Project PHT (Public horse traffic)
Completed on | 1999 |
Category | Other (projects, sкetches, videos, photos, documentary) |
Maznevski’s visionary horizon for a future imaginary and different time, which is engineeringly and aesthetically sound, is confirmed by the conceptual social project for public urban transport, the Project PHT (1999),[Project PHT – Public Horse Traffic.] as a return to the meaning of the slow and fun way of circulating, not just in the transit zones, or the streets of the city of Skopje, but also in the society. In this narrative, the changeability of the meaning of the ordinary life is sketched by the artist as a reversible time progression, conceived through an elaboration of a model (analog photographs) of the contemporary city image. The cultural materialist and critic, Raymond Williams, when analyzing the term or condition industry, suggests that the meaning of this term changed and became a collective notion of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Writing about the wealth of the nations, Adam Smith in 1776 equated this notion with an “institution” as a “body of activity” and not as a “human attribute.”[Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780-1950 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), xi.] The rapid growth of these institutions led to the formation of a new system in 1830, called industrialism, which radically changed the structure of the social system, which also changed at that time. The Industrial Revolution created new patterns according to which serial transformations of production methods take place, implying to some extent the structuring of a “new society” and “culture” as a general state of intellectual development of the society as a whole. The manuscript, or Maznevski’s vocabulary in this artistic form, provokes certain cultural and sociological relations towards the utility and functionality of the industrial product – the urban transport, which is ontologically underlined and redrawn, as a process opposite and contradictory to the capitalist order and its immanent movements and speed. The complexity of the narrative plot is in the artist’s point of view and the methodology through which a particular visualization is addressed and narrated. The documentary nature of the source material, as an index link to reality, is essential to the dialectical ratio occupied by this temporal and spatial juxtaposition of the framed content.
The manipulation through the drypoint technique and retouch used on the selected cut off parts of real landscapes, spaces and urban areas, is a kind of a montage discrepant, and as a radical individualization of the new image, autonomous from the archival material, it generates a semiotic interruption with the source conflictually producing a new meaning.
The authentic two-dimensional sketches for this project (base, cross-section and layout) made on a neutral surface of a 1:24 ratio show precise thoughtfulness of the transport vehicles which are designed functional and purpose-built industrial products aestheticized according to aerodynamic, ergonomic and interior specifics to become a concrete concept proposal that could be a subject to production and reproduction. This narrative scheme reflects the artist’s deep responsibility towards the civilization. He plans and designs a useful item that would meet the human needs. It is not only an industrial design, but an ecological, global, social and culturally ethical concept as well. The redrawing of the concept in a real context on three-dimensional photographs in a 1:1 ratio, suggests moving and dislocation from the area of the presentation into the domain of the real context. Diversifying the content of the source material – the city image – critically and according to the formal expression [détournement], it conceptually [dérive] becomes experimental behavior related to the conditions of the urban society.