From Care to Cure and Back

The Children’s Maritime Health Resort of Military Insured Persons, designed by Richard Marasović and completed in Krvavica in 1964, appears to be better known to explorers of abandoned buildings than architects. Web pages saturated with photographs inside the striking circular building are easy to come by, but the architectural background of the project is limited — in English, at least — to the always excellent Architectuul. This situation may invert itself when Rebeka Bratož Gornik and Joaquin Mora complete their short films set inside the remarkable building.

According to DAI-SAI (Društvo arhitekata Istre – Società architetti dell'Istria), the “From Care to Cure and Back” program that the two contributions are part of “explores critical architectural heritage, depletion of human communities in relation to abandoned architecture, and encourages transformation of both material and immaterial environments from ‘spaces of a common disease’ into places of ‘common healing.’” Curated by Ana Dana Beroš, the program is being carried out under LINA fellowships that started on the first day of this year and extend until the end of May. The two short films, below, provide snapshots of Gornik's and Mora's work underway.

Gornik’s film, per DAI-SAI, “deals with the enigmatic Croatian architect Rikard Marasović, the author of the building, in which the narration is created from contemporary interviews with architects researchers, local historian and community, while his character is played by a prominent local actor. The narration of the architect presents and questions the position of authority in describing the past, present and possible future state of the building, as well as the communities around it.”

Mora’s film, on the other hand, “aims at manifold interpretations of architectural space that are at the basis of what we could call the sound identity of a place. The author investigates, documents and redefines relationships between contemporary subjects and sounds of the former Children’s Maritime Health Resort. The video is composed in layers, from the sound and visual recordings of the building in its current state — empty and abandoned [—] to the confrontation of sounds in movement/singing choreography with members of the local female choir Tempet.”