project Talks about Photography, which takes place at various locations around Rijeka, including the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. He mentors workshops on photography projects and books, and in 2021 he opened the temporary gallery When Do We See Each Other Again? In Rijeka, where he exhibits creative works and organises arts programs. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and in 2020 he published the four-volume book While Waiting. The Office for Photography has included him among the 50 important Croatian authors at the Contemporary Croatian Photography web portal.
Goran Ferčec graduated from the Dramaturgy Department of the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, where he has been working as assistant professor since 2022. He is a writer and playwright. His text A Letter to Heiner Müller was performed in 2012 at the Zagreb Youth Theatre. The text Female Workers on Hunger Strike was performed in 2014 in a co-production of the Bonn fringe ensemble and Schaubühne Lindenfels from Leipzig, and in 2017 at the ZKM under the direction of Olja Lozica. He is the author of texts for the collective BADco.’s performances Corrections in Rhythm and The Labour of Panic. Together with Matija Ferlin, he is the author of the plays Sad Sam Matthäus and Canti di prigioniaperformed in the program of the Wiener Festwochen festival. He is the author of the novels Life of a Female Worker at the End of the Twentieth Century and There Will Be No Miracles Here, as well as the book of essays Handbook for Yesterday, the collection of performance texts Overtime and the book Corrections in Rhythm in collaboration with visual artist Siniša Ilić.
