Meandering Through the Sites of Naive Yearly

This is the last piece in our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series, and the talks from last year, here.

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Upon re-reading the notes my sister and I took after our initial call with Kristoffer Tjalve, I immediately realized that they contain something quite precious. The lightly crumbled A4 paper sheet folded in half was meant to merely contain practicalities, desires, and concrete ideas for Naive Yearly’s 2024 conference space, but instead became a container for beautiful intuitions and poetic questions that still resonate with me over half a year later. The words accumulated messily on that sheet are now part of my vocabulary of thinking about spaces, gatherings, and conferences in general. There are jottings about coffee and herbal tea, scrawled sentences about collective dreaming, and more practical reminders to check in with firefighters about renting some benches. There are also musings about how to reclaim spaces for conferences. This intertwinement of concreteness and immateriality — of wide questions and basic needs — is a reminder of how to dream, imagine, plan, and realize things in general: a methodology of practicalities and poetry. 

Robida, the collective that I’m part of, was invited by Kristoffer to participate in the second edition of Naive Yearly, not as guest speakers but as site caretakers. The Fužine castle in Ljubljana was to be the location for the conference, a place we already knew well as it hosts the Museum of Architecture and Design of Ljubljana with which Robida has collaborated multiple times. The proposal came with Kristoffer’s desire to domesticate the space a bit, or at least inhabit it for the one-day conference – to imagine some soft spatial interventions for the castle’s inside spaces, courtyard, and garden, in order to integrate them with Naive Yearly’s narrative. 

Beyond a connection to Slovenia and to the site of the conference, Kristoffer also wanted to collaborate with our collective because in the previous edition of Naive Yearly, Benjamin Earl presented Robida’s website in his lecture on site-specific coding. The year prior, Ben had, together with Kirsten Spruit, designed and coded our website while living for a period with us in Topolò/Topolove, the small village in the mountains between Italy and Slovenia where Robida is based. How can real sites shape websites? They began to ask during their stay. How can websites be placeful and therefore reflect the places where they were coded and designed from? 

In our case, these questions were particularly important since the village — how to inhabit it, its complex history, and its abandoned landscape — is central in Robida’s practice, projects, and programs. Robida is a collective that works and lives in a village of 25 inhabitants, at the end of the road, surrounded by the forest. We work from and in relation to Topolò, letting the place leak into our curatorial and editorial projects and inspire the pedagogical programs. Topolò is where the collective dwells the whole year round, hosting designers and researchers (who frequently become friends) and sharing with them our everyday lives, our houses, and our questions. How can we inhabit ruins – physical ruins, such as houses and abandoned landscapes and cultural ruins, too, such as a slowly dying language and its belonging culture? How can we be rooted locally while producing publications and cultural programs that circulate widely? We include friends in defining these questions with us and answering them. We walk with them through the landscape, which is elusive but contains traces of past histories. We meet elderly people, explore personal photo archives, open up community spaces, read aloud while weeding paths, make books and schools, and throw village parties. Ben and Kirsten tried to translate their experience of Topolò into a website that speaks (among other things) of Topolò: their everyday encounters with the place and its microlandscapes. This relation between sites and websites, between digital and physical space, between what is suggested and what is experienced — this was also part of the reason behind our invitation to work with Kristoffer on Naive Yearly. 

When going back to the notes we took during that first call with Kristoffer, where practical details are riddled with poetry (or maybe vice versa), I notice a succession of verbs: to experience, to retell, to reclaim, to suggest, to enter, to dismantle, to mark, to hold, to sit. They are frequently accompanied by how to questions — conceptual wonderings that became our main guiding principle while imagining the spaces for the conference: how to suggest things, rather than teach them; how to retell what you see in a place; how to enter a state of enchantment; how to dismantle everything in one day; how to mark a stage; how to hold attention.

The various moments of the conference would take place in four main spaces: the social space of the courtyard, the inner room for the presentations, the garden near the river, and a corridor connecting the courtyard and the presentation room. When imagining these spaces and planning the soft interventions they would require, we thought about how the participants would make them adaptable to their different needs. We asked ourselves how they would move through them, and how much effort the spaces should require from people to inhabit them, even if just for one day, even if just for one hour.

