Driving from Rijeka to Kraljevica, to the Frankopan Castle, on April 25^th 2025, at the invitation of Mischa Kuball, Zoran Erić, Lina Franko, and Andi Slawinski, in the early afternoon with the metallic reflections of the sun on the sea carried by the bora wind and a gentle drizzle, I kept repeating to myself Rimbaud’s words about the doubling — or splitting — of the self from the one who creates: Je est un autre (I is Other). This cryptic and revolutionary formulation, born from the mouth of a teenage poet, has long been a guiding mantra for artists, especially in the Francophone world. It acts as a shibboleth, a whispered code for those who, in the act of making, step outside the sealed chambers of identity to encounter the world through dissonance, rupture, and play. Rushing into the embrace of the other — the unknown, the uncanny, the not-yet-self — I who becomes Other reshapes any perception and envisions art not as self-expression, but as transformation; not reflection, but upheaval. After this mantra, an artist was no longer the stable subject but a vessel of becoming, a site of contamination within the world.

Mischa and Zoran were on a road trip, visiting various cities and bringing white walls like huge open white books — large, zigzagged, and vibrant white books they left for unknown hands to draw and paint upon. This is how they came to the Frankopan Castle — a 17^th-century fortress tied to noble power, shifting sovereignties, and cultural negotiation. They brought the white walls into the castle courtyard, prepared their installation, and invited children, young people, students, retirees, unknown poets and artists who do not know they are artists, and the residents of Kraljevica to intervene, paint, and draw on the tall immaculate walls. Their walls immediately merged with the castle walls, which have witnessed much: aristocratic decline, war, abandonment, and now, cultural reawakening. In Giorgio Agamben’s terms, this installation enters the realm of “profanation”: the return of what was once sacred — walled, guarded, monumental — into the sphere of common use. The castle, once a symbol of exclusivity, becomes public, writable, and unguarded. “Restoring to common use what had been separated in the realm of the sacred” defines profanation,[1] and Kuball’s walls enact this precisely. They do not merely “exhibit” the space — they undo its hierarchy by inviting scribbles, laughter, doubt, and participation.

With Mischa’s space and participatory intervention, the white walls in the castle became both a backdrop and a subject, co-authoring their artistic inquiry. Rimbaud’s radical reimagining of the self, which is fractured, polyphonic, and fundamentally other to itself, infiltrated and exposed itself publicly. They thus received a new language of participatory art and became connectors and disrupters.

At the top of one of the walls, just beside a black cartoonish figure, I saw written or painted in bold; A gdje si ti? (So where are you?). I wondered, is this a message or a joyful game of hide-and-seek among participants? To whom was it addressed? A stranger? A future self? Or to the fractured I now drawn out into the world? Was this a possible dialogue with Rimbaud or a pronounced riddle for all, where language, space, and participation intersect? Yet, on these white walls, language ceases to represent. It acted. It moved. It connected castle stones, childlike gestures, philosophical echoes, and the porous figure of an anonymous artist. It confirmed Je est un autre ("I is another"), and then asked: A gdje si ti? (So where are you?)

Sanja Bojanić is engaged in the philosophy of culture, focusing on contemporary issues of gender, race, and class that intensify social and affective inequalities. She completed her initial studies in philosophy, later earning an M.A. in Hypermedia Studies and a PhD from the Centre d'Études féminines et d'étude de genre at the University of Paris 8. Her work spans interdisciplinary research involving experimental artistic practices, queer studies, and affect theory. Sanja's professional career has included positions at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (Louvre, Paris), the Nouvel Observateur, and the Laboratory for Evaluation and Development of Digital Editing at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris Nord, St. Denis). Before her current position as Executive Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe (CAS SEE) at the University of Rijeka, she taught at the Universities of Aberdeen and Paris 8. She teaches Semiotics, New Media Theories and Practices, and Visual Methodologies at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka. The EU Commission, the Volkswagen Foundation, UNESCO and others have supported her extensive research projects. She is the author of several books and over forty peer-reviewed papers, making significant contributions to her fields of study.