Sz. Berlin ± Panic
In the Dorćol area of Belgrade along the banks of the Danube lies a forgotten industrial relic. The modernist power station Snaga i Svetlost (Power and Light) opened in 1932 and was decommissioned in 1969, it has stood empty for over 5 decades. It is now a ruined husk, home to crows, snakes and young trees gradually breaking through its concrete floors. Scoured by wind and sun, much of the roof and some internal stairways have collapsed and its decay constantly accelerates. Its fate is uncertain. There are plans to make it a museum, but even if it does survive it is likely to be surrounded by luxury housing, enduring a fate similar to Battersea Power Station. The threat of possible demolition also hangs over it.
Sz. Berlin ± Panic is an ongoing A/V collaboration between Istria-based Sz. Berlin and the London-based film-maker Panic. Since 2022 they have intensively documented the spectacular industrial ruins of Istria and Rijeka.
In Spring 2024 they released the Trilogy of Decay – a first set of films and soundtracks exploring 3 sites using a range of audio-visual techniques.
On 27th February 2025 T.F.I.D. (The Future is Dead), curated by Embryogallery, opened at Gallery Novo, Pula. Degeneracija [TEV-24] is one of the featured films in this group exhibition featuring leading audiovisual artists from America and Europe.
Throughout March & April 2025 Sz. Berlin ± Panic were on location at a former power station in Belgrade. A short film and a documentary about the vast ruined site was the result. The short film Iluminacija [BGD-25] featured in the exhibition “Light and Power of Industrial Heritage”, at the Museum of Science and Technology in Belgrade, May / June 2025. The documentary Transformacija [SVT-25] featured in the exhibition “Art&Science” at Silosi, Belgrade, October 2025.
The Illusive Regimes project, a collaboration with Gradska Galerija Labin was presented through a site-specific screening of video works at the Pijacal industrial complex, next to the Šoht mining tower, Labin, Istria, on Wednesday, 29 July 2026, at 9 p.m. It was curated by Stephanie Peršić. In the second part of the programme, Sz. Berlin ± Panic, performed as DJ Codex Europa and DJ Panic.
The Illusive Regimes project brought together two video works focusing on the industrial architecture of the wider Labin area during the Fascist period. Two industrial structures built within the same decade become the respective protagonists of Degeneracija [TEV-24], which examines the Vlaška power station in the Raša Valley, and Regeneracija [RGN-26], which focuses on the power station of the mining complex in Ripenda.
The presentation in Labin also included the video work Illumination [BGD-25], dedicated to the Snaga i Svetlost power station in Belgrade.
The production and presentation of the project have been supported by the City of Labin and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. Realisation of the event has been supported by Sonolux group, DKC Lamparna and Kire interpreneuring.
The passing of the high tide of 20th Century industrialisation in Istria has left a toxic but inspiring legacy. Titanic industrial structures that just a few decades ago housed cutting-edge technologies are now beached carcasses whose concrete bones are bleached by the Istrian sun and wind, and whose metallic veins and organs have long ago been stripped clean by hordes of scavengers. As time passes, they are colonised by plants, birds, animals and rust. Beyond the sounds of the wind, the birds and the occasional wanderer these sites are mostly mute.
The Yugoslav-era coal separator in which the action PLM-22 took place is a slight exception to this rule. The distant drone of the still-active power station that it once served is audible within the space, and at night the power station lights can still be glimpsed through the ruined façade. This vast concrete carcass was the ideal location for an experiment in re-animating such a space for one night only.
Using a vintage Yugoslav era radio and advanced contemporary sonification software, the building was allowed (or forced) to resonate again, in a delayed echo of the sounds of industry that it was once filled with. Just as Sz. Berlin scanned and played the sound of the space back into itself, Panic lit and shot it in a way that animated it, allowing it to “perform” for the camera and impose its textures and shapes on contemporary viewers. All that you see in the film was filmed in the course of one evening, and all sounds were generated live on site by Sz. Berlin. The final edited film condenses the long night hours of sonic and visual experimentation into a portrait of a forgotten but unforgettable building and its (re)-created sights and sounds.
