There’s a reason people find themselves compulsively hooked on “House,” and it’s little surprise you can build an entire empire on the kicks afforded by a “CSI.” Both have their origins in Sherlock Holmes and his ongoing adventures with his trusted friend, Dr. John Watson. These two characters have been played on film more times by more people than any other literary creations, and the basic formula has been bent and twisted so many times, in so many ways, that most audiences have no idea what the “real” Sherlock Holmes is like. They base their knowledge of the character on a few surface details, and they’ve been quite vocal about how upset they are by the way Guy Ritchie and Joel Silver and Robert Downey Jr. are “ruining” the character.

Only… they’re not.

In fact, I’d say “Sherlock Holmes” represents not a radical reinterpretation of the character, but instead a nearly revolutionary return to the genuine pulp roots of what Doyle originally envisioned. No matter how beloved the stories have become, and no matter how much technical skill Doyle brought to the table (quite a bit, for the record), his stories were pulp adventure that followed a rigorous formula. It’s little wonder they have been adapted or reinterpreted for film so many times, since the rules were so clearly laid out over the course of the stories he wrote, and the archetypes so clearly defined. What’s amazing is how much they changed in what are now thought of as the “classic” film versions, while here, they’ve reverted to the text as much as possible and suddenly it seems to the general public like they’ve reinvented Holmes. I don’t think most audiences will care, though, because what Guy Ritchie has done, working with a small army of screenwriters and a team of dedicated producers, is tap into the pure pulp adventure spirit of the stories in a way that should leave audiences worn out from being entertained.

–Drew McWeeny, Motion Captured

2006 © Bostan Alexander

The healthy have never had patience with the sick, nor, of course, have the sick ever had patience with the healthy. This fact must not be forgotten. For naturally the sick make far greater demands than the healthy, who, being healthy, have no need to make such demands. The sick do not understand the healthy and the healthy do not understand the sick. This conflict often proves fatal, because ultimately the sick cannot cope with it, and the healthy naturally cannot cope with it either, with the result that they often become sick themselves. It is not easy to deal with a sick person who suddenly returns to the place from which he was wrenched by sickness, and the healthy usually lack the will to help him: they constantly play at being good Samaritans, without actually being good Samaritans or wanting to be, and because it is only a feint, it merely harms the sick person and does not benefit him. In reality, a sick person is always alone, and whatever help he gets from outside nearly always proves merely vexatious. A sick person needs the most unobtrusive help, the kind of help the healthy cannot give. Through their essentially selfish pretense of helping him they succeed only in harming him and making everything harder for him, not easier. Most of the time the sick are not helped, but merely vexed, by their helpers. When a sick person returns home, however, he cannot afford any vexation. Should he point out that he is being vexed rather than helped, he will at once be rebuffed by those who are ostensibly helping him; he will be accused of arrogance and boundless selfishness when in fact he is only resorting to the ultimate self-defense. When a sick person returns hom, the healthy world receives him with ostensible kindness, ostensible helpfulness, ostensible self-sacrifice, but its kindness, helpfulness, and self-sacrifice, when put to the text, turn out to be a sham, and one does well to forgo them. (…)

The hypocrisy practiced by the healthy toward the sick is extremely common. Basically the healthy want no more to do with the sick, and they are put out if a sick person - one who is gravely sick - suddenly reasserts his claim to health. The healthy always make it particularly difficult for the sick to regain their health, or at least to normalize themselves, to improve their state of health. A healthy person, if he is honest, wants nothing to do with the sick; he does not wish to be reminded of sickness and thereby, inevitably, of death. He wants to stay with his own kind and is basically intolerant of the sick. It has always been made difficult for me to return from the world of the sick to the world of the healthy. While a person is sick, the healthy shun him and cast him off, in obedience to their instinct for self-preservation. Then suddenly this person who has been shed and has meanwhile ceased to matter reappers and claims his rights. Naturally he is at once given to understand that basically he has no rights. As the healthy see it, the sick have forfeited whatever rights they once had. Their sickness has robbed them of their rights and thrown them upon the charity of the healthy. When a sick person, having ceded the place that he once occupied by right, suddenly demands its restitutions, the healthy regard this as an act of monstrous presumption. (…) A gravely sick person who returns home must be treated with gentleness and consideration. But this is difficult, and therefore rare. The healthy immediately make him feel he is an outsider and no longer one of them, and while pretending that this is not so, they do all in their power to repulse him.

– Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew

2.
Misprejudices self-correct automatically. The first thing one notices is the thing one hasn’t been told in advance. For example, how thin and tattered Berlin’s urban fabric is. This is a rare European city that is yet to be stitched back together after the World War II. While most cities have grown over their war holes and gaps, reconnected historical street patterns and traditional pedestrian flows, Berlin is still in bits and bobs. It is not normal. A normal European city layers competing kinds of order, overlapping intentions: a majestic vista here transects a medieval neighbourhood there; an excellent metro cuts through a tight, walkable centre. It features a semiotic excess: regal triumph over the colonies specked with modernist rationality bordering 21st-century cool blending into the preserved history for we were all working class once. Berlin, on the contrary, is an urbanistic hodge-podge, a compendium of planning errors, everything we know it’s bad, not dissimilar to an Australian city. Berlin is competing centres separated by kilometres of thin urban fabric, light industry in the most central places, vacant sites not even broadly landscaped into parks, multiple airports, enormous warehouses separated by large empty spaces. There are large parts of Berlin, including the most central, like Alexanderplatz, that have no urbanistic idea worth keeping, that appear to have been built as a failed compromise between budgeting, marketing, transport and political constraints, not a single one actually satisfied.

This should result in a textbook fiasco. Instead, a kind of exhilarating chaos emerges, unlike any European city could possibly generate, with its main pedestrian shopping strips crowned by a cathedral, its waterfront promenades and Jugendstil cafes. These cities are built in the image of a society in which everything has its place. Berlin, very clearly, has no society. Just little clusters of like-minded people here and there, grouped around a couple of fast-food joints and a U-Bahn station. Going out is like going out in Melbourne, or even Perth. One walks the same street, and goes in and out of vibrancy, commerce, hipness. Unter den Linden is a historical monument, not a promenade, and it leads precisely nowhere. Friedrichstrasse is too cramped and short and trafficky to be anything more than a passage, despite Zara and Dussmann trying to make it look like just any place for office workers to shop afterhours. Multiple competing boulevards are flanked by kebab stalls and ruined by the Underground growing overground. I can list you the reasons, just in case you wondered: the Wall going through the Mitte/Kreuzberg, paralysing the former heart and resulting in double everything: train stations, airports; Cold War rewiring of traffic on both sides in order to make roundabout sense; the poverty of the former capital preventing swift reconstruction. But this list is deceiving, because it immediately points to a kind of historical wreckage that you will think you understand, and imagine an image from the collective imagery which will be beautiful, but incorrect. You will arrive, like me, and find a city which is neither grand nor historical: the history it abounds with is recent; fifty years; eighty years. And the grandness is amusing and macabre together, like a very bad joke. Berlin has grand patches (Brandenburg or the ˙Vőlksbűhne), but the overall effect is sort of homely, like Canberra. When it is a stage, it is without an audience. Again, historical reasons may explain why the city is happy to remain in theatrical tatters.

3. No photos of Berlin are ever right, so I settled on my favourite photo of my favourite
Berlin artist. Hands up if you recognise this man.

