The Architectural Legacy of a (Failed?) Revolution: I Am Your Future

In his seminal history book and manifesto Town and the Revolution, the architect Anatole Kopp argues that the earliest socialist architecture stemmed from revolutionary ideals – seeking to change man by changing his environment. In ex-Yugoslavia there are many interesting concrete remnants of this noble pursuit whose ruins today only testify to its utter failure. These representative architectonic buildings embody the epoch and the great historical and political turmoil which took place in the second part of the 20th century. They have recently been re-introduced to the international audience through the MoMA retrospective Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, but for many years they have haunted the imagination of ex-Yugoslav documentarists who in their works problematise socialist legacy and the influence of architecture on social memory and the mental maps of the local population. The modernist architecture of the filmed relics still communicates a past idea of the future, while the materials reveal their current state of suspended, indefinitely prolonged revolution. 

This is demonstrated in the experimental documentary Centar (Ivan Marković, 2018), an immersive visual study of the Sava Centre in New Belgrade which used to serve as a congress centre hosting summits of the Non-Aligned Movement. The author follows the Centre’s workers in their routine but meticulous endeavour of cleaning and repairing, and simultaneously offers an insight into the magnificent interior of a vast complex whose conspicuous futuristic aesthetics once symbolized progress and future. The film is composed of long, static shots caressing the inside of the building but also focusing on invisible labour, or rather “the labour of ‘invisible’ people,” as the director stresses in an interview.¹ The abstract, geometric constructions of the monumental Centre are mimicked by the composition of the shots themselves; we observe the solemn workers from unusual angles, but always from a safe distance, admiring the rhythmic coordination of their movements. Their repetitive work seems futile – the gigantic space is seemingly abandoned and is constantly deteriorating and leaking in front of our eyes. Yet they are the ones keeping it alive through small, ritualised acts of care, which they perform in complete silence. Marković gives us several close-ups of the workers taking a break from their toil, avoiding to glance at the camera and trying not to fall asleep, their choreographed bodies intrinsically linked to the body of the building. Through the entire film, we observe the Centre as a spatio-temporal vacuum. There are no shots of the exterior, only the interior. Even the windows are blurred with rain obscuring the cityscape. 

It is only in the closing captions that we learn the building is awaiting privatisation and commercial reconstruction, bearing witness to a wider process of neglect for socialist heritage and a revisionist climate. Designed in 1979 by architect Stojan Maksimović, the Sava Centre was part of New Belgrade, a planned city imagined as a capital of the multicultural federal state that hosted many representative buildings showcasing Tito’s “third position” and independence from the two competing blocks, challenging both the Soviets’ harsh rigour and the West’s aloofness to inequity. The former swampland was to be transformed according to modernist plans inspired by Le Corbusierian principles and socialist aspirations, but today this dys(u)topian city remains “suspended”: a place born to be central has become peripheralized, i.e. pushed to the margins.² What was to be an architectonic embodiment of the idea of a new society is today warped by a completely different ideology. Belgrade’s urban landscape became more and more dominated by expensive housing complexes, overcrowded shopping malls, and orthodox churches. Surrounded by relentless construction as the controversial Beograd na vodi (Belgrade Waterfront)³ sprouts on the other side of the river, the Sava Centre looks defeated, and its physical degradation betrays the decline of its social project. With his exemplary piece of slow cinema, Marković tries to counter the exoticization of these spaces – the trendy fad for Yugoslav modernist architecture that spread over the Internet after a series of photographs called “Spomeniks” (“Monuments”) by Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers described these objects as bizarre, extra-terrestrial, and similar sensationalist catchphrases. The problem Marković reveals is that these kinds of works (often coming from the West) create a “decontextualized image of Yugoslavia,” even though their objects are part of a tangible history and the people connected to them are still living.⁴ Mere visual attraction under the pretence of documentation is not enough. Marković challenges the prevailing culture of forgetting by juxtaposing what the Centre represented and strived at with its current derelict state, concomitantly trying to unravel its potential future and meaning for the people in its immediate vicinity and the nation as a whole. 

