13th – 31st October 2025
Set up photos: Ivan Buvinić
Lustre from the Edge of the City
Abandoned yet at the same time radiant, the buildings in Matija Brumen’s photographs seem like the edge of a city perceived by someone who admires it unassumingly. The photographer notices them without perplexity or exaggeration of their condition. For cities are always a puzzle of different layers – they are composed of more or less ordered centres and crumbling edges, with disparate expanses in between. Sometimes the edges might also find themselves in the centre, since they are not necessarily determined by geographical location or defined by a semantically or spatially subordinate place.
In the context of spirit of place, it is the spirit of the edge that the photographer, simultaneously a local and a visitor, has attempted to capture. As visitors to unfamiliar cities, we experience the spirit of place as an inner feeling. We quickly and intuitively distinguish areas where we recognise the scent of everyday life, from those that seem like beautiful landscapes on the outside, but are something else, perhaps even nothing, on the inside. Undoubtedly, the former, with their aroma of everyday life, evoke the connection of the local residents with the place, in anthropology considered one of the most important connections between people and a particular location. The Maribor we see in Brumen’s photographs also has a centre, edges, and in-between spaces – from buildings full of bustle to those whose interiors are known only to a handful of individuals. It boasts vistas familiar to everyone, and those that are largely unknown, even to the local populace. Maribor is a city that exceeded its former limits in the nineteenth century and has continued to expand in different directions to this day. These processes were dictated by waves of industrialisation and other circumstances, including the ingrowth of surrounding villages into the urban fabric of the city. There are gaps in it, in areas that have undergone dramatic changes; there are buildings that some people abandoned while others moved in amidst social changes, and there are areas that have been ravaged by the deindustrialisation of the end of the twentieth century. All these diverse spaces – both the ones that are growing and those in decline – are brimming with meaning for the inhabitants. Their mental images are often more vivid than those the eye can currently perceive. However, the view of a superficial observer differs from that of a photographer, who has the ability to capture in abandoned buildings a trace of their former dimensions, without which they would undoubtedly not exist.
Brumen has titled his photographic cycle Abyssinia, after one of Maribor’s shanty boroughs in the suburb of Tezno, where people from the social margins were housed during the period of great housing shortages following World War I. In the minds of Maribor residents and others, this settlement has been memorialised on several levels. One of these levels was established by writer Drago Jančar, who literalised the eponymous settlement in his novel Severni sij [Northern Splendour], except he situated it on the other side of town, giving rise to the frequent question of where Abyssinia is actually located. The second level was documented by ethnologist Maja Godina Golija in her book Iz Mariborskih predmestij [From the Suburbs of Maribor], which fortuitously provides the answer to this question. The third lives on in the memory of local residents, who still sometimes refer to Tezno as Abyssinia. Through life experience and literature, Abyssinia has grown into a metaphor for life on the margins in both a spatial and social sense, while Matija Brumen here portrays it from a previously unseen perspective.
Jerneja Ferlež
Matija Brumen (Maribor, Slovenia) is a visual artist and photographer. He completed his BA in Japanology and Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and his MA in Visual communication – Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, both at the University of Ljubljana. He studied as an exchange student at the Tsukuba University in Tsukuba, Japan, Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany, and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, the Czech Republic. He attended a three-month artist residency at the Soulangh Cultural Village in Tainan, Taiwan, and a one-month artist residency in Berlin, Germany. He regularly publishes and participates in exhibitions at home and abroad, including at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, City Gallery in Maribor, Gallery of Contemporary Art in Celje, Photon Gallery, ŠKUC Gallery in Ljubljana and across Slovenia, at the ESSL Museum in Vienna, Austria, at the HVCCA in New York, USA, and the Soulangh Cultural Park in Tainan, Taiwan. He has published his work in various publications and has received many nominations and awards for his photographic work (Henkel award, ESSL award, EMZIN photography of the year award, OHO award, SITTCOMM award, etc.) and has published a monographic photo book Galeb about ex-YU Marshal Tito’s representative ship.
