Student Cultural Centre (SKC, Belgrade) as a Site of Self-Production

• In Event: Yugoslav Aesthetics I: October 75—Fifty Years On

Abstract

In my previous research, I observed the SKC as an institutional space created in a sort of performative mode as an institution-in-movement, or institution-movement, since it grew out of the student and workers’ protests of 1968, and continued that movement from the inside as a critical wave of cultural production, supported by the international flux ofartists, intellectuals, and activists.

The end of the protests in terms of “redirecting” the students toward the space of SKC has been understood in two different ways, both of which have had their revered representatives among the protagonists of the epoch and art historians who deal with this issue. For some it was the state mechanism of control that turned SKC into an “organized margin” or a “peripheral social lab” in which critical ideas and practices could be easily identified, isolated, and controlled; for others it meant “conquering and producing a space of genuine freedom,” which made room for a different artistic expression and a free circulation of critical ideas coming from the new generation of (conceptual) artists from all over the world.
This paper returns to dynamic institution-movement or institution-critique in the light of the recent reclaiming of the space of the SKC by Belgrade Students (protesting students took over the building on February 12, 2025). From that point it speculates of (im)possibility of October 2025 in the current epistemic and political crisis

Author

• Jelena Vesic, Independent Scholar