Ljubljanastrophe: Alien Perspectives

<p>What do we talk about when we talk about Ljubljana being the most beautiful city in the world? Surely something like it being a museum (of the natural history kind), an embalmed, scented carcass of precious Mitteleuropa, a middlebrow, middle-class nostalgic mix of the restoration and reformism, where Metternich and Keynes still carry on in a vegetative state (dear plants, no offense meant). Ljubljana seems insulated from time, a simulation of a very particular timelessness. It’s tourism saying no to any sense of futurism.</p> <p>Who would want to exit this Arcadia and how would that catastrophe unravel? In Krašovec’s “A singular case,” cat-bots abandon the “landscape of low rises and lifestyle micro-enterprises,” so they can disappear into space between words … and purrs. It’s a Swiftean post-ironic love story, although the more grumpy ones will inevitably see it as Ljubljana finally getting the Houellebecq treatment it deserves. In Šiša’s “Ljubljana, I love you, but I’m bringing you down,” which reads like a xenofeminist outbreak countdown, women have vanished as well, cutting themselves off from men’s libidinal economy and from a pink glittery fog. A different kind of fog, a crystal one, seems to cover up that there’s only a strangely analogue wasteland left, which keeps on devouring accelerationist, octopus-loving protagonists of Kazimir Kolar’s “2 0 4 9.” Which is, in fact, nothing compared to the story’s body text being eaten by footnotes that went into speculative overdrive, clearly performing a conversion of Musil’s <em>The Man Without Qualities</em> into qualities without men—or humans, for that matter. Finally, there’s Simon Sellars’ “Love is a Totalitarian State that Grows Deep Inside Me,” populated with Slavojbots, Melania hologlots and vexxers, “all lost inside their own private Dream Zones.” NSK Metelkova Veleposlaništvo has a vital, but necessarily obscure role in all of it…</p>