The Written on Site Project
A journey around the present in twelve texts.
The Written on Site Project (2012-2023)
The most extreme form of poetic vigilance, a literary testimony of our times at the intersection of prose, travel writing and poetry. A journey around the present in twelve texts.
Aleš Šteger traveled around the world for twelve years, visiting twelve places. He uses twelve hours of his stay to listen and record the struggle of his inner language and to capture snapshots with his camera. What was written and photographed in this twelve hours went directly to the printer without any possibility for changes.
He chooses vivid places that tell unpredictable stories, evoking collective traumas and personal memories. The result can be found in an unique work of poetic testimony of our times, which sheds light on social, political and historical conditions and developments of many corners of our world. The Written on Site Project attempts to work literarily with immediacy and pure, pulsating life. Aleš Šteger describes his encounters in clear yet vivid and poetic language, places the present in the context of historical events and thus looks deeper, delving beneath the surface, off the beaten track.
In his first piece dating back to 21st of December 2012, Aleš Šteger staggers through the capital of his native Slovenia, Ljubljana, on the day of the prophesied end of the world, followed by Minaminosma, Japan, which is close to the Fukushima nuclear power plant. In Mexico City, he witnesses a demonstration against the government’s handling of the murder of 43 students of Ayotzinapa. The following year the author finds himself at a bus station in Belgrade, meeting Syrian refugees during their stopover on the way to Germany. The following entry opens with a look at Shanghai and a critical examination of the surveillance of people by artificial intelligence, giving an impression of the pulsating life and the simultaneous threat of omnipresent control. The traumatic gulag past on the Russian Solovetsky Islands becomes tangibly close. In Bautzen, Saxony, the author gains an insight into a former Stasi prison and is confronted with the shift to the far right in German politics and society. The journey continues among rickshaw drivers in Kochi in South India. Šteger writes in Santiago de Compostela, observes the rising of the sun and follows in the footsteps of the Covid pilgrims, then visits Tierra del Fuego in Chile and reports on the colonial events triggered by Magellan. In Hargeysa, Somaliland, he meets survivors of a forgotten genocide and their interesting culture, and concludes his journey with a final day, April 2nd 2023 in White Sands, the site of the first atomic bomb explosion.
With accompanying essays by Alberto Manguel, Péter Nádas and Carolyn Forché.
The complete Slovenian Edition of Written on Site was published in June 2023 by Beletrina. The German Edition (in three volumes) was completed in April 2024 and published by Haymon Verlag.
https://beletrina.si/iskanje?q=na+kraju+zapisano
https://www.haymonverlag.at/produkt/7234/logbuch-der-gegenwart-2/
Written on Site was performed in:
- Ljubljana, Slovenia, December 21st 2012
- Fukushima and Minamisōma, Japan, June 6th 2013
- Ciudád de Mexico, Mexico, November 26th 2014
- Belgrade, Serbia, August 2nd 2015
- Kochi, India, March 23rd 2016
- Solovki, Russia, July 19th 2017
- Shanghai, China, May 29th 2018
- Bautzen/Budyšin, Germany, April 17th 2019
- Costa da Morte, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 3rd 2021
- Magellan strait, Chile, January 31st 2022
- Hargeisa, Somaliland November 17th 2022
- White Sands, USA, April 2nd 2023
Excerpts from the Written on Site Project
Language, how playful of you: hot spots, denoting a place where one may access the web and consequently the information upon which we ever more depend. The same expression also denotes a place of radioactive particle accumulation and increased radiation. Language is intelligent: a piece of information radiates no less than deadly particles. Promised Land hasn’t yet happened to us. The solution that we strove to find in technologies creates an increasingly tighter circle that reduces us to victims and golems, a vicious circle that sucked not us but also every living thing, the whole planet.
Next to the piano I discover a small table, on it big aerial photos of the area struck by the tsunami. Next to it, shelves with newspapers. My gaze locks on a newspaper, Tarzan. It’s not a comic book, just another mishmash lifestyle magazine, one of the pages advertising healthy life and exercise.
“Leave me,” a boy pushes away his mother’s hand when she tries to hug him. A bit further on a girl lies down on the floor, father playing with her, giggles in between the bookshelves.
from: Minamisoma
It is time for me to turn to the east. It is night-time. An entrance without shutters. A gaping hole. Empty taxis drive by. Thus departs our civilization. Thus we depart, after another attempt to rise up, to create something else, something different. A better tomorrow.
It is time for me to bow before you, holy Julio César Mondragón, one of the forty-three. And all in one. You had attended college for barely a month, when you accompanied your peers to the rally. Fire would cry for you, boy with a beautiful face. Your body said September only twenty times. To me, you are Ayotzinapa. To me, you are the question I cannot answer in any other way but by writing, here, in the middle of the night.
The night does not know how to whisper your name, how to understand what they have done to you, how to mourn you. Hence, it turns dark.
Your grandfather and your girlfriend dressed in black came to identify your body. Your child, three months old, dressed in black, as well.
I see you lying there – a body in the middle of a dirty road. Right arm bent. The trousers yanked down, revealing your beautiful torso covered in bruises. They ripped the skin off of your face while you were still alive. They gouged out your eyes.
