In my previous post I commented on the history of New Belgrade in relation to Yugoslav self-management practice of socialism, as well as to different socio-spatial concepts of modernism and modernization, including the latest neo-liberal transformations of the city. I mentioned the project Differentiated Neighborhoods as the first large, 'all inclusive' and 'wide-spectral' research of New Belgrade, realized through the collaboration of group of artists, curators, architects, filmmakers, journalists etc. and presented for the first time to the public, after one year of internal meetings and discussions. The central interest of all the participants was the "common connotation of the term neighbourhood, derived from the vocabulary of architecture and urbanism in order to describe certain part of the city with its specificities" - at least this is what they stated in the joint text. Organization of the neighbourhood has recently become one of the central topic in many art and architectural projects, especially in parallel with the interests for different micro-political structures and models of self-organization as the alternatives to dominant top-down managerial models of the state and corporate structures. The participants of "Differentiated Neighbourhoods" project haven’t reach the consensus on the issue, and, at least at the first glance [although Zoran Eric spoke about this tradition connected with the exhibiting space of Dunavski Kej Local Community]. Looks like that they have shown more interest in the set of changes brought by the social transition of 90’s, and the way it was reflected on the urban tissue of the city.
While in the counties of real-socialism neighbourhood was clearly marked by the 'borders' of the block, 'post-socialism' produced fast urban restructuring and amplified simultaneously both the process of gentrification and the process of ghettoisation. Although the initial fascination of the most of researchers was a historical New Belgrade as the significant social-modernist project, as the main theme emerged the topic of 'hybridity' of the city and the plurality of life.
They took into the account what Henry Lefebvre called ‘differentiated’ spaces [the spaces that continued to persist under neo-capitalism] where difference is registered and linked to the clandestine, or underground side of life. In that sense, they joined to the kind of neo-situationistic vision and critique of the machine-like rationalized environment of Modernist urban space. Like Henry Lefebvre, The Situationists attacked modern urbanism as the 'technique of separation', based on the rationalization of certain aspects of the city and of human existence, such as production and circulation. This reference is not random, also from the particular historical perspective, since Henry Lefebvre was part of the team which appeared in the "International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement" together with Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud. Thanks to my hanging around with the participants of the project, as well as to the efforts of reviewing, I had a pleasure to read this interesting and rare document from 1986 and I'll share some of it with you. The most interesting part is, of course, the paragraph which shows the viewpoints of the team to the sensitive question of how to intercross the progressive social politics and progressive understanding of urbanization that has been a tendency worldwide in the second half of the XX century: "The right to the city comes as a complement, not so much to the rights of man (like the right to education, to health, security, etc.), but to the rights of the citizen: who is not only a member of a 'political community' whose conception remains indecisive and conflictual, but of a more precise grouping which poses multiple questions: the modern city, the urban. This right leads to active participation of the citizen-citadan in the control of the territory, and in it management, whose modalities remain to be specified. It leads also to the participation of the citizen-citadin in the social life linked to the urban". A Lefebvre&Renaudie&Guilbaud trio considers that the planning of Novi Beograd failed, both in its attempt at global coherence and in the domain of political will to create a new city. The main reason for this social and urban failure they find in the conceptual and morphological schematicism of the zoning which authoritatively separate, disjoint and disarticulate its parts. They call it 'the administration of the city' or 'mechanical functionalism' and claim that it "kills the city, as it would kill any other complex living organism". According to their visions of the links between the social and urban life, they point out that the Socialist countries, even with all their differences, have not been capable to create “The Socialist City”. The list of arguments sounds convincing and logical, especially in this digested order, and somehow we must agree, but at the same time while agreeing we may also examine the material conditions of the subject and the object of critique. "This is not the Socialist city" - was the judgment which in my case immediately recalled the scene in which three elegant critics stand in a front of the finished painting and skillfully state the conceptual problems which this surface reflects, neglecting the conditions of production and all the other things that are beyond the surface. In the case of the architecture it is even more striking, because New Belgrade is not just a blueprint or an abstraction, but the city built in a short period of time in order to host hundreds of thousands of people into the communal flats. This is the circumstance which makes New Belgrade to be quite Socialist architectural project, especially from the perspective of today, where high percentage of Belgrade-based people have to pay the rent higher than the average salary, and can hardly imagine to ever afford to buy the flat. The arguments can go further through the complex questions of intertwining of aesthetics and politics, form and content, representation and organization, ... but I will stop it here with this 'pragmatic' example I just mentioned and try to say a few words about the exhibition, screening and discussion in the 'Local Community' Dunavski Kej.
