Space, Magic, and Remembrance. Genealogy of an Initiation to Contemplation = Spazio, magia e ricordo. La genealogia di un’iniziazione alla contemplazione

The great architects of the anti-fascist and war monuments and memorials in Yugoslavia - Bogdan Bogdanovic, Zdenko Kolacio, and Edvard Ravnikar -, dedicate to the relationship between 'primitivism', abstraction, and spatial relationism, a substantial part of their career, both professional and theoretical. Kolacio dedicates theoretical studies to Stonehenge, to the tradition of the dolmens and menhirs, subsequently interpreting them in his works in a contemporary key. Ravnikar try to merge in his monuments the Neolithic art of the Balkan civilisations with oriental art and that of Max Bill and Henry Moore, working on highly refined spatial tensions between objects, paths, and places. Bogdanovic, who focuses all his creativity on the search for mythologems, figures, forms, and archetypal languages, capable of creating the first elements of the new Yugoslav revolutionary culture, will look at the tradition of the Neolithic and Etruscan necropolises as with Sumerian, Hittite, and Egyptian sculpture. In this context, Zdenko Sila's memorial dedicated to twenty-six frozen partisans and the memorial of Tican were designed to incite 'magic of a secular ecstasy', through this particular symbolic and spatial link with nature (the eternal), and with the experience of the meaning of death (memory).