Patricia Manos:
Ironworks Artist Colony

At the behest of those of Sisak’s worker-inhabitants who perceived in Sisak’s Caprag a lack of access to culture, the Sisak Ironworks also operated a “fine art colony” between 1971 and 1990. The Sisak Ironworks Fine Art Colony (Kolonija likovnih umjetnika “Željezara Sisak”) brought artists—mostly sculptors, but also photographers, graphic artists and painters— at various stages in their careers from across Yugoslavia to Sisak,

to create work that made use of the unique resources the ironworks afforded. These included not only studio space, and access to steel and industrial technology, but also proximity to the skills of Sisak’s ironworkers, technicians, machinists and welders, themselves.

Appropriately, the artists in residence at the Sisak Ironworks lived among the ironworkers in Caprag and collaborated with them on the steelworks floor. Close to 700 works of art were produced while the Fine Art Colony was in operation, many of which were public sculptures that were then donated by the artists for installation in the green spaces between residential buildings in Caprag. Many of the artists, like the monumental sculptor Dušan Džamonja, designer of the iconic Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina (1967) in Podgarić, Croatia, have regained acclaim worldwide since Yugoslavia’s striking, brutalist memorials to the fight against Fascism re-entered the broader imagination in the 2010s.

In 1990, the Sisak Ironworks experienced a 30% reduction in its workforce due to economic restructuring in 1990. With the onset of war between a Croatia that had declared independence from the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia and the Serbian-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army, the ironworks suffered infrastructural devastation and depletion of worker power from which they did not recover.

In 2003, the Sisak Ironworks were sold by the Croatian government to a private, Russian company for the equivalent of fifty symbolic, US cents in the hope that private investment could jump-start production and save jobs for a dwindling workforce.[3] It did not. Job losses continued and the Ironworks and its supporting institutions, including the entities responsible for maintaining outdoor sculptures on view in Caprag, fell into disrepair [Fig. 3].

Figure 1. Photograph of Artist Zvonimir Kamenar at Work on His Sculpture, Leptir [Butterfly] at the Sisak Ironworks in 1982, http://stazist.blogspot.com/2016/01/intervjui-s-umjetnicima-koji-su.html.

Fig. 2. Dušan Džamonja, Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina, poured concrete, rebar, aluminum sheets, 1967. https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/dusan-dzamonja.

Fig. 3. Conservation-Restoration Department of the Arts Academy in Split, Before and after photographs of restoration of Josip Diminić’s ‘Object II’, created at the Sisak Ironworks Fine Arts Colony in 1979, December 29, 2014. https://spark2015sisak.wordpress.com/why-sisak/.

Though many of the sculptures produced by the Fine Art Colony were vandalized, destroyed, or sold as scrap metal throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the remaining 38 sculptures produced for the Sisak Ironworks Fine Arts Colony were placed on the Cultural Objects Register of the Republic of Croatia in 2012. This entitled them to protection under the current Act on the Protection and Preservation of Cultural Objects. Ironically, however, the majority of the Sisak Ironworks’ remaining employees lost their jobs that same year.


Between the renewed, international interest in Yugoslav modernist memorials occasioned by the proliferation of images of such monuments in romantic states of decay on the internet at the start of the 2010s, and the lead-up to Croatia’s 2013 entry into the European Union, the remnants of the Sisak Ironworks Fine Art’s Colony’s sculptural programmes benefited from a nation-wide policy conversation around industrial heritage, cultural patrimony, tourism and ‘creative placemaking that took place at this time. Conferences and roundtables were convened around the preservation of the sculptures created at the Sisak Ironworks Fine Arts Colony, attracting academics and conservation professionals from around the world.

Contemporary visual artists, too, sought to visually interpret the history of the Sisak Ironworks Fine Arts Colony in numerous ways at the turn of 2010s. Many of these projects were unified by a common desire to 'give voice’ to the Sisak sculptures, and one of the most evocative projects of this kind was German-Croatian artist duo Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić’s site-specific installation, commissioned for Sisak’s annual ‘Ironworks Art Festival’ in 2015, Ironworks ABC (Abeceda Železjare).

For this project, Rädle and Jeremić created a pictographic alphabet for the 38 extant sculptures and used it to communicate with Sisak’s residents by way of a ‘bilingual’ Croatian-‘Monumental’ newspaper distributed throughout the town, as well as banners hung in public places [Fig. 4]. By imagining what the sculptures would say if they had a language to speak to the town’s inhabitants, the artists sought to illuminate some of the ways in which the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the sale of formerly-nationalized industries led to the town’s present-day, post-industrial decline:

Fig. 4. Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić, Ironworks ABC, installation with newspaper and banners, 2015. http://raedle-jeremic.net/abeceda_zeljezare.html.

4.
“Us, 


steel pipes,

have you, 


artists and workers, 


unexpectedly delivered 


from a predetermined form. 


More importantly, you have moved us beyond the control, 


of profit-driven motives. 


United against capitalist totalitarianism!”

8. “We, 


iron ore from the deep Bosnian 


mountains, 


make a pact 


with workers and artists. 


We do not serve the war on the poor, 


let's sabotage the reinforcement of 


palaces for the 1%!



Let's fuel the transformation with the 


class consciousness of iron ore!”

Rädle and Jeremić’s project animated the fanciful idea that Sisak’s largely-abstract sculptures could speak in poetic riddles and communicate to the world in spindly hieroglyphics, all their own. The political import of the sculptures’ message, with its talk of the 1%, was inflected by a theory-driven, post-Occupy-Wall-Street Libertarian Socialism for whom the streets of Sisak’s Caprag may not have been a natural habitat.

The real unifying language that the sculptures may have shared with the Sisak Ironworks’ former employees, however, was one of hope for a return to productive, community-enriching work, animated by the sense of security and recognition for a job well done, historically offered by employment at the Sisak Ironworks.