The Sz. Berlin action PLM-22 took place in a former coal separator in Istria during the night of 3rd October 2022. All sounds generated on location. Witnessed by Panic.

The passing of the high tide of 20th Century industrialisation in Istria has left a toxic but inspiring legacy. Titanic industrial structures that just a few decades ago housed cutting-edge technologies are now beached carcasses whose concrete bones are bleached by the Istrian sun and wind, and whose metallic veins and organs have long ago been stripped clean by hordes of scavengers. As time passes, they are colonised by plants, birds, animals and rust. Beyond the sounds of the wind, the birds and the occasional wanderer these sites are mostly mute.

The Yugoslav-era coal separator in which the action PLM-22 took place is a slight exception to this rule. The distant drone of the still-active power station that it once served is audible within the space, and at night the power station lights can still be glimpsed through the ruined façade. This vast concrete carcass was the ideal location for an experiment in re-animating such a space for one night only.

Using a vintage Yugoslav era radio and advanced contemporary sonification software, the building was allowed (or forced) to resonate again, in a delayed echo of the sounds of industry that it was once filled with. Just as Sz. Berlin scanned and played the sound of the space back into itself, Panic lit and shot it in a way that animated it, allowing it to “perform” for the camera and impose its textures and shapes on contemporary viewers. All that you see in the film was filmed in the course of one evening, and all sounds were generated live on site by Sz. Berlin. The final edited film condenses the long night hours of sonic and visual experimentation into a portrait of a forgotten but unforgettable building and its (re)-created sights and sounds.

This is the first 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.

View the film here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkedO9IJSsg