Centar

Centar

Dom boraca (Home of the Resistance, Ivan Ramljak, 2018) also explores the relation between people, spaces, and collective memory in a cinematic eulogy to the derelict Memorial Home for WWII Resistance Fighters and Youth of Yugoslavia in Kumrovec, the home village of President Tito.⁵ There are still some people taking care of the building and keeping it semi-maintained, although it remains empty and devoid of any function. It was rumoured to become many disparate things, from a film museum to a training camp for the Croatian Football Association, but it seems that its ideological background has deemed it untouchable. Once again, the building itself is the protagonist: via its large modernist windows, which resemble “film frames or even film strip,” the director plays with the notion that “we are watching the building, but the building is also watching us, or rather the few people who still visit it.”⁶ These are former veterans who watch old spaghetti westerns and use the decrepit stairs “at their own responsibility,” or curious tourists taking snapshots and snooping around (sometimes costumed in the cap and scarf worn by Tito’s Pioneers). Nobody utters a single word; a mysterious woman’s ghostly presence occupies most of the shots, roaming the empty corridors. She is seemingly the building’s guardian and our voiceless guide. There is something unnervingly domestic about the whole atmosphere – it seems that everything has settled into a routine of watering plants, dusting off books with titles like Ethics and Meaning in Young Marx, and mowing the lawn for the rare occasional visitor. The tranquillity and slow pace are at odds with the initial purpose of the building as a beacon of the revolution. The glory of combat is suspended, and the building’s residents stuck in time. 

Their trance-like state and the director’s restrained, meditative observationalism are interrupted on two occasions with the use of archival footage – the sound recording of a political speech kept in the Home’s library (the only “off” voice we hear) and, serving as a prologue, a slide-show of diapositives taken in the early 1970s when the Home was still brand new and fully operating. The last slide reveals a young woman standing behind the reception desk. We realise it is the same woman who is guarding the abandoned bastion 40 years later. Like a spokeswoman of her generation, she seems trapped between two societies, two states and two ideologies, unable to critically reflect on the past and escape its hypnotic hold – even relics are better than the nothingness ahead. Both Ramljak and Marković’s approaches to memory are hauntological rather than ontological – they are intrigued by the unreal, non-existent, and absent that permeates the quotidian of the post-transitional nation-state. In the territories of former Yugoslavia, these topics have for a long time been completely revoked by the media and the school system, or represented through a heavily revisionist filter. 

Home of the Resistance

Home of the Resistance

In Strujanja (Currents, Katerina Duda, 2019), plants have completely taken over a vacant business building whose destiny remains uncertain. The gardener still takes care of the plants that have become part of its architecture and prepares the ones in pots for relocation. Unlike the intentionally silenced protagonists in Centar and Home of the Resistance, the multimedia artist Duda allows the gardener to keep her voice, making her the film’s informal narrator. The last remaining green tenants – dragon trees, ficus, and philodendron – were an irreplaceable part of socialist architecture in the 1970s and 1980s. Amid the building’s triangular staircase and inner terraces shaped like hanging gardens, they establish their own temporality. On a metaphorical plain, what we are observing is a change in currents – one conception of space and architecture is replaced by another, while at the same time the concept of the welfare state and state-run companies is disappearing from society’s vision. The building belongs to the Croatian oil company INA, a former giant of the Yugoslav economy (and the preferred career moorage of the politically suitable), which is now owned by the Hungarian MOL group, its biggest shareholder. In an ironic twist of fate, it is also the very building in which Croatia proclaimed its independence from Yugoslavia at a clandestine parliament meeting in 1991, an independence de facto debunked given that the majority of national wealth (epitomized by INA) has been sold out and privatised without any consideration of public interest. The employees were evacuated, and the offices emptied because of economic rationalisation and very expensive maintenance costs, which leaves one with a cynical aftertaste knowing that, in 2022, INA is once again part of a scandal in which over one hundred million euros have been embezzled and that the filmed building remains subject to real estate speculation. 

