Coincidence wants me to find myself writing these notes precisely on the day when the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, a world heritage site and a universally recog- nised symbol, caught fire and was largely destroyed. Beauty is precious because it is fragile and subject to many transformations that every organism undergoes during its life, even though disastrous events. Instead, it is the image that we have of that work that fixes an apparently eternal icon, despite the fact that the reality constantly denies its persistence in time equal to itself.

The thin gold leaf that ignites with light and the flame that destroys everything share the same shade of light, showing us both beauty and fragility. The extraordi- nary work conducted on the images of the architectural heritage of the city of Pirot by Mirko Stanimirovic reconstructs a new collective imaginary through an operation that works on an absent level, subtly eluding and through photographic images elaborated with the gold leaf to the Byzantine mosaics or to the orthodox icons that, like the ancient faces, isolate the figure by sacralising it and making its face eternal. Through this conceptual operation, the author brings to attention the buildings be- longing to the architectural heritage of the city of Pirot as isolated subjects from their context, from which they rise like a gallery of portraits and timeless figures that are fixed in the imaginary in the form of icons, in the original sense of the term rather than in today’s sense linked to the digital world.

I started my work as an architect in Italy with a mapping of the twentieth-century buildings of value in my city, including many that were not considered valuable up until then because they were not recognised as belonging to the historical-archi- tectural heritage. For this reason, I find of great importance every operation that succeeds in attributing value to the buildings, or entire parts of the city, expanding the collective perception usually restricted and purely conservative of the concept of heritage. Stanimirovic’s works give us a key to reading, made of light and material, to appreciate the heritage of Pirot’s Golden Architecture with a different point of view.

 

Associate Professor Andrea Zamboni, PhD University of Bologna, Italy