With works by: Doplgenger, Vlado Danailov/ Mila Dimitrovska, Tilmann Meyer-Faje and Marko Tadic, curated by Natasa Bodrozic.
The final exhibition produced by Loose Associations in the framework of the international collaborative project "Collective Domain of Cultural Memory" was to open on April 14th 2020 at the VN Gallery in Zagreb. It was to feature four art works produced within the Motel Trogir Artist in Residence program (established by Loose Associations), three of which were produced last year. However, the exhibition never happened in a physical space due to the fact that we entered the world of pandemics on March 16th 2020.

However, an ONLINE VERSION of the exhibition is presented in a smaller scale on our website, while video works/ films were presented to the Zagreb audience at the end of May, in private spaces, in accordance with the recommended preventive measures during the coronavirus disease pandemic.

"You should be as distrustful of images as you are of words" [1]
When describing the turning point in his film experience as a viewer, Vienna-based film director Michael Haneke pointed to the simple gesture of the main film character in the middle of a movie chase suddenly turning to face the camera, i.e. the viewer, and addressing a few offhand remarks to them. That moment, claims Haneke, marked for him "the loss of cinematic innocence that would indelibly mark every film he went on to direct". From then on, he began to distrust the storytellers who claimed to be serving up real life.[2]

Another filmmaker, Harun Farocki, both in his work and in his theoretical reflections, strives to analyse the ways moving images and cameras imbricate with our everyday lives. His works tend to denaturalise moving images. His films always engage his own powers of critical analysis and elicit his viewer to do the same.

Re-examining the politics of media images that had been instrumental in developing the historical narratives in the region of former Yugoslavia between 1980 and 2000, the period marked by a sequence of changes in social relations, an economic and political crisis and the events that contributed to the breakup of Yugoslavia, informs the art practice of the Belgrade-based duo Doplgenger. According to them, those constructed media images, as an important ideological state apparatus, served as a base for constructing personal and then collective memory. The question they ask themselves as a (post-) Yugoslav generation is: how did we and how do we still react to variously opposing "montages of memories" to which we were and still are exposed?[3]

Somewhere in between those reference points lies the idea for the exhibition transposed in a concrete physical space and concrete historical/political context in which images and words take part in actual knowledge production, on the field of the current battle for the interpretation of the socialist Yugoslav heritage. In a post-communist condition, "the sense of reality" has been constructed by "reading history backward". This paradigm, characterised by the act of re-interpreting past events from the perspective of the newly established nation-states, contains a certain degree of manipulation with the past events in order to establish the so-called "national histories". This exhibition was to be an exercise in destabilizing the expected, in shaking the trust in storytellers, the constructors of the dominant narratives which shape "the (national) imagery", while, at the same time, posing the question how, by which means, to enter the battle of knowledge production and still propagate the idea of emancipated spectatorship in its broadest sense.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemics, the exhibition was cancelled and the new regime of life came along. Since some of the works were already finished by mid-March and some of them were only in the process of being made, the latter two took "a contextual turn". One of them started to create new narratives, future-oriented dystopian scenarios "after the total loss of control", while the other, articulated not only by the pandemics but also the earthquake that followed[4], posed a simple and immediate question "What will the city look like, after all this?" (...)

The starting point for the video is a circular building of the former Children's Maritime Health Resort, one of the dilapidated architectural masterpieces built in the 1960s, designed by architect Rikard Marasovic. The building is situated in Krvavica, a small, picturesque village three kilometres west of Makarska, in a small forest next to a pebble beach. Built in times when Croatia was part of the socialist Yugoslavia, it was part of the military infrastructure, but its main purpose was the treatment and recovery of children suffering from respiratory diseases. According to researchers, for some time, the health resort was strictly controlled by the military and inaccessible to the villagers and tourists of Krvavica. It was also hidden and out of the focus of architectural interest. However, more and more stories from the early 1980s have emerged, describing the health resort as a vivid place open to the local community. During the war in Yugoslavia, the building was used for sheltering refugees from war-stricken areas. In the second half of the 1990s, the building was "demilitarized", but had a similar destiny like numerous other former military facilities; it was left to the local communities, privatization funds and public institutions, which led to its gradual devastation. All this needs to be observed in the light of the so-called "transition" and rejection of the heritage of Yugoslav socialism.

Building a narrative in an epistolary form, uttered in a female voice, the Doplgenger film opens up a fragment from the life of a woman who spends time at the sea. Through an intimate letter from a vacation, the story unfolds in an indefinite time frame. Autumn days on the beach are intertwined with ominousness and a hidden tension. Time breaks down as the story unfolds, its determinants change with the instability of the words which describe it. The film dissolves the (linearity of) time, but also of meaning, destroying the structure of spoken language, as well as the very materiality of the film.

