Those at the photo are the blocks of New Belgrade, shot from the plane while landing from Paris trough unusual (maybe new?) route. This particular approach from the air to the city (the city we soon are going to walk trough) looks much more promising then the usual view on plains and forests - a neutral announcement that we're coming back home. Captain did his best for his traveler's viewing pleasure...

Besides being the aesthetic fact, to me, this image represents something else. It is the ultimate proof of the translation of the phantasies of the historical avant-gardes [for example Malevich's "Architectons"] into the reality of urban life and politics of the building of the New Society. It seems that this project was not that much of "utopian", as claimed by the contemporary history.

This postcard from Belgrade can be easily dedicated to the recent return of 'The Brave New World of Modernism' into the focus. Over the last ten years everybody got crazy about modernism: Biennials and other grand shows position themselves in the dialogue with the universal modernist heritage; Art market promotes neo-abstraction and formalist art; Critics and theorists reconsider the notion of 'form' and 'art autonomy'. All that goes hand in hand with nostalgia for the XX century, which brought revolutionary social, technological and aesthetic concepts. I was always interested in the ideological trajectories of the fragmentary projects of this recent modernist restoration. Together with my colleagues from WHW, Prelom, kuda.org and CCA/pro.ba, I started to research the notion of 'socialist modernism' inside the project that we vaguely named "Political Practices of [post-] Yugoslav Art". This is the project worth mentioning in this context, but I decided I'd write more about it in some of the following articles.

New Belgrade, built as the city within the city, is the greatest monument to the socialist modernism, and specific Yugoslav contribution to the representation of historical progress of the socialist societies. Consisting of the administrative core [Former Central Committee of Communist Party of Yugoslavia (now prestigious business centre on the expensive location) + Museum of Contemporary Art + The Federal Administrative Council + fundaments of never built Museum of Revolution] and residential areas in the form of big blocks of skyscrapers [in East Germany called “platenbau”], it became the target of interest of many visitors and researchers from abroad. It also hosted various architectural workshops and numerous official and less official guided tours.

The Differentiated Neighborhoods was the first large and 'all inclusive' project of the research of New Belgrade. Initiated by Zoran Eric, curator of the department for Visual Culture of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the project started in February 2006 as an open research and collective workshop of artists, filmmakers, architects, sociologists, curators, journalists and other people interested in the conversation. They 'exercised' to get-to-know New Belgrade over one year, during which they arranged various sessions, internal debates, social researches and artistic sub-projects. The model of collaboration was a typical non-hierarchical and participative one, resulting in a set of fragmented views coming from the antagonisms of the very debate.

The first public presentation of the project was realized trough the exhibition displaying the documents from the research, screenings of documentary movies, and a public performance by a Bikvanderpol duo. It took place in the small building belonging to the original late-modernist architecture and functioning as the 'Local Community' (Mesna zajednica) named "Dunavski Kej", now symbolically confronting the new spectacular building of B92 television. Zoran Eric considers that the choice of the exhibition space resonates with the very core of the research: "The symbolic connotation of the selected space relates to the concept of self-management, as a specific Yugoslav contribution to the Marxist theory and development of socialism, although the implementation of this concept in the very practice had its ups and downs". A 'Local Community' was both: a basic municipal administrative unit where the workers would exercise their rights, and a meeting point where the balls for the military officers or other festivities and celebrations would take place. He also comments that "the 'Local Communities are remaining in the new social system, but their visibility and importance is diminishing in spite of the need of local population for new kind of self-organization. They have the similar organizational structure as in socialism, consisting of the board and employees, but they serve mostly as voting places or space for rent for different sporting and folklore activities". I also asked about how he made the decision about this specific 'Local Community', among many others. Zoran answers: "After going around New Belgrade and meeting secretaries of several Local Communities, I have decided for the one in block 30. The space and the furniture were quite old, not renovated, and it resembled the atmosphere of some 30 years ago. Its location was central within New Belgrade. A very interesting spatial organization in its neighborhood is that it lays just next to the new building of Radio and TV B92, the symbol of civil resistance to Milosevic and his regime in the 90s, now a commercial corporation, and the brand new GTC 'Class A' office building that symbolizes the tendencies of transformation of New Belgrade into either a business centre or else a big shopping mall".

The space was hard to find, but interesting to visit, especially when inhabited with international art crowd. Otherwise, for the local people, the place is not exotic in any sense: we all use to vote in the similar spaces. The exhibition, screening and public discussion of the project, which happened in the 'Local Community' Dunavski Kej, deserves the proper explanation, and I'll concentrate on it in my next post. For now, I'll just add a few comments to the general conception.

Despite of the antagonisms in the group, quite often mentioned during the presentation and consensually defined as the creative engine of the collective work, the participants managed to come up with the joint statement. Their interests were interconnected through the connotations of the term neighborhood, derived from the vocabulary of architecture and urbanism in order to describe certain part of the city with its specificities. Those interests are also a part of the broader search for the different models of self-organization embedded in micro-political structures, which could be seen as the alternatives to the to the dominant top-down managerial models of the state and corporate forms of governmentality. The explorers were also curious about the changes brought by a social transition of nineties. While during real socialism neighborhood was clearly marked by the “borders” of the block, “Post-socialism” produced socio-spatial transformation of this concept, facing the historical New Belgrade with the fast urban restructuring of both gentrification and ghettoisation.

Visiting the show made me looking through some of the texts by Ljiljana Blagojevic, the lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, who significantly contributed to the understanding of modernism in Yugoslavia. She wrote a book about pre-war modernism, the digest can be downloaded as a .pdf here, and the doctoral thesis about the project of New Belgrade, which is yet to come out.

Ljiljana Blagojevic considers that "modernism in Yugoslavia clearly reflect the specificity of the Yugoslav political and ideological project (i.e. 'self-management socialism') as compared to the 'rest of the world'. In the process, the representative role of the new architecture was simultaneously both negated and underlined by the modernist praxis ...The project of New Belgrade became an unprecedented polygon of modern urban development, which reflected the ardent ideological aspirations to a 'third way'. The question is closely related to the consequential resolution of the double negation which (mis)informed the development of the late modernist 'socialist aestheticism' in architecture. Being theoretically grounded on an instable foundation of negative reference framework of rejecting both Functionalism and Constructivism as products of late capitalism, and the Soviet practice of 'formalist eclecticism', the Yugoslav socialist project in architecture ended up as an under-developed and unfinished modernism"

For the needs of the "Differentiated Neighborhoods" project Ljiljana Blagojevic covered the problem of New Belgrade through the short and apparently puzzling question: New Belgrade - Big Dormitory or Big Shopping Mall? I understood her question as the attempt to touch the two dominant modes of critique present over the time of the existence of the city. It was also witnessing about the changes of political course in Serbia and implementation of different social conceptions into the organization of the city space. The first critique was coming from the era of socialism and represented the voices of academic experts and elegant citizens of Belgrade. The second is the critique of the recent capitalist gentrification, which appears as the unified voice of leftists and 'advocates' of planed urbanization. During the socialism the people use to sleep at New Belgrade and travel to the center for a job. Now, New Belgrade is hosting the increasing amount of new business centers runned by the local monopolists and multinational corporations. It results with new business and construction initiatives, quite often very brutal and unscrupulous.

The historical New Belgrade is the monument of the certain politics based on the anti-fascist consensus of the people of Yugoslavia and catered for the well-being of the certain community. This project was named as 'socialist modernism' or 'socialist esthetism', and it reflected the idea of social progress as a participatory process, encompassing all of the individuals.