Hello there and welcome to our second instalment of our series on Tuscan Big Iron.

We just came back from Bibbiena, a small city in rural Tuscany, where the last working and complete assembly of an Olivetti ELEA 9003 is still whirring and churning in a high school basement.

The ELEA 9003, serial number 0000002 was leased to the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in late 1960 and worked on bank accounts for circa 10 years. After that, when the machine was deemed obsolete and ripe for substitution it was donated by the bank to the ISIS Enrico Fermi, a tech high school, and one of the firsts in italy to offer courses in telecommunications and computer science.

The monster, which draws 1KW for every 1KB of RAM, (that is 20 of both) was installed in the basement of the institute and was administered until 2001 by one aging IT guy.

When the IT guy had to retire the machine worked almost perfectly. The “keeper” of the machine is now Stefano Del Furia, professor of computer science at the Fermi High.

The institute, and professor Del Furia, are looking for a sponsorship in order to maintain the machine in working condition, the ELEA is complete with a full complement of spare parts and technical diagrams.

The Olivetti ELEA 9003 is a milestone in computer industrial design. Its cabinets were designed by Ettore Sottsass and were revolutionary in terms of serviceability and user friendlyness. The human interface was designed by Tomás Maldonado. The Olivetti ELEA was also the first Italian commercial computer and one of the first fully transistorized mainframes in the world.

(photos by Liquid Cat, courtesy of ISIS Enrico Fermi, Bibbiena)

In this country, like we haven’t already got enough problems, the police can kill you for 20 grams of pot, or just because they don’t like your face. In this country a medical doctor is willing to sign a death certificate stating, as cause, natural death while looking at a poor, beaten up, tumefacted, manhandled corpse. In this country police and secret service officers have blackmailed politicians and ordinary people alike, and thus enjoyed a status of superiority to the law. This mexican standoff has been going on for years.

In Genoa, in 2001, hundreds of people have seen the true face of this regime.

Police forces lack the cultural tools, are understaffed, underpayed, undertrained, underequipped. The apparatus is willing to cover-up. Politics connive. Liquid Cat is fed up with the general situation in Italy. And Liquid Cat is not alone. And not only in this country.

This is the shape of things that went. The C.E.P. was the first electronic calculator built by an university in Italy. It was constructed for research purposes and financed with money intended to pay for a nuclear reactor, in 1957.

We’re working on a project on the C.E.P. in the framework of Networking 2009, curated by Elisa Del Prete. The theme of this instalment of Networking is ‘memory’.

The C.E.P. sits today in a former slaughterhouse in Pisa, now the Museo degli Strumenti per il Calcolo, its components no longer linked by power, data and air conditioning links.

(photos by Liquid Cat, courtesy of Fondazione Galileo Galilei, Pisa)

Liquid Cat Machine (our musical division) had the pleasure to cooperate with Postcards From Beirut in a closed-reel tapeset at the opening of Private Flat 2009, here you can find the tapedump of the set.

We just came back from Bozen, where we held a workshop for high school kids. The workshop was sponsored by Museion and the 2009 Landesausstellung Labyrinth::Freiheit in Fortezza. During the five days of the lab we touched subjects such as citizenship, identity, borders, nations (and micronations), individual and collective freedoms, language and so on. We’ll post a page on the website soon.

Here’s a shot of our Hazmat suits in Géneve, Switzerland, during the closing party of the Uniforme exhibition/conference/performance/workshop. Here you can find a gallery of pics from the exhibition which opened on October the 1st in Espace Temporaire. Among the artists featured: Plotki – Nomeda&Gediminas Urbonas – Altrajin – Laafia – Pamoyo – Sheena Matheiken & Eliza Starbuck. The suits have been worn by Serpica Naro who was there holding a workshop.

Sarajevo

As one of our Bosnian friends said the tourist attraction in Sarajevo is the war. We might not agree completely but certainly the traces of the conflict are still there. In our impression, Sarajevo is certainly a place worth defending. The city was founded as a market and rest area for the Ottoman traders crossing Bosnia, and it still feels like an oasis, between surprisingly untainted-looking mountains. The old town has islamic architectural elements, following the course of the Miljacka river.

