BetON7

The thematic base of the project is the poetry by the local poet Pavla Medvešček and her collection Kamnite misli (tr. Thoughts of Stone), which narrates the destruction of the spirit of the Soča valley, which for centuries was available to its people through natural ancient temples, mountains, caves, springs and stones. The destroyed “sacred stones milled into flour”, packed into bags at the cement plant and sent out to build and develop the interwar and post-war Europe represent the greatest disaster for the culture of this community. Yet the poet’s perspective also shows us how to find the meaning in the changing of everything in which we believe, despite the disaster that has befallen the community. 

Project BetON7 was created through dialogue with young and old inhabitants of the Soča Valley and both urban centres, Nova Gorica and Gorizia, who, in the course of seven workshops gathered materials, emotions and impressions on the topic of the sacred in urban space, stories about the places that left a mark on them, and then forged them into a theatre-musical collage.  They searched for seven parallels of the modern world to the seven temples of the old age: urban concrete temples of the modern man, most likely built of stone, quarried from the holy mountain of Jelenk and the ground stone from other temples, which built and rebuilt the border towns, and which we can now see as concrete objects and homes. Concrete is a symbol of industrialisation of the once predominantly agrarian space, a symbol of firmness, of defying time, a clear product of the mentality of high productivity, and at the same time empty of content and form.

Under the directorial guidance of Miha Nemec and the musical guidance of Tomi Novak and his music collective Grunt, young and less young performers, musicians, theatre and visual artists and other creators from both sides of the border created a theatre concert with diverse, contemporary music from Goriška, filled with stories from the region’s past and projections for its future. This music is, basically, a “product of concrete”, its sound – a sound of a generation and a space – carries in itself an echo of something ancient that sneaked through time into cities and their periphery, and is looking for a way home, to the natural temples, to ourselves.