Currents serendipitously meandered into film form – it began as part of artistic research in collaboration with Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, which still operates in the space of the oil company, occupying several rooms on its lateral entrance. The Gallery is part of the former regime’s initiative of providing workers with cultural content, and one of its two remaining relics along with the INA Choir. Both the gallery and the choir have been pushed to the margins, while the complex cannot be envisioned as anything outside of a commercial venture, providing offices for another company, or becoming a fancy hotel. Mixing elements of documentary, animation, and experimental cinema, Duda also engages in the performative. She has the choir hold a rehearsal in the unoccupied main building, which some of the singers visited for the first time (usually they just pick up their keys there). By staging this situation, she temporarily evokes the forlorn dream of merging art and labour, envisaging a different, non-commercial purpose for the building. 

Currents

Currents

Unlike the previous three films, which focus on architectural structures while the protagonists are reduced to ghostly apparitions and operate as (un)willing keepers, in Muzej revolucije (Museum of the Revolution, Srđan Keča, 2021) the unrealised architectonic project serves as a mere backbone that allows the director to tell the story of three women living on the outskirts of late capitalist society.⁷

The film starts with Vjenceslav Richter’s programmatic words: “the purpose of this museum is to safeguard the truth about us” … “one cannot approach the task of designing this building using conventional ideas about museums.” One immediately gets chills down one’s spine and ponders – who is this “us” Richter is talking about (since both the proletariat and the Yugoslav nation have nominally, they reassure us time and time again, ceased to exist)? Richter conceived the museum as a space of permanent revolution and dialogue; the building’s largest part would have belonged to a colossal hall where film screenings and conversations were supposed to take place. He wasn’t interested in artefacts the museum would contain, but in the people it would gather and the encounters they would have – people who belonged to the workers’ movement and who would use it to share ideas regarding their joint worldwide struggle. The film is conceived by Keča as an extension of this venture, re-appropriating the unfinished space and taking over the role this utopian building was supposed to have by cinematic means.  

In an interview for Film Centre Serbia, Keča talks about the socialist ruin porn genre, saying that what he resents about it most is the way it “prioritises spaces of the past over the people of the present.”⁸ Museum of the Revolution tries to reverse this process by focusing on the micro-history of its current occupants as opposed to the grand historical narrative of the political elites. Although interested in the potentiality of the space as envisioned by Richter, Keča does not feel that the meticulous study of the building itself can trigger anything worthwhile in the audience – he opts instead to “reflect on the present moment via the building’s prism” and “record the existence of the people living on its remnants before it is erased.”⁹ Keča and his assistant director Radiša Cvetković decided to spend a lot of time with the community – sometimes a whole month, often without filming at all, only following the rhythm of life and work of their heroines. This results in the “camera not following but anticipating action” and achieving a sense of intimacy and closeness.¹⁰

Museum of the Revolution

Museum of the Revolution

In Museum of the Revolution, we meet Milica, a tenacious albino Romani girl who lives among the debris of an abandoned utopian project – Richter’s Museum of the Revolution in New Belgrade. Milica lives there with her mother Vera and an old woman called Mara with whom Milica forms a special bond, although their relationship is not devoid of strife.¹¹ Milica’s father is in prison and she wants him to stay there – it is better when he is not around. The three women live in taciturn solitude permeated by moments of tenderness. They roam through the Serbian capital past houses they cannot afford to live in, and schools Milica will probably never attend. The camera tracks the sheer vastness of their isolation – for all ostensive purposes, they could be on another planet. Their surroundings are always obscured by the camera’s frame, appearing only at its margins, as if making a shelter for them to hide in. Sometimes Milica makes heart-shaped figures in the snow or sings her favourite turbofolk songs.¹² Mara teaches her how to knit while her mother takes her to hustle for money on the streets. It is a far from idyllic childhood, yet as with all childhoods there is a cruel sweetness in its daydreaming and mischief – a tiny and fragile pubescent utopia fortified on the ruins of a grand utopian vision. The vapour of a collective dream meets a very personal one. Amid the heavy traffic, deafening car honks, and blinding city lights, Milica takes a moment of pause – catching her breath, raising her hands above her head. She makes a glowing serene figure amid the surrounding chaos of a reckless society crumbling on its feeble foundations.

