Summary
Gordana Benić: The Palace of Captured Dreams
Gordana Benić, poet, essayist, literary and art critic, winner of the first scientific conservation award "Vicko Andrić" in 2000 for texts about Diocletian's Palace (published later in the book Year of the Sphinx 2003), once again writes a dedication to her hometown: Split in the Palace. It is a unique literary-documentary project (of which this manuscript is only the first part) in which, at the beginning, an imaginary travelogue of the Palace is decomposed (or branched) into meditative-associative prose, so that, within a closed system, a document about time and space prevails throughout the 17th century. The reinterpretation of historical events (based on documents and historical sources) and metamorphoses, which have accumulated over the centuries, present the true resonance of all the consequences of numerous transformations related primarily to the testimonies of the state in which the Palace was located in certain periods and the methods of its reconstruction (or devastation). It is no coincidence that in the chapter "Palace Anno domini MMXII", with more than a hundred photographs, the author documents the current moment in the Palace from her own perspective, contrasting it with historical turmoil and rebuilding and the vanished illusions that echo less and less from the walls of the Palace, and, moreover, seem to repel from them.
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