The poem results from the workshop Infrastructure of Violence organised by Manca Bajec, held in the San Sabba Rice Mill National Monument and Museum in Trieste, in May 2024. Workshop and walking seminar (proceeding the workshop), were realised within two projects: Route Biographies (ZRC SAZU) and Infrastructure Soundscapes (UCL). The poem was also inspired by the novel Blameless (orig. Non luogo a procedere), by Claudio Magris, a book about the construction of the museum and the complicated history of Trieste, the trials for mass murder after the Second World War, and the general human cruelty.
The method of thinking about the infrastructure of violence through sound and »soundscape of violence« was presented to the participants, and the material for the workshop was given a day before the walking seminar. We read Pauline Oliveros (2005) distinction between hearing (“something that happens to us because we have ears”) and listening (“something we develop and cultivate our whole life”), as well as about the possibilities of “counter-listening”, i. e. “listening against official narratives” (Ouzounian 2023). As Manca explained on the spot, “Here, this building, this infrastructure is asking us to listen.”
Following Manca’s guidelines, I tried to listen to the infrastructure of violence, hearing beyond the noises of the visitors and traffic. The entry point and prompt that triggered the transition from hearing to listening was the fluttering of the pigeons in the warehouse, so-called Salla delle Croci (Crosses Room), which used to be cells for the prisoners. Several questions crossed my mind. Do the museum keepers release the pigeons in the evening? Are they embodied memorials of the entrapment, impotence, and despair? Living witnesses of the infrastructure of violence? Their noise enabled me to listen to the voices of the unheard and to put down some textual and video notes, which further built up a poem opening new questions. Could a video poem stand as an example of radical listening, a “counter-listening” (Ouzounian, 2023) that follows manifestations of the camp’s emptiness but reaches beyond? Beyond the wooden and sandblasted concrete, searching for possible creative transformations of haunted past and the (im)possible escape routes (vie de fuga).
Infrastructure of violence
Video poem by Špela Ledinek Lozej
trapped pigeons flutter in the warehouse
the cooing and flailing mixed with the traffic noise and voices of visitors, the voices
I have no desire to hear
as they drown out the voices of those before them
who had carved the initials of their presence during the long, dreary and deafening
nights to those of us who will come and leave after them
for the new arrivals, those before them were full of questions about the world beyond the walls
but once the SS soldiers came with the gramophone, unleashing their dogs, and launching a drunken party
no more questions were asked
in the knowledge that the wind and the sea would sweep the newcomers away
while the unheard voices, the barking of dogs, and gramophones’ music
would build a concrete void of hollowed-out silence
