The starting reference of the project Stone Walls: Mark in the Landscape or Oblivious Cultural Memory is heritage of the art of dry stone walling. This type of stone wall construction is made by stacking stones without using any connection material like cement. The dry stone technique, practised in Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2018.
There are different construction methods of dry stone walls: walls made of one row of stone (unjulica), from two rows of stone (duplica) and walls made from two rows of stone with a filling of smaller stones (barbakan).
In Croatia, the project explored dry stone techniques as a tool for artistic expression in the media of land intervention and site-specific practice. The land art interventions were made from natural material found on the locations. Students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb joined with ethnographic students from Zadar University in the project workshop taking part on Pag Island as well as the NGO organisation Dragodid, which is a well known for organising and conducting drywall workshops and doing research of drywall heritage. Each artist was supervised by a member of Dragodid during the construction of their land art installations. In Croatia, after the realization of the land art project, the sites have been defined as a land art trail on the Island of Pag.
The locations for the workshops and interventions were at 3 key places along the Adriatic coast Kožino, Privlaka, National Park Paklenica, Fortica at the island of Pag, Paška vrata all highly frequented locations during the summer months. By placing land art installations in public spaces, and in area which are extremely well visited during the tourist season, the cultural heritage of drywall construction reached wider audiences, through land art tours in the traditional landscape on the Croatian Adriatic coast.
List of Participants in Croatia:
Luise Kloos, Josip Zanki, Ivan Fijolić, Mark Cullen, Erwin Lackner, Silvia Grossmann, Maria Schneider, Gerlinde Thuma, Sara Mikelić, Maja Flajsig, Dorian Pacak, Laura Stojkoski
Mark Cullen 