I cannot imagine your pain, unbending young man. I cannot imagine what it means to become a ghost that haunts a murderer. They left you, faceless, lying on the street to scare the others. Into your mild cocoa face, they carved their own.
Julio César, my Saint, the government has no face! The government is an erased face. I am afraid. But because of you, I trust in my fear. I see its shape clearer. I see its image and begin to understand, more and more. No animal is capable of doing what mankind can. And only plants can compete with angels.
from: Ciudad de Mexico
Port, a terminal for passengers.
All the things people do in our lives, morning by morning, like chopping holes in coconuts, or pouring tea from cup to cup, as if pouring were everything we are, a moment when a constellation, fate or a deity pours us from one bowl to another.
They tell me about a devastating accident.
About a passenger ship which collided with a cargo ship before everyone’s eyes, not far from the coast.
The passenger ship broke in half.
Before everyone’s eyes.
Rescue attempts.
Even from some stranger who dove in to help.
Twelve drowned.
It happened four months ago.
Four months in one cup, we, in the other cup, and between us, information that has been poured, together with us, from one to cup to another, and back.
This morning has already happened before.
This morning will happen, again and again.
Every morning, the fishermen bring their catch back to their tiny port.
So many fish, arranged in piles across the ground, as if they had been replicated.
The head of the trade union supervises the unloading of the ship.
Guttural song of the supply.
from: Kochi
Yellow is the day.
Yellow is the day—those were the first words, first sentence perhaps, that came to mind even before I had actually opened my eyes.
Light burned through the glass doors of my room.
Yellow is the Wednesday before Easter in the region of Upper Lusatia.
Yellow is the spring.
Yellow are the birch crowns’ young leaves.
Yellow is the birds’ chirping.
Yellow blossoms on the decorative bushes all over.
Yellow is the orange Easter egg that I have at the bed and breakfast.
Yellow is the yolk of the yellow egg that is orange.
Yellow are the firemen’s vests and the color of the firetruck that turns the corner, blaring, and disappears.
Yellow is the siren.
Yellow are the creaking bike pedals as older people cycle by, each one over sixty, with yellow, although actually white hair.
Yellow is the fresh breeze and the ad for giving yellow blood.
Yellow is the star in the cemetery for Soviet soldiers across from my bed and breakfast.
Here they lie under thick ivy. Green.
A granite marker attests to who they were and what they are.
Yellow is history. Yellow its horrors, its rottenness, its outrageous perversities and delusions.
Yellow are the words of history and its apostles. Is anything easier, or harder, if they are to be fully believed?
Yet worse, perhaps the worst, is to be left without one’s own yellow history, without one’s own history, with only a foreign one, with no one’s story, one pierced like the egg shell about the head of a just hatched chick.
Yellow is our past.
Our past is a yellow tux that like it or not everyone makes fit and only occasionally do we manage to see through our own yellows to our interlocking, mutually dependent, individual stories.
from: Bautzen
GERMAN REVIEWS
ein ästhetisch-politisches Projekt, das auch in den nächsten Jahren für Aufmerksamkeit sorgen wird.
SWR, Carsten Otte
wichtigster slowenischer Schriftsteller seiner Generation
Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt
Im Wechsel von Landschaftsbeschreibung und Reflexion findet Šteger Sätze, die den Bildern, die in den Medien verbreitet wurden, eine andere Sichtweise entgegenhalten.
Nico Bleutge, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Ales Steger ist das Gegenteil eines Elfenbeinturm-Poeten. Er reist viel, und zwar an Orte, wo die Probleme und Wunden der Welt besonders sichtbar zutage treten: nach Fukushima, Mexiko-Stadt oder auf die nordrussische Klosterinsel Solowki, die zu sowjetischen Zeiten lange als Straflager diente. Seine Reiseskizzen, jeweils ad hoc aus unmittelbarer Wahrnehmung und Erfahrung entstanden, sind im ,Logbuch der Gegenwart’ nachzulesen.
Ilma Rakusa, NZZ
ein reflektierter Bericht, in dem Ort und Zeit durch das Bewusstsein des Besuchers gehen” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tilman Spreckelsen “Beunruhigend, aber nicht hoffnungslos sind die Orte, deren Zukunftsdimensionen Steger sensibel aus Momenten seiner Anwesenheit skizziert.
Hans-Dieter Grünefeld, Buchkultur
Stegers Empathie ist die eines formidablen Ethnologen. Er sucht, wie alle wahren Forscher, nach den Splittern des unrettbaren, in tausend Teile zersprungenen Selbst.”
Ronald Pohl, Der Standard
Urteile sind hier nicht zu erwarten, Anbiederung aber auch nicht. Steger deutet nicht und ergreift keine Partei, er bleibt ein Besucher, der bald schon wieder abgereist sein wird, aber er nimmt wahr, bewegt das Gesehene und Gehörte in seinem Bewusstsein und lässt sich auch vom Zufälligsten und Unscheinbarsten anregen. Diese Disposition ist in allen Texten des Projekts wahrnehmbar, egal wo sie entstanden sind, und sie gilt naturgemäß auch dort, wo es die Natur selbst im Zusammenspiel mit der Geschichte des Orts ist, die diese Anstöße liefert.
Tilman Spreckelsen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