4. Whichever way, in the absence of society the city is bustling. And here the other fallacy: that Berlin is a vibrant, happening city. Whatever makes Berlin interesting comes from the fact that precisely the opposite is the truth: Berlin seems to be constantly failing to happen. I notice, again, because I was told otherwise. Where I imagined a sort of European Beijing, a construction site peppered with designer stores and people in overtight jeans wearing wanker hats, it is more of an empty lot awaiting brownfield revitalization. Its main attributes, twenty years later, still being a vast oversupply of land to population and very low rents, it attracts not entrepreneurs but people who like not having to work too much. And this is the crucial difference between Berlin and a magnet for hipster-wannabes such as Melbourne (geographical similarity breeds easy comparisons). Melbourne is a typical product of boosterism, a collectively sustained state of belief in its own grandeur. The city government, the restaurant critics, the emerging jewellery makers and those who move down in droves to read Three Thousand a bit closer to the source, all wish Melbourne’s status as a cool city – otherwise, what would remain of their lives in overly expensive Brunswick shacks or overheated Fitzroy apartments? In Berlin, instead, only Kreuzberg seems to have achieved a mythical status. For however many starstruck art posers like me try to elbow their way into the city, they seem to be forever outnumbered by Turkish immigrants, old people enjoying the benefits of rent control, and the drug-fried who are here for the three-day techno parties. The highest percent of unemployed among German cities. Insalubrious and unwholesome and uncool, much of it. Berlin wears its dagginess with a shrug. It’s the cheap rents that seem to matter more.

As much as I doubted that the city of Berlin was as terminally bankrupt as is often said, it has been hard to remain sceptical when the snow freezes over uncleaned footpaths, resulting not just in the city-wide state of dangerous (that term so loved by Australians, who live in a permanent search for catastrophic perils to nip in the bud), but in constant obstacle to movement. People slide over metres of ice, occasionally falling, perpetually stumbling. And here another sweet side of Germany emerges: as much as they constantly apologise for their own, well-documented love of rules and regulations, they are certainly a couple of notches more unruly than the larrikin and anti-authoritarian Australians. When I ask about the elderly handling the icy footpaths, Ingo asks: “What, you think old people aren’t able do walk in winter?” When the ticket inspectors raid the undeground train, half of my carriage is unscrupulously ticketless. Squats still everywhere, smoking indoors, and memories of a Wall coming down. On the other hand, only Turks and I cross on the red light.

The combination of relaxed slowness and elephantine change, of poverty and big projects – my friends here showed me a book on No Wave, and that’s what Berlin now looks like, like New York circa 1974 – means that everything that is imaginable may be possible. Not always in the perfect way (which is what makes Andersen’s diary entry so apt), the cleanest and neatest, but it may be there, just inside a courtyard or underground or some distant U-Bahn stops away. Berlin is a New World, right in the centre of the Old.

5.The final thing nobody tells you is how happy one is in Berlin. It is a delirium of sorts, brought upon by the sights, the history, the people, the softly dry German humour, the abundance of good theatre and the constant invitations to go see things and do things, but primarily by the ridiculous, disorienting cold, in which a day counts as warm if gloves are not strictly necessary for outdoor survival. Getting indoors after an hour in this cold makes one’s nose run, blood rush headwards, and fills you with the adrenaline of survival, of achievement. Not dying on the ice is a feat which brings on constant self-congratulation. And I have never been as hungry as I am in Berlin. Every few hours, regardless of how many cooked meals I’ve had that day, I need to refuel on fast food, and no crap cuisine has ever tasted so unarguably good as the wűrste I find on these expeditions, including the ubiqitous Currywurst (’curry’ in this case the honorific bestowed upon ketchup sprinkled with curry powder), the sort of item I would avoid in a wide circle anywhere else. I have even found myself (incredulous) at a Burger King one night at 4am, eating ‘chilly cheese nuggets’ (certainly the worst idea in all of culinary history). I keep chocolate on me at all times, to get me through particularly long Alleen. When Rene spoke of the Canadian camaraderie, I couldn’t muster any feeling more positive than Schadenfreude, but now I understand. This weather is an opiate.

6. It is tempting to imagine that this state of suspension will last, that Berlin will remain the only hobo capital in Europe. Common sense suggests otherwise, but the sheer size of its voids makes you wonder. And then, its own history is one of fits and starts, not of accumulating riches. Of all the European cities, this is the only one in which so many things feel acceptable, from shabby clothes to indulging one’s sexual fetishes in public. Berlin smiles at you, sort of, and invites you in because there is no competition, the stakes are too low. It is likeable city, but cool. A rare thing, that one.

This video will cheer you up even if there is no reason in the world to be anything but miserable. Quite something.