Doplgenger is an artist duo from Belgrade, comprising Isidora Ilic and Bosko Prostran. Doplgenger engages as a film/video artist, researcher, writer, and curator. The work of Doplgenger deals with the relation between art and politics by exploring the regimes of moving images and the modes of their reception. They rely on the tradition of experimental film and video, and through some of the actions of these traditions intervene on existing media products or work in expanded cinema forms. Their work has been shown internationally. Doplgenger is a recipient of the Serbian Politika Award, has been supported internationally, and has been granted with various AIR programs. They have participated in symposia, organized educational projects and workshops, presented lectures, and screened curated programs worldwide. In 2017, Ilic and Prostran coedited the publication Amateurs for Film. Since 2018, Doplgenger has served as a curator and selector for the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade.

'... nature has always existed and has always already been there' (Bruno La Tour, 'We have never been modern')

The borders once established have been crossed. The decay of culture has given space for the return of nature and complete control has been lost. The project is inspired by the spontaneous landscape in and around Motel Trogir, a condition that shines a light towards a new possible place-making approach. We venture into a paradox exciting to explore - to preserve a modernist legacy by moving the human away from the center of the story.

We imagine a fictional storyboard that stretches forward and backward, through time in space.

We start at a moment in the lifetime of a building, a second ago, the last ice age, now and the history yet to come. The scale is a motel room, the Earth, Trogir's landscape and the Universe. We explore a visual and written narrative on the aesthetics and ethics: the decay is not necessarily ugly and the unbuilt is not genuinely empty.

Ivan Vitic's building is not a form following function anymore, yet it maintains an inherent placemaking value in its relation to the sea and the natural environment. In these conditions, we ask ourselves: what kind of hybrid landscape can encompass both humans and non-humans in a new symbiosis? How do we move beyond our own anthropocentric world, to include all other species to whom the land belongs?

Vlado Danailov is an architect and researcher. Vlado interests in theater, art and literature. After obtaining his Master degree from the Faculty of Architecture, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje in 2013, Vlado was enrolled as a researcher at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow (2013/2014). Together with Mila Dimitrovska he founded and edited ARHI.TEK, free monthly pamphlet publication at AFS Faculty of Architecture Skopje, opening a space for critical reflection on different topics concerning architectural profession and the wider cultural context that concern our time and space. Hybrid Landscape. 100 pathways is another step of their collaboration.

In his work Tilmann Meyer Faje focuses on the failure of the industrial processes. With his ceramic artworks he replicates contemporary constructions from our highly developed civilization and anticipates their decay. He builds structures which tumble down for their own weight and is doing experiments on how he can freeze the moment of collapse in ceramic sculptures. Faults in the production, like scratches due to dirty tools, or cracks caused by fast drying, become a prominent part in his pieces.

In Tilmann Meyer-Faje's work, the focus is on the failure of utopian urban dreams. In addition to his interventions in Dutch cities, he also dealt with the urbanization of the Soviet Union, and this is his first work related to the modernist heritage of Yugoslavia. The model of the Trogir motel made of clay was subjected to subtle but definite dis-aggregation and thus slowly disappearing in public, in front of the eyes of passers-by. The work was set up in Fortin Par, located in the immediate vicinity of the Trogir motel, which since 2013 has the status of a permanently protected cultural property of the Republic of Croatia, however, it is still in decay.
See the video HERE.

Tilmann Meyer Faje is a Dutch/German artist who works and lives in Amsterdam, where he graduated in 2000 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and in 2004 from the Sandberg Institute.

Drawings of futuristic buildings blown up into fluo-neon installations combined with short stop frame animated clips present and interpret the phenomenon of the emergence of immense, complex and chaotic cities. The work is trying to imagine a futuristic settlement pattern. How will a city look like after all this? Imagining all human settlements as living organisms capable of evolution, an evolution that might be guided using (ekistics') knowledge. Background and influence for this work derives from artist's ongoing research into utopian architecture, it's philosophy and concepts. Conceptually this work explores and visualizes a worldwide city in the line of works like "Monumento continuo" by Superstudio or "The Walking City" by Archigram. It visually explores the ways in which our habitats could be expanding in a more efficient way.

Marko Tadic studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. His artistic practice is in drawing, installation and animation. Winner of numerous art prizes, his works have been exhibited on many solo and group exhibitions around the world. In 2017 along with Tina Gverovic he was representing Croatia at the 57th Venice Biennale.

[1] Harun Farocki
[2] "Minister of Fear", article by John Wray, September 23rd, 2007
[3] "Images of Past as Images for the Future", text by Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran in Modelling public space(s) in culture, Lokomotiva, Skopje, 2018
[4] The Zagreb earthquake of 5.5 on the Richter scale happened on March 22nd 2020, early in the morning.

With the decline of modernism as an international movement and the proclamation of a series of post-movements from the 1960's and 1970's, the notion of modernity as an actual (living) force that does not merge the past and the present, but the present and the future, has itself become a historical fact.

