Cartography of Silence – Cisterns
On the occasion of Šibenik City Day, on 29 September at 7 PM, the NKC Azimut Gallery will open Jan Zalović’s photography exhibition “Cartography of Silence – Cisterns”, created as part of the Invisible Pašman project.
There are maps that show roads, borders and settlements. And then there are other kinds of maps — maps that do not lead us towards destinations, but towards memory.
On an island, water was never merely a resource. It was a condition of life, part of everyday work, a place of encounter, and one of the ways in which people connected with the landscape around them. Before water became something we could simply obtain by turning on a tap, wells and cisterns were built in response to the island environment and its conditions. They collected and preserved water for households, livestock and fields, while much of everyday life unfolded around them.
Today, we often notice them only when we stop and take a closer look. Some are still in use, some have been abandoned or overgrown, while others remain merely as traces of a former way of life. They preserve far more than water: they carry traces of how they were built, used and maintained, as well as of people’s relationship with the landscape they inhabit.
Jan Zalović’s aerial photographs draw our attention back to these structures. Not as folkloric remnants of the past, nor as yet another picturesque motif from an island postcard, but as tangible traces of life and part of a cultural heritage that is still present in the landscape. Each photograph becomes a kind of coordinate — not only in space, but also in time. It marks a place while simultaneously raising questions about what once existed there, what remains, and what we have stopped noticing.
The Invisible Pašman project explores precisely such places and traces of everyday life — those that can easily disappear from our view, taking with them part of the memory of the island’s way of life. Because what has become invisible has not necessarily disappeared.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with KU Teatar od soli.
The programme continues at 8 PM at Azimut Club with the premiere screening of the documentary film “How the Rebellion on My Island Began”, directed by Nikola Duper, and organised by the PERISKA Association for Environmental Protection and the Promotion and Improvement of Life on the Island of Kaprije and Kolektiv 4B.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the director, moderated by Šibenik journalist Jordanka Grubač Granik.