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Clã - Competência Para Amar:

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Against horizontal multiculturalism - by which we intend a socio-cultural activity oriented towards minorities, or a decorative employment of mainly non-European expressive cultures (Brook, Barba, Mnouchkine), a moussaka which tries to convince us, with a bit of Indian make-up, majestic Japanese costumes and roars of two to three dark-skinned actors, that it is engaging with the rest of the world. But the methods of composition and employment of these piled up sensations/sensationalisms are still intact in their Westernness. In contrast to this - let’s say it calmly - colonial approach, artists of the so-called vertical multiculturalism, working on the transects of different cultures, struggling to break through the simultaneity of different cultural identities with a sort of schizoanalytical approach, are building a unique, innovative art. Such an actor manages to hold, within his mental habitus, multiple different archaic combinations and ways of being while his body emanates the gestic essence of modern theatre, which gives a vertiginous dimension to the internal, ritual element. The same can be said for the above-described directorial interventions.

–Gordana Vnuk, Pogled iznutra

“…as time marches forward, hipsters seem to be quite adaptable. When they were first identified as a demographic, circa 1998, the two most dominant hipster aesthetics were twee—think Belle and Sebastian, sweater vests, and Ira Glass—and a white trash-chic epitomized by the tattoos and wifebeaters found in Vice magazine. (Greif referred to these two types as “non-aggressives” and “aggressives,” respectively.) Jump forward 10 years, and the latest wave of hipsters have their own trends—beards, “freak folk,” Depression-era chic—all of which communicate: “I take careful care to cultivate an aesthetic, by which I hope you’ll judge me.” The styles have changed, but the overall sensibility of the hipster remains intact.”

“First and foremost, hipsterism is about stuff. It’s the natural byproduct of a consumption-obsessed culture with a thriving middle class. The complete works of Johnny Cash on vinyl. An iPhone packed with apps. Thick-framed glasses without the lenses. Throw in an unwavering certainty that your tastes are superior to everyone else’s, and you’re on your way to establishing a hipster aesthetic.”

“The second element is pastiche, the hodgepodge blending of elements from pop culture to create a sensibility. Whether it be the goofy “post-punk-electro-blog-house” labels associated with hipster music, or the entire film career of Wes Anderson, pastiche is essential to hipsterdom.”

“Finally there’s irony, a knee-jerk way for hipsters to emotionally distance themselves from sincerely appreciating things. While the hipster’s ironic sensibility has always been the subject of ire, pretending to be disaffected isn’t exactly a novel concept among people who are “cool.” ”

–thank you, thank you, thank you Robert Lanham

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“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved… the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.” - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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Image from Estudo-V, a blog which is, against all odds, Lithuanian.

Lisboa is as beautiful as ever: weather very much like Sydney’s, but with a history and a society and a certain gravitas only Portugal has. It has become more popular with tourists, which makes me happy, because it’s finally being recognised as a fine, fine city. Children and old people on the street until the very wee hours, and the abundance of tascas, small restaurants with the wife in the kitchen and the husband on the floor.

“Chorizo is the sundried tomatoes of the last few years in Australia”, I said to my friends, who looked a bit annoyed:

“But there are so many different kinds…”

Vanda and Cisco’s apartment overlooks Tejo, the bridge and the gigantic Christ on the other bank, and being here is wall-to-wall joy. Not good for my smoking habit (the Portuguese smoke like they all have a stash of spare lungs somewhere safe). Not good for my sleeping routine (going to bed before 3am is something I’ve yet to experience in this country of insomniacs). But so good for the soul.

And it’s home. Frankfurt was home already - the familiar taste of bad German coffee and excellent German croissants. (Jet-lagged as I was, I had one croissant but two coffees.) As I move and move around, more places become home, and home becomes larger. The world becomes more familiar, less scary. As I’m putting together my stay in Berlin - populated with strangers artists, urbanists and adventurers - it all looks so easy. (I like to travel. It’s my pirate aspirations. I can bum around for a very long time before I need the reassurance of a bed and a breakfast.)

Most importantly, I’ve found all my niches. The cross-tabulations of interests that look suspiciously outre’ in Melbourne, Victoria, are here legitimate areas of expertise. In Zagreb, I spoke with Sonja, who runs UrbanFestival, a festival of theatre that poses questions about space. Why?