This is the first part of the “Trilogy of Decay / Trilogija Raspadanja” – an alchemical A/V response to three abandoned sites in Croatia that the duo have been compelled to witness and to process. In the films and their soundtracks a power station, a rail depot and a coal separator are fleetingly re-animated. The works transform them from dead industrial powerhouses to newly un-dead post-industrial powerhouses. Each carries its own host of memories of the three ruling systems that created them: the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Fascist Italy and Socialist Yugoslavia. In their derelict, looted state, these sites have become terrible to many, and many would prefer them to disappear entirely, yet much can be salvaged from them – fragments, atmospheres, sounds and visions for the new times in which they find themselves and in which these projects are made.
Degeneracija [TEV-24] Panic’s visual documentation of the ruined Vlaška thermoelectric power station main hall is accompanied by its atmospheric soundtrack, rendered from photos and videos gathered on site, plus archival sources. It was filmed for use as the static video installation TEV-22, which was shown alongside the cdx-foto exhibition Autarcheum at Burren College of Art, Ireland in November 2022. This 2024 reimagining introduces new tensions, ruptures and contradictions, reanimating the space and its ghosts.
Vlaška began operating in the Raša Valley in Istria in 1939, as part of a large-scale industrialisation of a previously rural, marshy landscape. It supplied power to the mine in nearby Raša (Arsia in Italian). Raša was built in 1937-8 as a model industrial settlement and designed as a self-sufficient “Città dell’autarchia” (City of Autarchy). Bombed by the Allies during World War Two and restored by Yugoslavia, operating until it fell silent in 1976. Since then, time, looters and the climate have sculpted it into the atmospheric ruin we see today.
Sections of the concrete walls and floors hang improbably and precariously, waiting for gravity to deliver a final blow. The other invisible yet potent presence is a range of contaminants. The Raša coal that fired the plant is a source of super high-organic-sulphur and colossal quantities of it were stored and burnt here. It is both sulphurous and serene, contaminated but far from dead. Birds sing in the turbine hall and in the summer much of the structure disappears behind the vegetation that is increasingly colonising the site. The new film and remixed soundtrack brings a futurist(ic) new 21st century life to this modernist relic.
Degeneracija [TEV-24] had its first public screening at the Embryogallery Film Festival, September 30th, 2024 in Manhattan. The film is also featured in the Embryogallery exhbition T.F.I.D. (The Future is Dead) at Gallery Novo, Pula, Croatia, 27.02.25 – 28.03.25.
The final part of the Trilogy, Destilacija [RMZ-24] reworks the duo’s second collaboration, exhibited at DKC Lamparna in December 2002. Since Sz. Berlin ± Panic began to document the rail depot in Rijeka, much of its contents have been cleared, but the intense atmosphere that they work with has only intensified, and their next project will salvage a more intensely kinetic audio-visual experience from its emptiness. It can be viewed here and the soundtrack can be downloaded here.
This film was first show as part of the Sz. Berlin exhibition “Disposizione schematica / RZR-22” at DKC Lamparna, Labin in December 2022. It re-engineers and re-imagines salvaged 1960s rail blueprints as the schematics of a future that is simultaneously lost and recovered, just as every rail terminus is always a point of beginning as well as ending, and of departure as well as arrival. The film shows us the vast space of the abandoned rail depot in which these documents and a train sat fading into history. These are accompanied by an hypnotic soundtrack, created using image sonification software. Photos of the original documents and of the new composite exhibition images derived from them were fed into the software and modified, generating the sonic component of the film. Blending location footage filmed in the space one winter morning and the exhibition imagery derived from the schematics, the result is a 10 minute audiovisual requiem for a lost art and for lost futures. It is the final part of “Trilogy of Decay / Trilogija Raspadanja” – an alchemical A/V response to abandoned industrial sites in Istria and Rijeka. In the films and their soundtracks, a power station, a coal separator and a rail depot are fleetingly re-animated.
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