++++ The comparison with a playground is not completely off the mark. The installations which were erected by the tenants of a residential block in Skopje are strongly reminiscent of toys made out of junk. They are in fact really nothing else, even though their function is not only for fun and play, at least not in the sense in which children have fun and play. But a viewing tower made out of junk seats from a bus, a frame for sitting on made of old timber battens and all the other self-made objects in the middle of a settlement in the artist’s home-town reveal a lot about the communicative needs of those living there.
Since here certainly nobody else will worry themselves about how the residential complex could be made a little more friendly, more human, nicer, the residents themselves get involved and that is the way it looks. They put together meeting places, shelters and places for sitting.
The materials which they use for this purpose are scrap metal, old furniture and other junk. And obviously this does not disturb anybody. Everywhere where people set up home and are left to themselves, they start at some time to perform remarkable settlement rituals.
In the residential area in Skopje where the artist, Oliver Musovik, who was born in 1971, lives, they leave their traces in the form of anarchic outgrowths of civilization. Musovik investigates these constructions with the gaze of a criminologist.
The perpetrators themselves are not important for him. He keeps the residents out of his documentary photos. Instead, he researches the habits of his neighbours with a kind of photography of the scene of the crime.
Later on, Musovik gives the pictures captions in which he describes the mood, sketches routines or adds other everyday notes which supplement the picture with the lives of some residents in a settlement in Skopje.
Frankensteiner Hof, Große Rittergasse 103 hoh