“There was a group of us theatrologists,” says Sonja, “and we figured out that theatre had moved out of the black box, and the most interesting work was all investigating geography, especially urban geography, all over again.”

Initiatives in sustainable urbanism are cropping up all over Europe too, and I see no reason why I wouldn’t be able to find much to do in the years to come. This breadth of creative thinking, of innovation, and the radical reappraisal of the importance of my discipline, are a beautiful thing to trip over at Christmas time.

Add the fact of clothes-shopping (Coco Chanel tops, Italian boots), of abundant superhero movies (the new Sherlock Holmes is my perfect film, and Robert Downey Jr. my unlikely perfect man), of good food and spirits, and wonderful friendships revisited, and it’s something of a perfect time away. I’m being every inch the international woman of mystery and intrigue I’ve always aspired to be. And I am serious. Irony is so 1997.

I will, in the years to come, try to establish a section along the lines of ‘Guerrilla Semiotics Presents…’, a kind of evil twin to 5th Wall’s Critic Watch, with theatre writings notable & worth pointing out.

For now, though, they will remain ‘Bookmarks’, and here is another one. A very dear friend of mine, and a wonderful performer, Petar Sarjanović, on Montažstroj’s Timbuktu (based on Paul Auster), in two versions:

-original: Dresura pobune, pobuna dresure
-and English: The training of rebellion, the rebellion of training

“We have a lot of soul.” I told my perplexed friend. “That’s really the best way of putting it. We’re soulful people.”
“What do you mean by soulful?” he asked diplomatically, being of a race that prides itself on not showing emotion. He would gently remind me, later, that it is an integral aspect of every nationality to be lyrical about its own qualities as a people. “How does this soul manifest?”
“It’s like when you read Dostojevski…” I mumbled.

I couldn’t tell him then, except that it was the opposite of sentimentality, that it was a kind of emotional verticality, a layered depth, and that it explained our proclivity to violence. Aggression as a kind of overflow of soul. It was one of the most attractive things about my people, and as such intangible.

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“You’ve brought us snow!” is an excited message that arrives to me in email, text and person, as I land into a city snowed under. The traffic halts, life slows down, the children are happy and drivers unhappy - the stockphrase of our daily press.

The tram, stops behind another, opens the doors onto the tiny green wedge before the stop itself, now a perfect patch of untrodden white. As I’m getting off, I hear one in a group of men, serious men, between mid-thirties and mid-forties, tell others, pensively but with a smile:
“Hey, let’s throw ourselves into the snow.”

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As I walk into a jewellery store, the shop assistant is showing a set of rings to a lady:
“This one is very particular, isn’t it? I think it would be the best for you, seriously… (pause) Oh, no, not that one, that one is nothing much at all.”

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“I was hoping you’d do something more seasonally appropriate!” is how I greet Dunja, having just snapped a photo of her at the main square, drinking from a bottle of water.
“Ah, right, because nobody drinks water in winter.” she smirks. “I can do an elk for you, if you want.”
“Please.” I say.

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The man on the tram, who kindly held my bag around the corners till he got off at the train station, was eagerly convincing me that he would carry bags for such a beautiful woman to the bus station too, what’s more, to Rijeka itself!, especially since he was homeless and I was clearly homeful (his phrasing), but eh, unfortunately he had some prior commitments to take care of. I said it was OK.

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G has had his first threesome, and I was complaining very loudly that I was never going to get mine, since I was living in a Protestant country now.
“Well haven’t we promised each other one?” he was being very reassuring. “Last year I had a girlfriend, this year you’re committed, but perhaps we’ll be third time lucky.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t sleep with me this time? Is it because my head is like a pumpkin, huh?” it was early days since I had my wisdom tooth removed, and I looked like a farce.
“No, I wouldn’t. Not because you’re not very cute still, but because the vibrations might make some permanent damage to your jaw.” he grabbed my hand reassuringly.
“You are a disgusting pig.”
“Maybe, but I’m also full of soul.” he winked, and I loved him like only Croats love their friends.

