Installation / cigarette paper
By choosing Passatacqua’s steps in front of the Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius in Dubrovnik as the site and reference for his spatial intervention, Kopljar opted for a very demanding and scenically baroque site. Using wide bands of cigarette paper he covers the steps steeped foot steps in a sheet of whiteness with all the associations this invokes; from
innocence, silence, a scale of values, rites of passage (marriage) to a liturgical, Easter whiteness.
The white background offers passers by the opportunity to measure their own step, to embed it, mark it, feel their own passage, possibly in the form of “Shame” (the project’s title). All that which is rely noticeable on the hard and resilient stone texture, which barely even shows the mark of centuries of human passage, is instantaneously recorded by the thin sheet of paper. This pure and unobtrusive layer of paper which gently covers the steps upon which processions, believers, ,uit priests, dukes and members of both Councils, small and great citizens of Dubrovnik, not to mention modern day tourists walked, briefly becomes a reminder of forgotten steps, a condensed survey, a “digest” of ascents and descents in Dubrovnik.