On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), a key figure of the Modernist movement in architecture and creator of numerous buildings and monuments around the city of Ljubljana, in 2022 Luca Lo Pinto and Olaf Nicolai curated an exhibition titled I Am Only the Housekeeper, but I Don’t Know… in the Slovenian architect’s former home. The publication retraces the contemporary interventions undertaken by the curatorial duo, who invited twenty-five internationally recognised Slovenian and foreign artists, allowing them to enter the house through their own works to commemorate Plečnik’s oeuvre and place its reading into a different and more contemporary context.

Works by John Armleder, H. C. Artmann, Nairy Baghramian, Avi Beracha, Pierre Bismuth, Monica Bonvicini, Pablo Bronstein, Michael Dean, Jason Dodge, Hansi Fuchs, Lena Grossmann, Ana Kučan, Janette Laverrière, Enzo Mari, Hana Miletić, Carsten Nicolai, Saša Pavček, Julie Peeters, Manfred Pernice, Florian Pumhösl, Fabio Quaranta, Ana Roš, Giovanna Silva, Mladen Stilinović, Diamond Stingily, Sophie Thun.

Photography by Giovanna Silva. Graphic design by Julie Peeters with Laura Martens.

A poem written by the artist for the space of the book composed only of punctuation marks. For about twenty years, Olaf Nicolai (born 1962 in Halle, East Germany, lives and works in Berlin) has been producing conceptual artworks influenced by a philosophical background inherited from its formative years in East Germany, questioning the deadlocks of romanticism and Marxism. Alternating between photography, sculpture, publishing, design, installation and performance, Nicolai creates artistic situations whose purpose is to hijack the production patterns of the industrial world as well as its cultural, financial and social representations.