TEV-24 was the first collaboration between Sz. Berlin ± Panic. Panic’s visual documentation of the ruined Vlaška thermoelectric power station main hall is accompanied by its atmospheric soundtrack, rendered from photos and videos gathered on site, plus archival sources. It was filmed for use as the static video installation TEV-22, which was shown alongside the cdx-foto exhibition Autarcheum at Burren College of Art, Ireland in November 2022. This 2024 reimagining introduces new tensions, ruptures and contradictions, reanimating the space and its ghosts.

Vlaška began operating in the Raša Valley in Istria in 1939, as part of a large-scale industrialisation of a previously rural, marshy landscape. It supplied power to the mine in nearby Raša (Arsia in Italian). Raša was built in 1937-8 as a model industrial settlement and designed as a self-sufficient “Città dell’autarchia” (City of Autarchy). Bombed by the Allies during World War Two and restored by Yugoslavia, operating until it fell silent in 1976. Since then, time, looters and the climate have sculpted it into the atmospheric ruin we see today.

Sections of the concrete walls and floors hang improbably and precariously, waiting for gravity to deliver a final blow. The other invisible yet potent presence is a range of contaminants. The Raša coal that fired the plant is a source of super high-organic-sulphur and colossal quantities of it were stored and burnt here. It is both sulphurous and serene, contaminated but far from dead. Birds sing in the turbine hall and in the summer much of the structure disappears behind the vegetation that is increasingly colonising the site. The new film and remixed soundtrack brings a futurist(ic) new 21st century life to this modernist relic.

This is second part of the “Trilogy of Decay / Trilogija Raspadanja” - an alchemical A/V response to three abandoned sites in Croatia that the duo have been compelled to witness and to process. In the films and their soundtracks a power station, a rail depot and a coal separator are fleetingly re-animated. The works transform them from dead industrial powerhouses to newly un-dead post-industrial powerhouses. Each carries its own host of memories of the three ruling systems that created them: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fascist Italy and Socialist Yugoslavia. In their derelict, looted state, these sites have become terrible to many, and many would prefer them to disappear entirely, yet much can be salvaged from them – fragments, atmospheres, sounds and visions for the new times in which they find themselves and in which these projects are made.

Sz. Berlin ± Panic is an ongoing A/V collaboration between Istria-based Sz. Berlin and the London-based film-maker Panic. Since 2022 they have intensively documented the spectacular industrial ruins of Istria and Rijeka. So far their videos have been shown in exhibitions at Burren College of Art and DKC Lamparna. Their next project will explore the acoustics and vintage machinery of a rail depot.

Watch the film on YouTube:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=snl2--PjxDg