Lights Are on But Nobody’s Home, 2024
Photo and sculptures series

Photographs
Archival inkjet print mounted on 1mm aluminum, framed in solid yellow pine wood frame, Art glass UV 70%
62,5 x 50 x 4,5 cm

Sculptures
62,5 x 50 x 4,5 cm
Inlaid oiled pine wood

In the series Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home (2024), I try to bring together traditions of apiculture (beekeeping) with my experience as a guest in the former home of Jože Plečnik. The series consists of inlaid wooden sculptures and photography exploring the tension between the presence and absence of the architect in his former rooms. In these spaces, the architect’s creative spirit is reconstructed and maintained through the careful positioning of his writing and drawing tools.

Slovenia has a strong history of beekeeping. Honey plays an important role in Slovenian agriculture, and we see many private beehives in both rural and urban areas in the country. An important historical figure in Slovenian history is Anton Janša (1734–1773), the beekeeper who entered service as the first court beekeeper at the Austro-Hungarian court and wrote treatises such as Abhandlung vom Schwärmen der Bienen (Discussion on Beekeeping), 1771. Jože Plečnik was very aware of these beekeeping traditions and identified strongly with the symbolism of the worker bee.

To a great extent, Plečnik was an architect who wove these kinds of customs and rituals into the design of architectural elements. His designs demand a specific action or stimulate a degree of efficiency. It is said that he deliberately made his own bed narrow and short so that he could never be too comfortable in it. Furniture for his visiting clients in the vestibule of the house was made deliberately uncomfortable, to make them leave the house as soon as possible. In his kitchen, the architect designed a chair with a built-in table for himself to continue drawing while making coffee and not waste a single moment of work. Architectural elements in the Plečnik House testify of a life focused on hyper-production and dedication to realizing Plečnik’s sculptural dream, which is Ljubljana.

In certain medieval Catholic traditions, bees were considered as hardworking, asexual emissaries of God. For this reason, beeswax has long been the only permitted finish for religious wooden objects. Plečnik's personal as well as his professional life show interesting parallels with these religious, celibatarian traditions.

The architect’s social life is often referred to as ‘his marriage to his architecture,’ as he didn’t seem to like people that much. However, Plečnik maintained very warm ties with the pastor of the nearby Trnovo church who was one of the very few people who had the permission to enter Plecnik’s personal rooms in the house. Plečnik's private life was as shielded from the outside world as the interior of a beehive is for most humans. Or was his life in the beehive, that is now the Plečnik House, a safe haven, a refuge for an intimate and personal life that the outside world was unaware of?

On a more visual level, too, the rooms of the Plečnik House show interesting similarities with the architecture of the beehive. I discovered the same wood joints in the construction of Plečnik’s bed as in the beehive in the garden. The many drawers, doors, and cupboards recessed in the wall and the pine-paneled dim rooms in the house show interesting visual parallels with the dark interiors of the pine beehives.
During a ritual called telling the bees, part of various European folkloric traditions, beekeepers inform the bees of major events in people’s lives, such as birth, marriage, and mourning. It is said that if this does not happen in time, there is a risk that the bees would no longer produce honey, never return to the beehive, or even die. The starting point for the series Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home was to inform the bees in the museum’s backyard of the departure of Plečnik, in continuation of these folkloric traditions.

The photographs of Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home depict abstract pinewood constructions that conceal empty, dark interior spaces. In the reliefs, graphic sculptures made out of inlaid pieces of pinewood that have been treated with beeswax, form an homage to the (folk)architecture of the beehive. In the work, I examine (mourning) rituals in architecture and am choosing an animistic approach to architectural spaces: how, through architecture, we can get in contact with those who preceded us in history. For example, in the work Relic (2024), we see a pine cone that fell from the overhanging tree on Plečnik’s grave during my visit to the Žale cemetery in Ljubljana; a place that also has been designed by the architect himself. The pine cone in the photo balances on the edge between light and dark and is an attempt to connect the two separate spaces of the cemetery and house.

In Shutter (2024), another work from this series, we see the shape of light falling through a window. However, where the light should illuminate the pine surface, the window projects a shadow instead. The work references the windows at the Plečnik House that looked out onto the nearby Trnovo church. The church, redesigned by the Austrian architect Raimund Jeblinger (1853–1937), was an unbearable sight for the architect, who strongly disliked the Neo-Romanesque appearance of the building.This was the reason for Plečnik to keep the window shutters on this side of the house closed at all times. Shutter is a reversal, a window that casts shadows, the negative image of daylight entering the room. The shutters of Plečnik’s rooms that looked out onto the Trnovo church would remain closed until after the architect’s death in 1957.

- from the essay Passage (2024), click [here] for the full text.

Installation view Annotations - RAVNIKAR, Ljubljana (SI)

Lights Are on But Nobody’s Home (2024) was part of the solo exhibition
To Decide Where the Shadow Falls, Plečnik House, Ljubljana (SI)
18.10.24 - 26.01.25

Annotations, RAVNIKAR, Ljubljana (SI)
24.10.24 - 21.12.24

Installation view To Decide Where the Shadow Falls - Plečnik House, Ljubljana (SI)