Slovene Images

Extract

I start instinctively as the airplane swings on its descent toward a stretch of land that is my country. A simple view from an aircraft approaching the Ljubljana airport suddenly becomes a fictitious vision of the ‘memory landscape’ conveyed by Dušan Kirbiš in his picture Gesichte einer Jugend (1984). Under the lowered, steel grey sky, among patches of snow-covered landscape, I catch glimpses of a dark green surface which reminds me of the woodland above the Sava river—the Kočevski rog forest or the Pohorje hillsides of dark, peaceful, impenetrable woods and sparse clearings with remote, unfriendly houses. In the coolness of this vision, the landscape of Slovenia looks both like a satellite photo and an object of fantasy.