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I am lucky enough to live in the genius loci. I come from
Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before the political changes in Eastern Europe, Ljubljana was a small world, closed into itself. It was a world in which it was still possible to long for something unattainable, quite specifically for the world on the other side of the Berlin Wall. My friend Alexei Pourtcak told me a joke, popular in St. Petersburg in the eighties, about this desire for the other world: Two Soviet men meet. One of them says, "Oh, how I want to go to Paris again!" The other one replies in astonishment, "You've been to Paris?!" The first one says, "No, but I wanted to go there before!" So if you have the genius loci, you also have that other, unattainable world. And if you don't have the genius loci, you don't belong to any world at all.
What fascinated me about the Americans was the ease with which they non-belong to places. The question "Where do you come from?" does not seem to mean much in America. It's quite different for Europeans; we still come from a certain place and time, from within the context of nation, history, culture. Today, displacement and the loss of history are happening in Europe. This is what Europe is dealing with, not America.
-- sculptor Marjetica Potrc
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