The project if walls could tell had one of its venues in the small Croatian town of Kraljevica and involved a group of students, local teenagers, and passersby during a week at the end of April 2025. Solid white walls were constructed on a public square and the local community was invited to leave marks or traces of any kind. At the beginning, participation consisted of a few shy gestures. The white walls were authoritarian as a newly built construction in a public space, but at some point, they began to accumulate marks, which became a clear invitation for everyone who wanted to participate in this shared creation. The walls were filled with overlapping gestures, signs, comments, and drawings and were shown in the Rhizom (K) Gallery space of Frankopan Castle in Kraljevica. This time, the public intervention around the walls was intended as a discussion among a group of curators, artists, and museum directors and later left to the gaze of gallery visitors.

The walls can be described as a metaphor of absorption: opaque surfaces impregnated with invisible layers of sounds, breaths, humidity, and light, absorbing even our thoughts and imaginary projections. They can be seen as a safe barrier that gives us distance and the possibility to contemplate the world behind their impenetrable materiality, creating a sense of proximity through closure.

In the case of the project if walls could tell, we are dealing with a very different concept.

The idea of community is created around the concept of exposure, not only as a gesture of stepping out from the private (in this case institutional or gallery) space, intended as a space with a limited or specialized audience, to the public space of the square (open to every person), but as a carrier of transformative experience. In this case, both participants and the walls are exposed to each other in an asymmetrical relation. Walls act as sculptural displays immersed in the specific location and the community that inhabits the town of Kraljevica. On the other hand, local spontaneous participants are exposed to a newly encountered situation in which they are invited to interact and leave traces in ways they usually do not interact with objects in public space. By interacting with the white walls and leaving messages, participants enter into a complex relation not only with the surface but also with each other, where personal and collective actions are intertwined in unpredictable ways. Sometimes traces are passively accumulated; sometimes they are reactions to one another; and sometimes they are even erased by a new layer of paint. The formal aspect of traces begins to reveal the logic of the participating community as much as its conceptual frame. In the final instance, the whole process of shifts and actions is exposed to the view of gallery audiences or panel participants. Exposure becomes an agent that unites different elements of this complex process and creates relations that can be seen as an attempt to build a different experience of community.

Igor Eškinja (Croatia, 1975.) live and work in Rijeka, Croatia. Eškinja graduated at Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Italy in 2002. Since then he participated in various group exhibitions such as Manifesta 7, Rovereto (2008); Complicity, Rena Bransten gallery, San Francisco (2009); 28 Grafični Biennale, Ljubljana (2009); Dirt, Welcome foundation, London, (2011), Rearview Mirror, Power plant, Toronto, (2011); Ash and Gold – a world tour, Marta Herford, (2012); 2^nd Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg, (2012); 8 ways to overcome space and time, Museum of contemporary art, Belgrade, (2013), T-ht nagrada, MSU, Zagreb (2016.), Every Time A Ear di Soun – Documenta 14 program, Savvy contemporary, Berlin (2017), PRODUCTIVE WORK what is it supposed to be?, Q21, Museums quartier, Vienna, (2018.), Works from the collection, MAXXI, Rome, (2020.) as well as solo exhibitions in: Project for unsuccessful gathering, Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg (2009.), Inhabitants of generic places, Kunstforum, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art-Zagreb (2011), The Day After, Federico Luger gallery, Milano, (2011); Interieur Captivant, MAC/VAL Museum, Vitry, (2012); Quixote, MUWA, Graz,  (2014), Do plants dream…, EPK, Rijeka (2020), Exposures Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021.).