Architect, painter, and sculptor Vjenceslav Richter was a visionary thinker – not many of his projects were realised, but he wrote a lot about the future of the socialist city.¹³ According to Keča, there are hardly any written or filmed traces of the plans to build the museum (initiated in 1961) and none whatsoever about the beginning of construction in 1978. This is dumfounding given the size and location of the project; Keča assumes this is due to a lack of political will and faith in this grandiose project from the former governing structures.¹⁴ That would explain why from 1961 until the collapse of Yugoslavia, for 40 years only a huge basement was built. Since the early 1990s this underground cavern has become a sanctuary for homeless people and other society outcasts pushed out of other spaces (although now the site is supposed to become a new concert hall for the Belgrade Philharmonic). “There will be a place for all of you,” the concert organisers shout on the megaphone, completely oblivious to the existence of the underground dwellers whose fate interlocks with theirs. Most citizens of Belgrade have never heard about the Museum of the Revolution or the people who have lived on its premises for the past 20 years. “All these histories are being erased in favour of an infrastructure which will only benefit the richest segment of the population,” says Keča in an interview regarding his archaeological celluloid endeavour.¹⁵ This destructive urbanism, encapsulated in the Belgrade Waterfront project, wants to keep poverty out of sight at the same time as rapidly producing it, a characteristic that Keča describes as “urbicidal”.¹⁶ The heroines’ dreams may seem naïve and elusive but what can be said about a society that lacks any vision, or even a pretence of having one? A society devoid of even a false promise of a better future? What does a society like that build? No wonder it is only capable of producing bleak and sterile cityscapes. As Lewis Mumford perceptively wrote, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at…”¹⁷ A society incapable of conceiving its own utopia is dead even before its actual physical demise. 

Museum of the Revolution

Museum of the Revolution

Lastly, Hotel Jugoslavija (Nicolas Wagnières, 2017) is a highly personal and multi-layered film essay on the break-up of Yugoslavia and resultant nostalgia. The author documented the decay of a once glamorous hotel for over ten years, editing his footage with profuse archival materials, film clips, and interviews. The director is Swiss but of (once) Yugoslav and (now) Serbian origin, as the country he visited as a child no longer exists. Wagnières explores a strange nostalgia for what he calls “my Yugoslavia” – his mother’s country, a country in which he never lived but which represented for him “a mythological place, an origin, a lost kingdom.” It is, as the filmmaker puts it, an “image that allows me to believe but prevents me from seeing.” He remembers how his mother always reproached his father that he didn’t marry her but a certain idea of socialism, and that he only saw in her the image of this ideal. Although Yugoslavia doesn’t exist anymore, the Hotel named after it still stands – it is in a state of permanent refurbishment, awaiting its new guests who never seem to arrive. Just as Sava Centre and the Museum of the Revolution, Hotel Jugoslavija was an ambitious and extravagant project to be built in the envisioned modern utopia of New Belgrade.¹⁸ Construction began in the late 1940s; at first it was supposed to be a housing estate, but the building remained unfinished for over 20 years. Then, President Tito decided it was to become the biggest and most prestigious state-run hotel in the Balkans, and that it will represent the country to foreign powers – in 1969 it opened its doors to foreign businessmen, heads of state and celebrities. This costly and lush display was unreachable to the average citizen of Yugoslavia, but there was a sense of pride in the way it was represented. The lavish hotel colossus once housed around 600 rooms and employed over 400 employees of all ex-Yugoslav nationalities. 

Wagnières began his regular pilgrimages to Hotel Jugoslavija in 2005, filming the abandoned and worn-out rooms and walls as if witnessing their state would help him get a hold on the history that baffled him. From the assembled interviewees, we find out that during the 1990s the hotel became a gathering place for criminals and other seedy characters. In 1999, during the NATO bombing of Belgrade, the hotel was destroyed. There are various stories as to why it was targeted: the warlord Arkan ran a casino on its premises, a state minister was present at the time, it was large enough to become the headquarters for the vengeful federal army. Wagnières informs us that since he began filming the hotel has changed owners three times and that there were three failed transformation projects, each more ambitious and luxurious then the prior; the country itself also changed its name three times. Since the bombing, the remaining employees took out a loan and refurbished a part of the hotel. A dire financial situation led them to seek help from the powerful Dunav osiguranje company, which was obligated to invest in the reestablishment of the hotel, but they just re-sold it without fulfilling any of their obligations. 

