2024
Installation for the exhibition The House That Is Falling Apart at the Museum of the Republic of North Macedonia, Skopje, with Winnie Herbstein and Filip Jovanovski. Curated by Ivana Vaseva and produced by the Faculty of things that can’t be learned – FRU as part of the project We don’t want to be stars (but parts of constellations).
During a residency period in Skopje in 2023 I approached the city through the process of moving, drifting and tracing – letting the city’s shifting conditions bring me to places where time, wear and repair are easy to read. FRU, as a nomadic organization, always decides on a location according to the specifics of a given project. For The House That Is Falling Apart it was the Museum of the Republic of North Macedonia, the most important architectural work of Mimoza Tomikj, co-authored with architect Kiril Muratovski, built between 1971 and 1976 – now a building that is literally falling apart.
This site became the core of my video work: a slow, exploratory recording of the museum’s withering architecture, filmed while wandering through its corridors and half-abandoned expositions, looking at dusty display cases with leftover artefacts, peeking through the partly covered windows of a former exhibition hall – now a storage room for a shipment of souvenirs marking the nationalist re-branding of a modernist city.
Alongside the video, the exhibition included two photographs of the Universal Hall, a monumental 1965 cultural venue and a symbol of global solidarity – following the disastrous 1963 earthquake, it was the first public and cultural building completed as part of the reconstruction efforts. After years of decay, it burned down to its base structure in the spring of 2024. Instead of showing the building directly, the photographs capture only its reflections in the surrounding architecture. These indirect images speak to its in-between state after the fire – present yet no longer fully visible, a building reduced to trace in the urban fabric.
The exhibition space at the museum was arranged in dialogue with artist Winnie Herbstein. Together we treated everything that was already there – leftover infrastructure, partitions, surfaces – as material to work with rather than erase. The arrangement of the space grew out of this shared process: a choreography of what we found, what was decaying, and what we added, allowing the space itself to hold the traces of both past use and present attention.
The title of the installation is borrowed from The Glass Essay by Anne Carson (1995).