On April 30. 1944, Croatian village of Lipa was a place of great suffering. Nazis and the Fascists killed 269 inhabitants, mostly woman, children and elderly, and burnt the whole village to the ground. Seventy-three years later, on October 7. 2017, the village of Lipa is shining with a different glow. During all those years, four generations of survivors have rebuilt the village and kept the memory alive. They have opened a Memorial Centre and preserved ruins surrounding it as places of remembrance. Those ruins are materialized traces of their heavy heritage. With the absence of physical integrity and domination of emptiness, ruins became a strong metaphor and a medium of communicating human loss. People form Lipa are constantly asking themselves how is that absence forming part of their existence today. They tried to find an answer by working together with the contemporary artist Nika Rukavina and creating a spatial intervention situated in the preserved ruins – called “The Line”. By using golden color, Nika Rukavina performed as an alchemist – “healing” the ruin and evoking a longlasting and painstaking process of regeneration, of mourning and restoration of the village. At the same time, Nikas installation acts as a reminder that those processes are still present within the community of Lipa.
The art piece was part of project “Inverting Battlefields – for a borderless future, project of Xenos Association ( Nayarí Castillo, Joachim Hainzl, and Maryam Mohammadi) in cooperation with KIÖR | Art in Public Space Styria / Universalmuseum Joanneum, and with the’ Kombinat ‘association from Rijeka “
NIKA RUKAVINA 