Ljubljana, Day 2

In which we make connections

A spinning donut with spiky limbs spins and whirls on the screen, and Daniel Murray is talking about learning to love without possession. In any other context this juxtaposition would be jarring, but this is Naive Yearly and this, like so many things today, and so many things in the evening and day after, just make sense.

You truly had to be there.

I meet J and S in a hotel lobby where we agreed to catch a ride together to MOA, the museum of architecture and design (Muzej za arhitekturo in oblikovanje). The car is late, and so like all men of a certain age our conversation drifts to how young all the other participants are, especially the speakers. Imagine, we say, being so focused at that age, and we do imagine where that would have taken us, blindly side-stepping how our actual, real-life decisions all brought us here, to Ljubjlana, into the paths of each other.

Our flustered driver interrupts our indulgent revelry—he was not late, but instead dodging angry motorists and determined police officers as he waited outside, running back and forth to the hotel “10 minutes ago” and “17 minutes ago” because we were waiting in “the only hotel in Europe without a place to drive up a car”.

As we rocket to MOA he tells us why the iPhone is better than Samsung (they don’t break after 1.5 years), why he moved back to Ljubjlana (unbeatable lifestyle), and how you can walk around at 3am without worry (here he indicates our lack of required worry by moving his hand in a flat line across the top of the dashboard).

Late, we sneak in as Kristoffer delivers opening remarks. What follows is a tidal wave of ideas, concepts, ruminations, visuals. My brain can’t fully process what’s happened before bang we’re onto the next slide, the next speaker. In between we all sit at long tables in MOA’s courtyard, draped with cloths designed by an artist collective, eating food prepared by a last-minute catering team from a different museum.

Everything is communal, connected. You can almost see the threads in the air.

We hear about electric zine maker, interfaces and contamination, marginalia in digital spaces. We absorb satellite data and the deletion of Yugoslavia’s top level domain—and 32000 sites along with it.

We go outside and open a tonescape, walk by the river while various iterations play from our phones, stopping next to each other to combine the sounds.

Later we gather at a bar, the fast friendships from a day of collective enthusiasm making conversation easy. More than one person compares their present feeling to a music festival. Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone has lived multiple lives with frequent career switches and country moves. Some don’t remember how they even heard of the event, but after sharing their story it feels inevitable they’d find it.

Inevitable they’d come.

I remember Metelkova mesto from yesterday, and as the bar announces last call I convince a small group to journey the 15 minutes to the autonomous culture center. Once a military base for two different empires and now a squat, Metelkova feels like what you’d get if the really quiet guy in high school art class’ sketch book was a 3D space.

J, our local guide and somewhat inebriated dad, shepherds us around the back to the place without cover charge where the beer is VERY cheap. It feels like a college party, if you went to college with anarchists and aging punks. Someone gets a round of shots.

Is this why I can feel my brain begging to be turned off? Perhaps. I take my leave, first tapping the top of my phone to everyone else’s which, if you’ve not tried this (iPhone only I think) go ahead and give it a whirl. Technology!

Both the time and my physical state means the conditions are right to try Slovenia’s main street food (and late night life saver), burek. I don’t know what burek is, but they sell it 24 hours a day. In the morning you’ll see construction workers gathered at the stalls. And at 2am, a slightly different crowd.

Burek costs €3 so I order two, assuming, with my Dutch-conditioned mind, they’ll be small. What the man hands me is roughly the size and weight of a kitten. A burek is a wedge of filo pastry, drenched in oil and filled with meat or cheese or spinach or apples or yogurt or…, all hotter than allowed by the laws of thermodynamics. I watch people eat theirs as soon as they get them, and I can’t even look at mine until I get back to the hotel. Somehow after that ten minute walk they feel even hotter.

I don’t think I’ll eat burek again. But sitting there at my small table, head swimming with ideas and ill-fated schnapps, it tastes like one of the best things in the world.