This ground-floor-only building with one meeting room and the offices, almost invisible in the surroundings of the new and monumental business edifications, stuffed with the untacled furniture from the original period, was a real 'unspectacular' monument of the socialist-modernism. The catering was 'gentrified' though, because according to the historical setting and the spirit of the place, we should have been offered with the so-called 'sindical refreshments' which would consist of the incredible amount of all kinds of meat and lots of drinks. But, ok, the project was precisely about the match between the 'original' and 'gentrified', so not much of a complaints about the catering falling under the later... The exhibition was of a documentary character in the narrowest sense. It was a presentation of all the ongoing researches on the topic, in their current stage and presented in the visual, audio or textual form. The space was filled with all the different faces of New Belgrade, from it’s very beginning up to now. We could see the images of 'collective working actions' [otherwise the dominant representation of the project of New Belgrade in socialist-realist photography at the time], new community of the future China Town in the block 70, clusters of new corporate buildings, graffiti-covered walls in the ghettos of the block ... It was a kind of 'posters on the walls' show, pleasant to be at, but hard to overview. Anyway, all the projects are presented in detail on the website.
Three films were screened at the opening: NEW by Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, BOULEVARD OF ILLUSIONS by Stefan Romer, and PRC by Dusan Saponja & Dusan Cavic.
The film "New" shows the key late-modernist institutions in Belgrade whose images are followed by the excerpts of the already mentioned text by Henry Lefebvre from 1986. The fun part comes when the excerpts on English are being read by the local participants of the project with heavy serbian/slavic accent. Camera pans in slow motion, forcing us to focus at highly aesthetical interiors of the late modernism. Besides the good selection of telling quotations and the imposing architectural examples, which can not be neglected as the value of this film, I failed to understand the point of juncture of the symbolic spots of Yugoslav modernism with Lefebrian critique of the unification of spaces under capitalism.
"Boulevard of Illusions" is conceived as a road movie. The New Belgrade sites [architecture, graffiti, billboards, parks ...] are shot from the car; the film starts with entering the city and ends with leaving the city, which completes this idea of New Belgrade as "the city within the city". Camera drives trough the Boulevard of Lenin [now of course it’s name changed to the Boulevard of Mihajlo Pupin], opening the view from the key motorway to the representative space of New Belgrade, it’s historical core. The latest attractions on this display are the edifications of Erste bank, Zepter, Delta corporation, etc..., witnessing about the gentrification of the space and growingly significant business investments. Voices in off are telling the stories about the different places which are passing by, ranging from the dry informational approach to the more subjective impressions, experiences or historical reflections. I don't know what to think about the imposing equation of 'Boulevard of Lenin' and 'Boulevard of Illusions'. Whether this parallel is derived from positive or negative associations, it repeats the stereotype of the post-socialist discourse, either as the claim that socialism was just an illusion, or trough the nostalgic view towards what will be no more.
The film about Recreational Centre for Retired (PRC) depicts a day in the life of New Belgrade pensioners in one of the last social clubs in New Belgrade. This is the type of the socialist organization of community life, quite similar to the one Zoran Eric explained about in the previous post, talking about 'Local Communities'. The film represents old, but still vital men playing the table games, drinking cheap beer and singing folk songs. They are approaching the camera, saying: 'This is the only corner left for us' or 'This is the best place to go out' or 'I'm here the minimum 10 hours per day ' or 'This place is good because there is no women', etc... As a difference from the first two films, realized in the form of video-essays, this one has a cinematic dimension articulated through the intensive narration and brutal close ups. [BTW the term video-essay I learned from the UK based group Inventory, and recently 'put it in the motion' as the operative description of this particular video genre.] This bold and self-oriented representation of the white male community reminded me somehow on the Fight Club (the movie), of course this is the moment where the age makes the fight impossible, but still keeps a certain underground practices as a radical form of psychotherapy against the discomfort with the outer world. This is the film about a real ghetto, portrayed a bit differently than what one can find in the stereotypical imagery. The authors of the film also played with the idea of ghetto during the subsequent discussion: Dusan Cavic said "This film is recorded in the block 70 and I live in the block 70. I moved only once in my life - from the block 70 into the block 70, and I feel more for the block 70 then for Serbia."
At the end comes the time for the critique. I have two critical points to the project "Differentiated Neighbourhoods", both of which are general and particular at the same time:
The first concerns the shift in artistic production caused by globalization of the arworld and mobility of artists. The site of production is not any longer the place of living, but various residency programs and workshops across the world, which are distributing material resources for the new artistic production. The constant change of the sites and topics transforms the users of the 'mobility services' into cultural tourists, which results in the over-production of the superficial site-specific projects, operating with information that are at hand, and without deeper analysis.
The second concerns collaborative, non-hierarchical, processual, participatory and inclusivist forms of work on art projects, which at the beginning [early 90s] had an experimental value of questioning strictly authorial, professionally enclosed, epistemologically determined and exclusivist forms of creative work. Nowadays, this collaborative forms have been canonized in the artworld as the value 'per se', unfortunately not as the form of questioning, but as the ultimate affirmation of the neo-liberal democracy practices based on the concepts of either 'consensus' or of 'antagonistic debate'. Such art projects are often loosing clear tendency and articulation, being transformed into symbolic exercise in the democratic processes of the Western parliamentarism.
Taggé comme:
differentiated spaces, neighborhood, new belgrade, socialism, socialist modernism
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