The valley widens and an Austro-Hungaric and then a Socialist neighborhood appear.

Sarajevo is full of places you have the impression of having visited before. Most of these places were the theatre of horrible massacres during the siege, such as the market or the parliament building. Power of the media.

To be short and to spare you all the poetic justice, Sarajevo is also the place where we ate the best Balkan food in the whole region, and where we found some of the nicest people we’ve met in our trip.

Mostar

Again a fucked up place. Mostar had an economy and a society before the war, but the conflict took all this away. Mostar has been shelled by the Yugoslav national army, by the Serbs, by the Croats and by the Bosniaks alike.

The result is a place full of bulletholes with a town centre (and a famous bridge) totally rebuilt with the help of EU, UN and of the former warring states. The main income of Mostar now comes from tourism and this has fractured the social fabric even more. Nonetheless the rebuilt centre is still a jewel of architecture and the surroundings are marvellous.

One of these marvellous places is the Darvish monastery at the source of the river Buna. The river is carsic and exits a huge natural cave on the mouth of which a delectable Sufi Tekke, Vrelo Bune, has been built.

Leaving Mostar

Right after mostar you enter the Croatian influence area of Bosnia, the partition of Bosnia in two confederated sovereign entities after the war has left the ethnic croats without a fatherland, and it shows. The place is replete with chequered flags and Croatian nationalist slogans even today.

In order to reach Dubrovnik (which we never did anyway) you have to exit Bosnia, enter Croatia and travel on the coast southwards, until you reach Neum. Neum is the only kilometre of coast that Bosnia owns, it has two customs stations on either side bordering croatia and it’s a sprawling mass of concrete reaching down to the sea.

Split

Split is split between two Splits. One is the city centre, built by Romans as the Palace of Diocletianus, conquered by the Venetians and turned into a commercial port and then held by the Croats against an overwhelming Ottoman empire pushing from inland. The centre is layered and it’s an architectural folly. It still shows its Roman heritage very well but intermingled with Austro-Hungarian, Venetian and Slavic architectural elements. The Palace is most beautiful when the tourists are asleep.

The other Split is a Socialist metropolis, one of many, mad for its Haiduk football team but surrounded by splendid waters and islands and beaches. There we took our last seasonal bath before boarding….

The ferry

The ship to Ancona was full of italian pilgrims, on the way back from the marian sanctuary of Međugorje, Bosnia. Still unrecognised by the catholic church, Međugorje is the place where the Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to a group of six teenagers. Of these six three are still claiming to experience marian visitations every day. Međugorje is visited every year by hundreds of thousands of catholic believers.

The ferry was full of catholic imagery, it had a chapel with the sacred idol of our Lady of Međugorje constantly guarded by two praying nuns. It also had almost no seats, so we had to sleep on the floor, in between the praying pilgrims.

Skopje is pretty much fucked up, an earthquake in 1963 has leveled the city and triggered a feel-good socialist effort of brutalist reconstruction which has turned most of the town in a grid of concrete highrises, all the same and pretty much dull.
The old Stone Bridge still marks the division of Skopje into two influence areas. South the Soviet-style Slavic Macedonian area, North the Ottoman style Albanian Macedonian area.

During our stay there we’ve met a curious figure, a certain Nicola, a shady former alcoholic from Italy. What makes him peculiar is the fact that he’s a former alcoholic that drinks. And much for that matter. How he manages to pull this off we still don’t know.
We were housed in a Student House, the Pelagonija Studentskij Dom. When we first got there, on August 31st Pelagonija was full of Dada installations, such as a pile of dripping and broken WCs in the main hall, a mountain of drawers on each storey landing and so on, the quantitative and classificatory nature of these artworks escaped our comprehension.
On the next day, probably following central committee directives, the artworks were removed.

In Pelagonija we experienced slight discomforts such as: psychedelic tiling in bathrooms, Dictyoptera visitations, perforation of our buttocks by mattress springs, view of ectopically decorated christmas trees from our bedroom window, lousy italian music at wee hours and the warmest mess room. Ever.
After a few days of senseless partying we finally found a band which played at least a song we liked. Actually a cover of Kraftwerk’s Das Modell. We had to seriously threaten them of throat slitting in order to extend the performance of that particular song of two mere minutes.