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And finally, there was the newspaper article my sister showed me.

I am my own grandfather

We have received a letter in which an unknown young man has recently attempted to avoid military service

Dear Mr Minister, allow me to explain my situation in hope that You may be able to solve my case. I am currently awaiting my call for the military service. I am 23 years old, I am married to a 47-year-old widow who has a 26-year-old daughter. This daughter is married to my father. Marrying my wife’s daughter, my father also became my son-in-law. Meanwhile, my wife is my father’s mother-in-law, and my wife’s daughter is my stepmother. In January, my wife and I have become parents. Our son is a brother to my father’s wife, and my father’s son-in-law. Simultaneously, this child is also my step-uncle, because he is my stepmother’s brother. In May my father’s wife gave birth to a boy. This boy is my brother, because he’s a son of my father’s. At the same time, the child is also my grandson, because he’s my wife’s daughter’s son. Therefore, I am my grandson’s brother, and since someone’s husband is also the father of this child, I am also the stepfather of my wife’s daughter, and her son’s stepbrother. It is therefore clear that I am my own grandfather. I hope I have explained everything. I hope, sir Minister, that You will find it appropriate to relieve me of the duty of military service, because the law states that sons of more than two generations (that is, grandfather and grandson) cannot do the military service at the same time.

Thank You for understanding.

The response of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Croatia followed two weeks later. The report stated:

“The person is permanently relieved of military duty due to suspected psychological shortcomings and mental instability which are a result of a chaotic family situation.”

Drawing and Painting class in ŠPUD.

ŠPUD is Škola Za Primjenjenu Umjetnost i Dizajn, or School of Applied Arts and Design. In the Croatian high school system, divided between the general academic gimnazije, and academically much more lax trade schools, ŠPUD is an oddity. A lair of self-selected weird kids, of an academically suspect, but artistically rigorous curriculum. Not least, it generates a very strong sense of belonging.

“This is the best school ever!” they hail me in the Interior Architecture department. “Well, in Croatia at least.”

Some final works in Grafika.

Chess set made in glass (?) by a student in Interior Architecture.

I am here as a delegate from Australia, and as my sister’s sister. She introduces me to each one of her classmates, and each one shakes my hand. They are finishing up their semester duties, and spend most of their day at school. The school is a maze of classrooms, lockers, bathrooms, workshops and exhibition spaces. They stay overtime and hang around. I come and go; nobody asks (”With your lip ring and hair and camera, you look like one of us”, the students are adamant). Some classrooms have loud music coming out; all the doors are open. I snoop.

Girls bouncing balls during class time.

The graphic design teacher finally comes into the class.

“Am I allowed to be here?” I ask. The girls laugh.
“Just don’t try to take his photo. He won’t like it.”

I am photographing their work, hopping around while he is inspecting their final drawings. The students are sending text messages, talking, arguing, and pulling out their maths homework. The teacher gets to Dora as she is in the middle of an animated conversation with her friend Jasna, and pulls her back onto her chair, holding her by the shoulders.

“Lean back.” he instructs her with a deep voice. “Relax. Breathe. Di-a-phragm!”
She giggles. He looks at me.
“Good morning!” I say. “I am from the Ministry!”
“Good.” he nods. “I’m from New Zagreb.”
We shake hands, too.

Dora’s pencil drawing, next to the original.

Illustration homework.

Discarded jewellery.

Sopija (Josipa) + Hitchcock.

Students during class.

“When’s your recess?” I ask, waiting for a fag break, and unsure of the high school time-table.
“Oh, it’s almost over…” the girls grumble, reassuringly.
“Shall we go out for a fag while we can?”
“Oh god, not now!” they exclaim. “Wait until the recess is over. The first years will be throwing snowballs at everyone!”
Only once the recess is over, am I allowed to go out with them.

Croatian National Theatre, the stronghold of mediocre performance and a very fine building, outside the school window.

A ‘general’ classroom, the sort I had in my non-artistic school. The board, cryptically, says “black and white technique”, followed by “socio-political situation in Croatia” and “struggles between feudalism and the bourgeoisie”.

