Lecture with Markus Butkereit
25.07.2013
18:00 Canetti House

Invisible Cities – Ruse is the first part of Markus Butkereit’s project which was realized during his three-month stay in Ruse. Markus Butkereit approaches the city from its margins, its overlooked and hidden areas: abandoned grounds, bunkers, old industrial buildings, ruins of schools. Exploring the city by bike, he has come around corners where there hasn’t been a living soul for a long time. Places and buildings that were abandoned and have ceased to exist, they are nothing more than “the inferno of the living“.

“The inferno of the living“, says Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s book The Invisible Cities, “is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

A lot of such places have become invisible in Ruse. Life has stopped there, and nobody ever came back. Scattered coffee cups, playing cards, instruments, everything is still where it was left. Time stood still but life outside went on as usual.

In his work, Markus Butkereit researched various abandoned places, mapped them and documented his discoveries on numerous photos. The thus created map, which is to be found on Google Maps, gives new presence to these invisible places in the digital world.