Let me tell you about this place.
The website you now see before you has been a ghost on the web. At first, it was a website with an mp3 playing noise. Then it was an indexhibit portfolio for a webdesigner of minor success. Then it was a WordPress website run by a self‑teaching and self‑studying hobbyist art student who also wanted to blog about his efforts. After that, it was a koken website, with pictures, but mostly text, paradoxically. But it always was a thing, a place of disquiet, nervously swinging back and forth between being and not being. A thing which would not be itself: it wanted to be an artist’s portfolio, but it always ended up changing, disappearing, again and again, because that art student couldn’t do it. Poor guy, he tried very hard, but trying hard was not the solution for Geisterfestung. Even now, Geisterfestung went through four hours of existing as a Ghost CMS website, which was too cute an idea by half.
It really has a track record of being off. Or its proprietor having overloaded it with symbolism, personal and otherwise.
And then it disappeared altogether, in 2019. The domain kept existing, reaching way back into 2013 since its first registration, but never managing to fully form, to fully be, to be itself. It was word referencing nothing. At one time, I believe only three people even knew it had existed, now, in 2024, it’s only two. That is what happens with words, despite them being carefully crafted: if they fall into disuse, they will fall to Oblivion.
Even now it is more of a placeholder for later. A summoning circle for something not yet manifested. The ingredients, the curios, they are all there. And me, its proprietor, have gotten a whole lot older since 2013. And yet, something is different this time. I am, that is for sure. I used to go by different names. A great many, chief of which was the pseudonym “Casimir Broca” at one time. Tacky, I know, but it was true to the spirit of this project.
My name is not Rio Croatoan, but this nom du fantôme has been growing alongside me, the last name dating back even further, into a more personal, more distant past. My real name is Mario Breskic. I will call myself Rio Croatoan here, because Mario is already a graphic designer, and under the pseudonym Rio Croatoan, I can do personal art.
And Geisterfestung can finally exist that way. It can stay. It can wait. And it finally can be itself. Because what that young man needed, was not effort, not hard work, not grinding, not suffering of any kind: he only needed hope and a goal which can be reached by laying a path in front. This is a place dedicated to the ghosts which haunted me. May they not haunt my anymore. May the work be done.
Geisterfestung is a personal portfolio launched in September 2024 by Rio Croatoan. It will slowly grow, with time.