The next day, I visit the girls in their Graphic Techniques class. They are doing their final linocuts. I like Dora’s.

“No, it’s crap!” she answers. “We have to make five, and this is zero. Zero! An attempt!”
What’s wrong with it?
“Everything! The outline isn’t clear, it shouldn’t have these smudges, and the colour should be more consistent!” she is fixing her design, very concentrated. “I will probably have to stay in for the rest of the day.”
The teacher walks through, and looks at one of the finished works:
“This is very good. The colour is solid, the parquetry floor has turned out great. It wouldn’t hurt if you had more going one here”, she points at the centre of the print, a solid dark bookshelf, “it’s very monotone. This guitar in the centre doesn’t do anything for the composition. But the rest is very good.”
She leaves again.

Graphic Techniques class, with the best linocuts exhibited.

Textured surface that used to be a desk.

Despite the complete lack of disciplinary effort (at the parents’ meeting the day before, some parents complained about teachers leaving the classroom so often), student life is strongly ordered. There doesn’t seem to be more than a very basic code of behaviour in place, but the amount and the level of work they are expected to accomplish is demanding enough to structure their life very firmly around the school. Apart from nine academic subjects (Croatian, English, Music, Mathematics, History, Geography, P.E., History of Art and a choice of Religion/Ethics) they have professional subjects, which vary depending on the department. Grafika (which can be very, very loosely translated as ‘Print’), Dora’s department, has six: Painting and Drawing, Graphic Techniques, Graphic Design, Illustration, Script (which will be followed on by Typography in the years to come) and IT, in which they learn to work with design software.

Final works in the Typography class.

Grafika is an elite department, I am told, and so is Arhitektura (which is really Arhitektura Interijera, or Interior Architecture). Theirs is a separate, small building, and my guide is a charming young man called by his surname. (Generally speaking, I find these children both charming and interesting: they are funny, articulate, and independent, which is more than I can say for most Melbourne University students, many years older. During our conversations, I never feel particularly older.)

Final years’ graduating works.

I am intrigued by the fact they do their technical drawing by hand, which my faculty has abandoned - the fact of which some of my colleagues bemourn. Ivek introduces me to one of his teachers, who confirms that they only start working with AutoCAD in third year (out of four).

“But there is no individuality in computer sketches”, she says. “Hand drawings are artistically much more interesting.”

All architecture and design schools seem to have thriving bulletin- and pinboards. We have more than a few in my office alone, and Ivek’s department is no exception:

“I’M BUSY I’M BUSY I’M BUSY…”; in the hand-written explanation above the photo, the girl lauds some competition she travelled to, saying: “I FINALLY LOST MY… CAMERA :)”

The answer, I suspect, is in the problem-solving nature of design, and the multi-step lateral thinking it requires.

“You know what I’ve realised?” my sister tells me on the street that day. “A designer is actually very much like an inventor. He invents new things to solve problems.”

They are making a simple mortise and tenon. The teacher, needless to say, is not there.

“My Australian audience will be dying to know: do you guys get injured?”
“Yeah! Like, she’s injured now…” says Ivek, hugging his friend.
“Just pinched my finger!” she’s protesting, jumping on the spot and shaking her hand.
“No, really injured?”
“Oh, once a week. Once a week someone cuts themselves.”
“No, really injured. As in, someone cuts their finger off?”
They look at me baffled:
“We pay attention to what we’re doing.”
“I’ve heard it happened once, but to someone from Carpentry, many years ago…” the girl helpfully remembers.

I took a photo of the ‘injured’ girl. She hid her face, but it only made her look more aching.

“Look at my mortise and tenon!” one girl jumps in to show. It’s perfect, compared to Ivek’s, which has also chipped.
“Hers is much better.” I point out.
“Yeah, well, I decided I wouldn’t pay anyone to do it for me.” he pouts at the girl, who starts beating him, with joking anger. As I leave, Ivek is shouting: “I wouldn’t get naked just for homework…!”

Since Grafika is the elite department, their toilet is labelled (in free translation) ‘the most elitest water closet’.