Taking the style of a childrens tale, the video consists of three characters telling their own stories: an accelerating aging machine in Belgrade’s National Library; the huge ficus tree inside a House of Culture in Cacak, Serbia; and the archaeological remains of the Roman baths, also in Cacak, Serbia.
In 2007 Deball made a visit to the National Library in Belgrade in order to meet Nobody, an accelerating aging machine. The artifact was used in the restoration department of the library in order to test the resistance and durability of books, giving an idea of how an object might look in 20, 50 or 200 years in the blink of an eye. To the surprise of Deball the machine was actually in the laboratory but it stopped working 30 years ago. The political and economical situation collapsed the laboratory, now a collection of useless artifacts.
The film starts taking the machine as the main character of the story, who gives its own testimony of the passage of time and our relationship with technology. In the film, even if the people working at the laboratory believe that the machine is not working anymore, it still performs a series of secret experiments.
Another character in the story is a tree, a huge ficus tree that grew inside of a modernistic cultural center in Cakac, in Serbia. The tree started to cross ceilings and walls, a parasite transforming the functional architecture of the building. All the characters in the story are real, but the connections between them are fictional.

Language: English/Serbian
Texts by: Mariana Castillo Deball
32pp. 210 x 145mm.
24th. Čačak,: Nadežda Petrović Memorial, 2007.

Published as part of the exhibition 24th. Čačak,: Nadežda Petrović Memorial, 2007.