Landscape of Anxiety | Eleven Critical Hotspots

Publication promotion, photo exhibition, and presentation of Prof. Dr. Trajche Stafilov and Tihomir Topuzovski

04. 10. 2023 | 7 p.m.

The event “Landscape of Anxiety: Eleven critical hotspots in the Republic of North Macedonia” is the result of several months of research and exhibition with the same title and refers to the Republic of North Macedonia as one of the countries of the Western Balkans that represent the center of pollution in Europe, above all, due to obsolete coal plants, automobiles, defective industries, as well as the energy poverty of the population. And a series of other factors that continuously pollute the air and water, endangering the overall biodiversity of the country, and causing negative impacts on the environment and the health of citizens.

The publication is part of the project Landscape of Disturbance – Culture and Art for the Future Coexistence With Environmental Crises and Climate Changes and begins with an explanation and visualization of the so-called hot spots of Macedonia, i.e. anthropogeomorphological landscapes where their urgency for resolution stems from criteria such as the amount of waste, toxicity, proximity to populated areas and concentration of hazardous chemicals. In addition, the workshops that were part of the project, realized in Veles, Bitola and Prespa, are shown, with the aim of raising awareness and mobilizing citizens around the issues of local devastated living environments; and the third part refers to the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje in March 2023, which was created by all the participants involved in the project, where new models of cooperation, strategies and initiatives involving joint action were researched and practiced.

The exhibition is made up of photographs of eleven hot spots located by Professor Trajche Stafilov and which refer to specific locations of active and closed industrial facilities that generate waste and pollute the environment with heavy metals. The eleven hot spots are ranked according to the danger of these hot spots, and the criteria are the amount of waste they generate, toxicity, how close the location is to a populated area, the concentration of hazardous chemicals in the waste, what form it is in, and other factors.

During the event, Prof. Dr. Trajche Stafilov and Tihomir Topuzovski.

Photography is by Denis Saraginovski and the entire event was produced in collaboration with the curator Ivana Vaseva. The project is supported by the Open Society Foundation – Macedonia.