In the Blato district of Zagreb, on top of the concrete skeleton of a building that has stood unfinished and abandoned for decades, we placed a fir tree wrapped in Christmas lights.
This massive structure was meant to become the largest and most modern hospital in the region. Construction began in the early 1980s as a promise of better healthcare – a place of healing, care, and human dignity. Citizens contributed to its funding, believing in a future where this building would serve generations. But history intervened. Political changes, war, and economic collapse halted the project midway. The hospital was never completed. It never received its first patient.
For more than thirty years, it has remained suspended in time – a monument to interrupted plans, unfulfilled expectations, and a future that never arrived.
The tree we placed on its roof carries a simple but powerful meaning:
A light in the darkness.
A gesture of respect for what was imagined but never realized.
A tribute to all the lives that were meant to pass through these corridors – and never did.
At the same time, this place has quietly become a space where artists express themselves, reclaiming abandoned walls with creativity. Our action stands in solidarity with them as well – with all forms of expression that grow in the cracks of unfinished systems.
Thirty years after construction began, we placed a tree there as a sign of hope. As light. As a reminder that even in places defined by absence, something living can still appear.
This is not only an intervention in space.
It is a gesture toward memory – and toward the possibility that unfinished stories can still carry
Thnx @7&4GR
