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Authors:
Emma Canton, Sofia Tapia Buchelli, and Frida Law
Collaborators:
Adam Breznik, student at the University of Ljubljana
Martina Malešič, Museum Councillor in the Department of Architecture at MAO
François Pisapia, a Canadian artist and filmmaker living and working in Berlin, with an on-going research series titled Bunker Gardens
Dr. Matija Zorn, associate professor in geography, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska (Koper, Slovenia), researcher at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute, ZRC SAZU
The project explores how images of post-war infrastructure are constructed and circulated through contemporary digital media. It focuses on the military bunker, examining how online photographs, 3D models, virtual walkthroughs, and AI-generated content reshape its meaning and perception. The exhibition transforms these digital images through physical interventions, exploring what is lost, gained, or newly created in the process. Through these gestures, images become spaces: surfaces turn into walls, folds into volumes, and flat images into inhabitable environments.
MAO is the caretaker and promotor of the world’s most comprehensive collection of Slovenian architectural and design heritage.
The institute focuses on geography of Slovenia. It carries out national and international research projects, publishes geographical studies and promotes the advancement of geographical knowledge.
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Soft Fields within Reinforced Walls focuses around the perception, image construction, and circulation of post-war infrastructure within contemporary media channels. Through research solely conducted virtually, we resignify the bunker as a lens through which to analyze the world above it.
Once built as an impenetrable architecture for collective protection, designed to remain hidden, undocumented, and strategically concealed, the war bunker becomes porous and malleable through its digital representation. Here, we encounter the bunker first as yet another piece of media to consume, its image an amalgamation of historical photography, tourism materials, renderings, user-created 3D models, virtual walkthroughs, and even AI-generated clips – altogether blurring the boundaries between composed reality, speculative possibility, and fiction. Its narrative also shifts from a top-down governmental propaganda tool to a space freely questioned by users online, opening its technical functionalities, political significance, and philosophical implications up for debate.
The landscape surveyed is thus not composed of geographical territory, but rather of digital artifacts created and shared across various platforms – Instagram, TikTok, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest – each organized spatially in its own logic, simultaneously reproducing and being shaped by the world around it. The project thus also exposes the contemporary media ecologies through which architectures designed to remain hidden become visible, shifting between documentation, speculation, and collective imagination.
Within the exhibition, images circulating online become working materials for the creation of re-composed media, transformed by physical operations that either emphasize or question what is lost, gained, or unexpectedly produced. These simple gestures allow the image to acquire new spatial conditions: a surface becomes a wall, a fold becomes a volume, and a flat image becomes an inhabitable space rather than something simply looked at. The materialisation of images therefore does not merely reproduce their digital input; it opens them up to further interpretation and intervention.
Soft Fields within Reinforced Walls focuses around the perception, image construction, and circulation of post-war infrastructure within contemporary media channels. Through research solely conducted virtually, we resignify the bunker as a lens through which to analyze the world above it.
Once built as an impenetrable architecture for collective protection, designed to remain hidden, undocumented, and strategically concealed, the war bunker becomes porous and malleable through its digital representation. Here, we encounter the bunker first as yet another piece of media to consume, its image an amalgamation of historical photography, tourism materials, renderings, user-created 3D models, virtual walkthroughs, and even AI-generated clips – altogether blurring the boundaries between composed reality, speculative possibility, and fiction. Its narrative also shifts from a top-down governmental propaganda tool to a space freely questioned by users online, opening its technical functionalities, political significance, and philosophical implications up for debate.
The landscape surveyed is thus not composed of geographical territory, but rather of digital artifacts created and shared across various platforms – Instagram, TikTok, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest – each organized spatially in its own logic, simultaneously reproducing and being shaped by the world around it. The project thus also exposes the contemporary media ecologies through which architectures designed to remain hidden become visible, shifting between documentation, speculation, and collective imagination.
Within the exhibition, images circulating online become working materials for the creation of re-composed media, transformed by physical operations that either emphasize or question what is lost, gained, or unexpectedly produced. These simple gestures allow the image to acquire new spatial conditions: a surface becomes a wall, a fold becomes a volume, and a flat image becomes an inhabitable space rather than something simply looked at. The materialisation of images therefore does not merely reproduce their digital input; it opens them up to further interpretation and intervention.