Planned for Belgrade 2008

— Tijana Stevanovic + Inga Zimprich

Naturally the notion of a building could comprise the functions and usages it shelters, the social visions it stems from, embodies and prolonges, the political fundament it is based upon as well as the infrastructural ties it makes with its environment. From this perspective Belgrade's modernist architecture could present us with the phenomenon of buildings outlasting their purpose, persisting albeit the erosion of their political fundament and societal vision. Functions desert them or altered ones move in - relative to the processes of alteration that Serbia undergoes politically, socially and economically.
With this definition of a building as point of departure one could question in turn whether designing spaces of experience or usage might validate as methods to suggest designs and constructions. The small school of architecture does not invite for an expert meeting but on the contrary is meant to temporarily inhabit a building once designed to house a societal function in Yugoslavia and to mutually process questions of fundamental relevance in workshops, readings and lectures.

Modernist Architecture
After the losses of WWII the population in an at that time still agrarian country relied on the Yugoslavian academic structures which would concentrate in the new ‘la ville radieuse’-like city on grounds not before used as urban space. On a strategical geopolitical position – in history seperating the Ottoman from the Austro-Hungarian empire – the new governmental headquarters would be detached from the old town’s historical centre and reflect the new block-less state and a new social class in its architecture and urban planning. Buildings in Belgrade and New Belgrade as Nikola Dobrovic’s Block of Buildings of the Ministry of National Defense (1956–63), buildings by Ivan Antic (‘25th May’ Sports-Recreation Center, 1961–73), Uros Martinovic (Local Community Center, New Belgrade 1963) and others will serve as study-cases to consider the environments which were meant to facilitate and call in this new community. In which manner are schools, hospitals, high-rises and town halls shaped and which social relations and usages do they suggest? Which concrete structures do still correspond to today’s social life; which have been adjusted to contemporary
conditions? Which threats of thought and form can contemporary architectural practice pick up to correspond to existing cityscape? Which conclusions can be drawn from modernist school facing contemporary architectural assignments?

De-stabilized bodies
In The Intruder Jean Luc Nancy introduces the notion of the foreigner as a figure that escapes integration but that presents itself as alien from within an organism leading towards a process of ‘polymorphic’ erosion or dissolution. Nancy from observing his own sickening and psychological as well as physical reaction provides us with terminology to consider both the human as much as the urban body in a process of disintegration originating from the inside. From The Intruder parallels could be drawn towards the very organic spreading of destructive cell-growth in a cancerous body, as much as a spreading of decay in an urban body as a symptom of denial. In de-stabilized bodies we would like to raise the question whether a fundamental social disorientation and uncertainty works on the body – the human, the collectively social as much as on the urban one, and to look for the dynamics of these processes: Which experience causes spreading decomposition? Does one cell influence the other cell’s behaviour? Hesitation, growth, destruction and productivity, which (dynamics)
energies are apparent where in Belgrade’s cityscape?

Resisting the opposition
Former oppositional powers, which challenged the Milosevic regime, hold relevant public and political positions in Serbia today, embodying democratic, anti-communist and pro-western values. Democratic initiatives have been supported and subsidized by western institutions since the nineties. But has the resistance in Serbia taken chance enough to critically evaluate itself? How does one resist an opposition? Is it useful to operate within this political terminology and does it make sense to incorporate critical terminology from ‘the West’? Subversive practices still assume a dialectical perspective from which an antagonist can be singled out. The concept of left and right, resistance and power has been diffused not only in Serbia. Is this mind-model actually apt to form a bases for operation today?
Can a new critical language emerge on the bases of dialectical argumentation or within
grammatical constraints? Which forms of articulation fuse styles, work with a consciousness of contradiction and thereby challenge concepts of criticality?

Stateless Spaces
In Georgio Agambens We refugees he introduces the ‘person without a country’ as a pioneering figure of a society to come. Through the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Serbia is not only a state noticeably without close federation with other states but also caused and witnessed many scenarios of migration. When Agamben suggests towards the end of his essay a concept of ‘reciprocal extraterritoriality’, an ‘exodus (of) one into the other’ as a political, non-autonomous space, in how far does this correspond with or contradict experiences made in Serbia: ‘In other words, we become illegal habitants of the Europe, people without papers, we entered obscure Other of Europe, outside the Law and its protection. And we learnt from this experience. We learnt that it is not possible anymore to be emigrant, which is to be someone who freely circulates Europe ever-ready to jump in to the Abyss of not having an identity. [...] since then we are emigrants in our own country and that is only position we find to be correct. That’s why we never again wanted to [...] leave Belgrade forever, because only in Belgrade we do not have to be Serbs...’[1]
Which forms of governance do permanent states of being stateless call for? Which questions do concepts of stateless spaces pose towards architecture and planning?

[1] Milica Tomic, Branimir Stojanovic: http://www.project-go-home.com/gohome/
dinners/Bios/Milica_Branimir.html

Tijana Stevanovic (1982), student of architecture, Belgrade. She focuses on the phenomena of transition between post-communism and post-capitalism, the shift from common to privatized property and the way it affects built structure in micro and macro scale, in social and urbanistic studies. From 2003 to 2005 she worked on Radio Belgrade 1 as author of the weekly show on urban culture and city life Tajni prolaz.

Inga Zimprich (1979) works as artist and curator focusing on sites of knowledge creation in the projects Thinktank – A groupware research and development project, Post Funding Eastern Europe and The Faculty of Invisibility. She is an inhabitant of Het Blauwe Huis – a residency of the mind and works as curator for the Center for Contemporary Art, Kiev.

Currently Stevanovic and Zimprich work together on the project ‘Small School of Architecture’ in Belgrade.

tijana.stevanovic@gmail.com
ingazimprich@gmail.com