Emil Šverko_THE IMPRESSIONS OF THE WITNESS
The arrangement of the stage for the solemn gathering of people with Pope John Paul II while he was visiting Zadar is a courageous act of the author to face the demands of complex surroundings in the city core.
The distinctive quality of the context implies an increased creative effort in order to find the right design solution, and it is not irrelevant who will be dealing with it. In the case of the Forum in Zadar it was the architect who approached the task free of elitism, preferring the dignity of populist joy and sorrow of the lifetime.
In my witnessing to the Zadar's Magnificat, and now evoked from the time distance, I still cannot draw a distinction in relation to the visual and emotional memory: the intervention of Bašić is an expected transitorium based on the thoughtfulness of the details and the expressiveness of the whole, but provoked and designed by the attributes of permanence.
Thus, the author does not shirk, but with determination and responsibility places the curved line in the orthogonal matrix of the Forum. But this deflection is not aggressive as that curved line has been originated by the surrounding space itself as some sort of contextual resultant. Bašić only recognized it and extruded it, and cut it obliquely with the master's touch. By doing so and in spite of the difficult position of the eye, the curved line is positioned in the gesture of the protective concave that determinates the stage. In that manner, an expressed screen is hatched by referring on the image of the historical sediments with the horizontal lines of garlands carefully put together out of different colors in order to “create layers out of lines”.
Introduced attraction, authentic linen sail, paints with its shadow the focal point of the celebration only as a result of its own presence. Because the only role of that sail is to represent itself, i.e. the sail of the fisherman boat – leut, and that is pointed out by presenting the whole register of elements pertaining to the sail.
All in all in any moment and in any element of the scenery I haven’t felt a forced narration; those elements were simply artistic interpretations of their own archetypes, free of any kind of including a metaphorical one.