The walking seminar in Istria was a revealing experience for me. I expected to be mind-blown. It was, but not in the ways I had prepared for. I set out thinking about infrastructure within familiar terms, such as Global China, Belt and Road, geopolitics, ready to slot impressions into familiar taxonomies. And as we set out in the tunnels of Drugi tir, I immediately got more than I bargained for. The smallness of a human body set against humongous excavators, the fresh concrete ribs, the trucks idling like some huge animals taking a nap after a large meal. I kept thinking about my son and the excavator toys that children obsess over. There is something primordial about manipulating earth, carving passages, making stone obey.
That encounter disarmed me intellectually. I had planned to catalog sublimes: economic, aesthetic, political. Instead, I was handed naked, brutal, human experience. Walking turned out to be the right method: a calibration device to make sense of scale so disturbing, that we often take it for granted. In a car, the world slides past and normalizes the grotesque. On foot you are reduced to the correct dimensions and role. Distances are tyrannical, you have to properly earn the right to arrive, time not a category anymore. The illusion of instant-ness evaporates; what remains is sweat, breath, a calf muscle complaining, and fear if my damaged knees will endure.
My second revelation was how intimate infrastructure becomes in its afterlife. We took the ciclopedonale, the abandoned railway now softened into a path. Peaceful, calming, unreasonably smooth – it felt like a backyard laid across a landscape. I listened. A chorus of birds stitched the trees together. Wind combed the leaves. Boots suctioning out of the slightly muddy cobblestone. My own breathing, suddenly audible, suddenly mine. No more wroom-wroom, no metal shrieking against metal, no algorithm choosing a song to help me unplug from reality. Quiet is not silence, and random sounds are not noise: each sound has value on its own.
Then came the shock: Trieste’s Riseria. Again, human insignificance, but twisted. Brick, beams, chutes, rails – the same general grammar of infrastructure, but here repurposed to move bodies toward humiliation and death. The exact negative of my developmentalist reflex, which wants infrastructure to be a stairway out of hardship. The building sat there, expression-less: intake, storage, sorting, throughput. I am sure some local equivalent of Eichmann was elated how efficient the building and the adjacent infrastructure were in serving the concentration camp.
Same principles that can serve to transport rice or for that matter any product also apply to transporting human bodies deprived of humanity. I knew this, we all knew this, the way one “knows” painful truths but chooses not to discuss them, and more importantly, not to learn lessons from them. That in the 2020s we would be all witnessing another genocide, in Palestine, and be unable to do much to stop it or punish the perpetrators is a civilizational defeat. Do we deserve to call ourselves humans, given that one core feature of humanity is the minimum compassion and protection of other humans? Or we are simply biometric units of expendability, compliance and indifference? I took the time we were given for creative reflection and wrote a few lines, not to resolve anything but to record the pivoting of my thought, the way the seminar moved me through exhilaration and dread. I went to one deserted part of the Riseria, climbed up to the attic, full of pigeons. I could suddenly write poetry again, something I had not done in ages.
As I sat on the stairs at one of the corner hallways of Riseria
Really a dead-end, except for an emergency-exit sign, nothing remarkable here
I thought this isolated corner would calm me down and help me write
Little did I know I was an intruder, and intrusive thoughts was what I got
I disturbed a pigeon, the pigeon flew away and it scared me senseless
The squeak of the pigeon, one of too many unexpected sound senses
One of the many in an array of unexpected sensory experiences
Of the privileged man who went on a walking seminar with the pretense
To search for inspiration, think outside of the box, put on new lenses
But all I am thinking now is
Whether those
Locked up here back in the day could hear the pigeons coo?
Did they hear the squeaks, and the flaunting of the feathers too?
Could they even be scared? Not of the pigeons but of life, if you could call their life that
Injustice, suffering, destruction and death
When I think about this seminar, I think of bird sounds, paradoxically
Birds singing along the way on the Ciclopedonale, a different kind of melody
The only thing that made me pick up the recording device
This is what I like about Slovenia, birds songs – it sounds nice
Neutralizing the noise, therapeutic effect, only happy sounds – no cries
I used to crave noise, bird-less cities, chaotic vibes
The sound and the smell, the crowd and the descending of the urban tribes
Beijing, Shanghai, skyscrapers and high speed railway, accelerated time
Not your typical big city but I also used to live in Warsaw in its prime
Galloping modernization, that was my sublime
Infrastructures, megaprojects, all the glitz and the shine
Living in Poland though, I also faced traumatic past
I have already had peculiar ideas about the sounds of the Holocaust
Sounds that you don’t have to listen to, to be able to hear them clearly
Piercing my soul forever, haunting dearly
Those sounds are now here in the Risiera, I could hear them in the exhibition
The distinguished sound of the banality of evil
The distinguished sound of human mind’s dark ambitions
Wagons screeching
Boots thumping
Weapons clashing
Locks and chains clicking
Commands in a foreign language
Yelling, cursing, bashing
Clock ticking, water drops
Enduring anguish
Heavy breathing, sick coughs
Sighs and shouts of pain
Did they have the force to cry? Did they whisper?
Was it in vain?
Why the suffering? Why the pain?
Why the death?
Where are the children?
Where are the bones?
It happens today
A different soundtrack, different guise
Same genocide, same blood in the sky
Different people, same people
I see the pigeon in Riseria and think – free Palestine!
The prisoners here I assume were mostly silent
Dreadful, haunting, eeriely quiet
So maybe they didn’t mind the birds squeaking
Aside from cliches about flying and wings
Pigeons and freedom?
Maybe hope comes with the pigeon
Or maybe there were no pigeons here during the war
Maybe the pigeons moved here only after humans were gone
After the infrastructure served its purpose, only then comes the bird song
Much like the birds on Ciclopedonale, life moves along
Except in Riseria, there is no point to be made, no life, no silver lining
Hope came here to die, where Trieste’s old hills are inclining
Published October 2025. 2025/21
