Rene Rusjan
for Virtual Urban

I like long travelling through vast distant countries. I could do it for days and let my mind fly. But, approaching a city late at night is what I fall for, any time. -------------

There are cities where I feel just right, where I feel "like-at-home", even when I'm there for the first time. I'm not at home in London (although I like it - but I'm always a tourist there), but I feel at home in Dublin (although I spent there just a few days) or in Glasgow, Berlin, Bilbao, Prague. I like Paris, but it is not a "home-like" city - only a very familiar one.. The same is Rome. I do not feel at home in Madrid. -------------

Travelling with my family is something between driving long distances, jumping from one, to another distant point, stopping at petrol-stations in the middle of the night for a coffee and never come back to the same one again...; and finding ourselves in unknown cities, trying to find familiar corners there - which become ours forever. We enjoy discovering new places - but returning to a distant place, after a certain time, again, feels special. -------------

Landscape is horizontal, timeless, eternal.
A City is vertical in time, present is just one layer of this vertical, one of numberless layers of past and future. -------------


A city, its streets and pavements, buildings and walls, look and feel so solid that we sometimes forget that there is earth underneath.

From my project for Urbanaria, Ljubljana 1994
The City - Marking and Leaving Traces

All people, things and places have their memories and history, which are indelible, regardless of the time and order of occurrences. The city is a hyperconglomerate of memories - its own memories and the traces of the people who live and have lived in it. Cities have evolved in those places where a larger, more concentrated mass of people have left traces behind them, which have gradually piled up into layers, dragging their memories behind them.

Any place I have marked once has this indelibly printed on its memory and in its history, just as it is imprinted in my memory and in the memory of the piece with which the area was marked.