Disposizione schematica (RZR-22)

Exhibition booklet for the exhibition Disposizione schematica, RZR-22.

Disposizione schematica / RZR-22  (Riječki željeznički rekvijem / Rijeka Rail Requiem)

“The ruin attracts the discards of time. Such a gathering is possible because pure presence is suspended, creating a place in which the traces of history find their splintered deliverance. As we are able to recognize the entire history of space in a site while simultaneously recognizing the future absence of that history, the ruin’s magnetism resounds.”

Dylan Trigg.

Composite image combining details from original schematics and location photography.

“Disposizione schematica” is the result of a long-term research encounter between Sz. Berlin and a ruined rail depot. In October 2021, a local urban explorer encouraged the artist to salvage items from the doomed rail office, before they succumbed to decay and destruction. Here, amongst the dust and deceased cats mummified by heat, lay a vast and forgotten archive of rail schematics, relating to the abandoned locomotives that are (un-)housed in the vast “Remiza” depot situated on the former “Industrijska cesta”. It’s unclear if the material was even much consulted in the decades since the arrival of these once futuristic and now decaying trains. In the exhibition a selection of them are displayed for the first time in decades, taking on an artistic after-life, becoming visible for the first time in public.

1960s rail schematics salvaged from Remiza.

These can act as mirrors of a lost future, through which we can view the present. These “objets ferroviaires trouvés” (found rail objects) are visually and conceptually sufficient in themselves. They symbolise the lost arts of draughtsmanship and manual design. Five decades later, the cutting-edge units they envisaged are almost all museum pieces, or sit waiting for scrap merchants, rust and heat to overcome them.

“Banco Manovra”. Composite image based on details from original schematics.

Yet in another sense they are not obsolete and can still inspire and fascinate, reconnecting us to the “live rails” (žive tračnice) of futuristic enthusiasm and inspiration. In the words of the writer Dylan Trigg, they provide a “sudden jolt that is transparency of the past”, but they can also (re)-open tracks into newly salvaged futures.

Sz. Berlin Disposizione schematica / RZR-22 Exhibition poster, 12/22..

In such a moment, these 1960s plans became the schematics for Sz. Berlin’s 2020s re-activation of the designs: a process of rebuilding through ruin. They are rendered into sound and multiplied, processed imagery. Italian technology implemented in Yugoslavia becomes an artistic source in contemporary Croatia.

Original schematic design displayed in the exhibition RZR-22.

The contemporary audiovisual element of the exhibition re-engineers and re-imagines them as the schematics of a future that is simultaneously lost and recovered, just as every rail terminus is always a point of beginning as well as ending, and of departure as well as arrival. The video and original schematics are accompanied by composite images turned into abstract designs for non-existent components.

Composite image combining location photography and an overlay of rendered schematics.

As well as original schematics and prints based on the designs, the exhibition film (a collaboration between Sz. Berlin and Nik Panic), re-engineers and re-imagines them as the schematics of a future that is simultaneously lost and recovered, just as every rail terminus is always a point of beginning as well as ending, and of departure as well as arrival. The film shows us the vast space in which the documents and the trains sit fading into history.

Original schematics alongside composite images rendered from them.

The final element is an hypnotic soundtrack, created using image sonification software. Photos of the original documents and of the new composite images derived from them were fed into software that transforms images into sound. The result is a 10 minute audiovisual requiem for a lost art and for lost futures. Through the course of the film the audience can watch a subtly shifting audiovisual collage of documentary footage from Remiza, combined with the new designs they have inspired.

Sz. Berlin / Nik Panic Disposizione schematica / RZR-22.