The Emancipatory Potential of Exhibiting Croatia’s Architectural Pasts

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Art III: Charting Emancipatory Spaces: Insights on Art from Yugoslav Socialism and Post-Socialism II

Abstract

In the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, Croatia began to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale under its own national presentation in 1991. This paper will focus on the 2010 presentation. Designed and produced by a group of fifteen Croatian architects, the project included a floating barge that was to travel from Rijeka to Venice for the opening. It was a multi-coded, layered, and transformative architectural object rich in material and phenomenal effects that invited relationality with its changing context. I argue that we ought to read its making, floating, and collapse as a form of architectural performance, made possible by its historical moment, described by some theoreticians as a period particularly fit for experimenting. It was also a project that drew on references to collective work and art practices of these architects' own (previous) Yugoslav experiences. Imagined as a participatory project with a series of interventions (dockings) in public space, the floating pavilion was in dialogue with the local experimental heritage in architecture as well as happenings and the ‘new art practices’ that sought to activate public space with critical dialogue, humor, and art. The collective dimension of the project included, it is interesting to think of it as a form of re-enactment or as a “retro-utopian” impulse of the generation of architects who were straddling two systems and different formations of the country.

Author

• Ana Martina Bakic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)