Exploring Pelagonija’s corridors we found a room inhabited by three Austrian madmen. They like to call themselves Krafftmalerei and they also like to bury themselves in their dirty hostel room for ages while repeating industrial mantras and recording each other.

The youngest component of this collective has allegedly murdered a Dutch pizza delivery man while under the influence of “magic mushrooms”.

In his words: “HE VAS IN DE MÜD OF KILLING ME”
LC: “and what did you do?”
A: “I killd him bevoor”.

Matka Lake

Matka lake (sorry croatian link) is a lake that shouldn’t be there, a lake that owes its extistence only to the sturdy Yugoslav hydroelectric industry. Its main attraction is supposed to be the boat trip in the caves, but the water level was so low that the boats hung from the mountainsides like dead ducks. The dam is pretty nice and it has been a pillar of our new approach to tourism, we like to call it infrastructural tourism.

Tetovo

Tetovo is the unofficial Albanian capital of Macedonia. You will not find any sign of a macedonian off-colour japanese war flag there, neither will you find cyrillic script signage. Only two-headed eagles and a lot of ümlauts.

People in Tetovo live a peaceful life of commerce, we must say that the market is much more colourful and rich than the bazaar in Skopje.

While we were there we visited the Arabati Baba Teḱe, a former Bektashi Sufi Darvish monastery. The history of this monastery is very interesting. During the Tito rule it was converted to casino+art gallery+restaurant and hotel. After the fall of Yugoslavia it was taken back by the few surviving Bektashi (an alcoholic mystic Shiite Islamic sect) and turned into a Tekke (monastery) again.

During the unrest in Kosovo, Sunni Albanian elements took over the Tekke, jailed the old chief Darvish into a wooden blue tower (with the excuse of a contagious illness) and turned the complex into a Sunni mosque and islamist centre.

We were greeted there by a stout security guard, he was very kind to us and showed us the facilities, when we parted, after the customary photo-op he told us he had been there, on the gate tower, shooting Macedonians by the dozen. He introduced himself as a member of UÇK. We bid farewell in order not to compromise our micronation’s neutral status.

Another funny character on the premises was watering a cemetery ground, he had keen memories of the Italian Fascist domination of Albania, we didn’t, but nevertheless he was a lovely old man.

Ohrid

In southern Macedonia there lies Ohrid, both a lake and a lakeside town. Ohrid lake is the seasonal home of the critically endangered European eel, which migrates from the distant Sargasso Sea to this remote place in order to reproduce. The Ohrid lake has crystalline waters, slightly tainted by the recent massacre of Bulgarian citizens, drowned after their boat sunk under their recently acquired capitalist weight. In Ohrid we had our first taste of fish in a month, not fish from the lake anyway, because overfishing has depleted the stock of the even rarest Ohrid trout.

In Ohrid we experienced the hospitality of a fine Macedonian family, the quality of their friendship, their propolis flavoured rakija and their tasty tomatoes still bring us to tears.

End of the Biennale

We removed our artwork and fled Macedonia to reach Sarajevo, Bosnia. Our next stop.

On the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (actually the serbian sovereign region, Republika Srpska), we were asked to give five euros in order to cross the vast no-man’s land there. Officially this place is a natural park, called Mokra Gora.

Liquid Cat, E70 252exp 100asa
252 photographic prints, 10×15 cm each, 112×575 cm

Liquid Cat has shot a full 36 expositions roll of 35mm film for each of the seven stages of its journey by car to Skopje, starting from Florence and touching Trieste, Ljubljana, Celje, Zagreb, Beograd and Niš.

For the whole trip Liquid Cat has maintained a purely touristic and amateurish outlook, developing and printing in one-hour labs along the way.

The film rolls have been sold in advance to collectors and friends of Liquid Cat in order to cover part of the expenses of the trip. The buyers of the rolls don’t know which photos they are going to receive.

We prepare to leave Serbia for the Republic of Macedonia, where we’ll find a different (or maybe two different) people, a different (or maybe two) language, a different currency, but will we find a different cuisine? The answer in the next post.