I Am Only the Housekeeper, but I Don’t Know…

On 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. Drawing inspiration from a fictionalised letter ascribed to Urška, Plečnik’s hypothetical governess, the exhibition creates new perspectives within the house and accepts that “things can be a certain way, and that they can also be different,” as stated in Urška’s letter.