The glorious past of the now dilapidated hotel is shown via the only two film clips Wagnières could find during his pedantic research – the mistreatment of the archive in the region once again reflecting the neglect of its contested history. The first clip comes from a German advertising film from the early 1970s, mixing propaganda, tourism, and politics. Hotel Jugoslavija was also the main film location for the banned Black Wave film Mlad i zdrav kao ruža (Young and Healthy as a Rose, Jovan Jovanović, 1971) where a group of sexually uninhibited and narcotic misfits break into the hotel as a symbol of state power and the privileged elite. In the final credits, the lettering YU = NO END turns into NO HAPPY END – the hotel already epitomizes the country itself, but also the communist idea. In the ending scene, the cynical Godardian protagonist Stevan Nikolić, a young anarchistic delinquent played by the iconic Dragan Nikolić, prophetically exclaims – “I Am Your Future.” Is he embodying the apathy of the generation of ’68, the upcoming rule of war criminals and mobsters, or the dystopian destiny of the architectonic giant itself?¹⁹ 

Hotel Jugoslavija

Hotel Jugoslavija

The third film clip featured in the archival documentary illustrates the post-communist present and comes from the action blockbuster 3 Days to Kill (McG, 2014), shot in Belgrade and starring Kevin Costner as a CIA agent hunting down an arms trafficker. Wagnières re-uses the scene in front of Hotel Jugoslavija, inspired by its turbulent past, in which it is blown-up once again amid a clash between the good guys and the bad guys of the new world order. Wagnières ponders whether Yugoslavia lived only artificially, and whether his version of it actually existed, wondering at the same time if there was nothing worth inheriting from it. He films to retain and to regain and, in the process, obfuscates the distinction between personal and collective memory, approaching Yugoslavia as a shared experience of a disappeared country exchanged between members of his family, the former workers and managers of the hotel, the audience, but primarily his subjective self. The director connects his intimate vision with the destiny of an entire country – Yugoslavia is an idea, a concept, not a real place, a (non)place, dare one say utopia? As someone who grew up in an affluent Western capitalist country, he mourns the death of an ideal, an image to believe in (isn’t a film just that – a string of images we believe in?) and compares his visits to the hotel with visiting a cemetery. Old masters have been replaced by new masters and the image of ownership dispossessed the citizens even more, reducing moral values to commercial values and abandoning all notions of a communal life. “What can grow on ruins apart from a moral wasteland?” The film becomes saturated by the director’s nostalgia, which he rather overindulges in. 

Some say that architecture is most beautiful when in ruins, exuding a certain melancholy of decline. Svetlana Boym calls this fascination for ruins “ruinophilia” and sees it as a distinguishing feature of the early-21st-century imaginary.²⁰ According to Boym, ruinophilia is connected to the prospective dimension of nostalgia, which is reflective rather than restorative. It dreams of potential futures that never came to be (rather than of imaginary pasts), making us aware of the vagaries of progressive vision as such. The utopian notion that architecture can make the world a better place permeated Yugoslav socialist society despite all its contradictions, stemming from its unique position between the East and the West. Nostalgia also has a utopian element, but it is not directed toward the future or toward the past. It is directed sideways, like the gaze of the camera. Ex-Yugoslav documentarists have taken it upon themselves to excavate the potential slumbering in these ambitious but abandoned projects (some commercialized and partialized, others devastatingly neglected and decaying). Instead of portraying them as fallen monuments to a lost era and a failed ideology, they use cinematic means to ignite a long overdue conversation – inviting us to rethink the way these spaces can be used beyond their original purpose, but also how we can imagine new forms of sociality.

Endnotes