Until the end of the 1990s and the ‘collapse’ of socialism, Zaječar was known as a center of the Eastern region of Serbia. The town had more than a dozen factories – milk, textile, leather, fruit and vegetable, steel, glass, beer (the only remaining one currently owned by Heineken), etc. Each of them employed several thousands of people, something hard to imagine nowadays as they stand vacant today and in various stages of destruction. Mostly abandoned, waiting for decades to be privatized and sold, there are still traces of people and former production everywhere. In the meantime, many ‘vandals’ passed through, often destroying everything on their way but still leaving plenty behind: objects that seem not to have a place in history.

During one of their research visits to the former Crystal Factory, once famous worldwide, the group members of SKVER Magazin came across several hundreds of discarded photo negatives, covered in dirt and debris – a treasure nobody cared about. After cleaning and inspecting them, they were stunned to discover a forgotten world. As it turned out, many factories in former Yugoslavia used to have official photographers whose duty was to document the most important moments for the factory newspaper. Soon they discovered that the images document much more: workers during leisure time, doing sports, on trips and excursions, learning, or having fun. The images turned out to be silent witnesses of the slow decay of the factory as well: as the socialist system slowly collapsed, the images offered a glimpse into this process and struggles. The group spent the next several months digitizing and scanning them, searching for the data to identify the authors and times when they were taken.

United Nations have proclaimed 2022 to be the International Year of Glass, and soon an invitation for the collaboration came from the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade. The UN proclamation further initiated a whole network of international institutions with the aim of creating various projects in 2022 and 2023 to promote the heritage of glass production worldwide. In order to offer a new reading of their archive-in-becoming as well as a different perspective on this history, SKVER Magazin invited Amsterdam-based artists’ initiative Public Space With A Roof, whose research projects deal with the new forms of exhibition making. During PSWAR research in Zaječar, it became clear this was also one of the unique opportunities to study a historical site that seems to exist outside of time: the space once occupied by the factory and its workers today speaks about the heritage not yet accepted by any of the existing narratives, existing in a particular state of limbo. PSWAR research project hence focused on using this opportunity and searching for the ways in which it becomes possible to make visible what is now invisible and formulate narrative(s) in which this particular history would be allowed to exist.

Our individual narratives were challenged and put into a dialogue with the narrative created by somebody else – the creator(s) of the found thousands of images from the photo negatives. The wild imagination, which was let to roam freely over the former factory spaces, has now been directed by this. On the other hand, during our theoretical research and reflection on this experience, we were constantly encountering pairs of seemingly conflicting dualities such as: liquid/solid, symmetry/asymmetry, darkness/light, fragile/indestructible, present/past, luxury/mass production, socialism/capitalism, humans/objects, negatives/positives, individual/collective, visible/invisible, presence/absence, etc. Hence our main idea for this project was to expose all those pairs and put them in a dialectical, productive relation to producing new narratives. The main dialectical pair we focused on was that of workers and objects. The fragility of human bodies became juxtaposed with the idea of the eternal nature of crystal objects that will survive the physical presence of their makers. This idea came from our studies of the very nature of glass as a material. Namely, although all those objects were worked on by a series of people (shaped by someone’s breath, touched by someone’s hands…), all traces of human labor became invisible in the final product itself.

For this exhibition, we printed the images from the black&white negatives discovered in the factory on glass plates. Referencing the early projection machines but also bringing to life the projections of faces and bodies of all the people who made the factory what it was. The exhibition also includes the photo archive of the photographer Mikica Andrejić who has been documenting the transformation of factory spaces in the past decade. This way, our exhibition includes not only the images of the life of the factory as it is to be found on the photo negatives but also the images of the absence of life.