When the day of the conference finally arrived, everyone started out gathered in the castle’s courtyard. The beautiful outdoor space is surrounded by white walls that are covered with red and green ivy. The three meals served between talks would also take place in the courtyard, so alongside the walls overgrown with creepers, we placed long tables, which we borrowed from the nearby fire station. We dressed the tables with cream-white tablecloths that we sewed with an orange hem. On top of those, we placed vases with flowers we picked on our drive between Topolò and Ljubljana. We thought a lot about this connection between the two sites: including Robida in Naive Yearly also meant bringing Topolò to Ljubljana. Our journey between here and there became important. We avoided highways and instead reached Ljubljana by driving on mountain roads, through beautifully tended rural landscapes, small villages, and forests, often without meeting other cars. On the way we stopped on the side of the road, wandered in still flowering fields, and gathered flowers to be placed on tables. 

On the day of the conference, people traveled back and forth between the courtyard and the room inside the castle where most of the talks were being held. It was a simple black space with black chairs. During planning, the transition between the light and convivial courtyard atmosphere and the dark inside room became one of our main focuses. To reach the presentation room, people had to cross a long, empty, not very beautiful hall. Kristoffer imagined it as a spiritual passage, a space which would somehow accompany the shift from the liveliness of the courtyard to the focus required in the dark room. How does one enter a state of enchantment? 

We wanted to avoid this spiritual passage being housed within an empty corridor, so we brought in textiles, sounds, and smells. We hung tall curtains to break the strong longitudinality of the room, and with them created a more playful, soft, and lighter space. The curtains were special: In another homage to Topolò, we sewed ten of them with pieces of old bed sheets donated to us by the inhabitants of the village and nearby. Renato, Maria, Antonella, Nadia, Luciana, Lidia, and Andreina came to us with bags of old sheets they didn’t need anymore. The majority of them were threadbare but embroidered by hand. We made a collage out of them, combining different materials, weaving techniques, and shades of whites. When we hung them in the space, they filtered the light coming in from the four big windows beautifully. Throughout the day, the sun moved around the castle and the curtained room was tinted with a pinkish light, a yellow light, and closer to dusk, a light that was almost grey. Because the windows of the corridor face the river Ljubljanica, which runs alongside the castle, we left them open for the entire day. The small waterfalls under the castle flooded the room with a strong noise, and the breeze made the curtains move. Reflected light shimmered on the walls. At the beginning of the conference, we lit an incense smelling of wood and mint. 

After lunch, the conference participants descended towards the river in a small garden, rarely used by the museum, to read and write about dreaming and listen to sounds. While most of the talks took place inside of the conference room, the two “screenless talks” took place outside on this site. We walked down there together, carrying the benches that we’d sat on during lunch, and collectively made space for our next session. The space was beautiful and rough: a small lawn with a big tree in a corner overlooking the river, ivy growing on the fence defining its edge. The sound of the river’s waterfalls dominated everything, sometimes making it difficult to hear the voice of the speakers, but also allowing us to fall into a state of time-suspension and immersion.

After the two outdoor talks, we went back to the courtyard, had some dried fruits and warm tea, and finished the day with the last two talks back in the conference room. While those were finishing, Robida started to dismantle the space we built the morning before, folding the table cloths, bringing the tables back to the firefighters station, and collecting all the flowers we previously distributed in the small vases into a big bundle, which we gifted to Kristoffer — a symbol of the “wayside flowers” he gathers in his newsletter, Naive Weekly.

The participants of Naive Yearly chatted in small groups in the courtyard while the sun was slowly setting. They would later go to Tivoli park while we would go back home, through the same meandering roads, crossing small villages, forests and pastures. We would pass by darkened grass fields where we had just that morning picked the flowers. And in the middle of the night, after having met rabbits, deer, and martens along the road, we would arrive back to Topolò. 

There were a few other wayside flowers that we carefully gathered during the conference, and later dried to preserve them for the future: notes around how temporary places can be as meaningfully imagined and built as those to which we dedicate long gestures of care and maintenance; sketches for how to approach projects spontaneously; a list of elements that build spaces of comfort, such as smells, the sound of the river, flowers, specific movements of the air, collectively moved benches, a vase of sunflowers, and shadow; annotations on the rhythmic cadence of a conference’s moments; suggestions on the right balance between definition (of time, space, rhythm) and looseness (of conversations, pauses, meetings).