While modernist expression promoted, for aesthetic or purely political reasons, distancing and differentiation processes in the old cities in the era of its post-war domination (according to Thomas Will), thereby creating something comparable to Brecht's alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) in the theatre of city memory, it was largely opposed to the idea of the monument, by saying: "here I am, to serve the reformed life of a new society of survivors as a sincere expression of my time, and also as an instrument of catharsis."

With the onset of the crisis of the modernist movement, its outright enemy-nostalgia-began to prevail; first it replaced it by so called "post-modernism" (making the modernist movement a history), then by questioning its fate, that is, its future existence. It was the first stage in recognizing the values and inventions of yesterday's rival as a subjugated historical fact, which could from then on be treated as cultural heritage.

This opened up the possibility for the valorisation of the great ambient gestures of the modernists. The process was comparable to the recognition of industrial heritage, considering that, from Thatcher's Britain to Tuđman's Croatia, transformations of the national economy and the establishment of post-communist national identities led both modernism and industry to become "the other" and anachronistic almost overnight.

(Marko Spikic at the public discussion HOW DO WE PROTECT MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE?, organised by the MOTEL TROGIR project and the Croatian Society of Art Historians, 15 February 2017)

Significant progress has been made in the last seven years of activity of the Motel Trogir project and in the course of the even longer efforts of other protagonists – in fact, since the topic of the protection of modernist architectural and other cultural heritage (from the second half of the 20th century) somehow reached the local and wider European general public. In the first place, this period has seen the beginnings of a more or less systematic exploration and critical validation of the heritage. In the local and regional context, these inevitably drifted towards scientific evaluation, as well as towards a "battle for (the interpretation of) Yugoslav heritage". The period also saw the gradual affirmation of the concept and practice of "heritage activism", connected with the protection of the modernist built environment and the reclaiming of public spaces by the citizens. The two phenomena were often (in)directly linked. The activity of researchers and activists in Croatia has also become part of a bigger, global picture of the necessity of protecting modernist heritage. The two levels are constantly intertwining, sometimes causing friction due to the different political positions articulated in the process of historicizing this heritage. It should be noted that the recent trend of historicizing the different dimensions of the spatial and physical development of socialist Yugoslavia has its ideological and political function, which also involves the policies and practices of the conservation of modernist heritage. As political activist and theorist Milan Rakita pointed out, the profession-specific conservational concepts and methodologies cannot be understood without reference to the general patterns of the social validation of the historic past. These, in turn, are part of even more extensive processes of shaping what is known as the politics of memory and depend on them. In other words, these conservational concepts and methodologies are part of the entire social system's relationship to its own historical past.

Regardless of the ongoing debates in the field, many researchers, architects and activists believe that the protection of the finest works of modernist heritage is an urgent matter which calls for the deployment of all available methods. One of them, which the activists often fall back on, is the formal protection of landmarks. It involves efforts to endow them with the official status of cultural heritage, which acts as a kind of guarantee of institutional care, so often lacking in the (preservation) of such environments.

The three-day symposium / public gathering which will take place in Split and the surrounding area from 17 to 20 October 2019 is organised by the Loose Associations, platform for contemporary artistic practices, as part of the Collective Domain of Cultural Memory (CDCM) collaborative project. The symposium is organised with the intent of fostering the critical reflection and examination of the last decade of dealing with the topic of protection of modernist architecture from the second half of the 20th century. We intend to consider the processes, protagonists, methods and challenges in this field (of the historicization of modernity and preservation of modernist heritage).

In light of the up-to-date activities and practice of the Motel Trogir project, the symposium will cover the following topics:
- The Motel Trogir project 2013-2019, how do we protect the architecture of modernism? critical reflection
- The Mediterranean Modernism Network, focus on Northern Africa, the example of Morocco
- The relationship of the historicization of modernity and the activist practices of protecting modernist architecture to contemporary artistic practices, frictions and crossovers

Participants: Doplgenger (Isidora Ilic, Bosko Prostran), Ruben Arevshatyan, Ekaterina Shapiro Obermair, Imad Dahmani, Lahbib El Moumni, Meslil El Mehdi, Visnja Kukoc, Jelena Borota, Sanja Matijevic Barcot, Lidija Butkovic Micin, Jovanka Popova, Anastasija Pandilovska, Sasa Simpraga, Jasminka Babic, Neli Ruzic, Duska Boban, Lana Stojicevic, Mariana Bucat, Platforma 9,81, Udruga Kacic, Bozo Benic, Morana Rozic, Aleksandar Bede, Sabina Damiani, Marjoca de Greef and many more.

Concept: Natasa Bodrozic for Motel Trogir/ CDCM. Organization: Loose Associations/ Motel Trogir team (Bodrozic, Butkovic Micin, Simpraga)

The work (in progress) by Dutch artist Tilmann Meyer-Faje dedicated to the Trogir motel will be performed on Tuesday February 18, 2020 at the Fortin Park in Trogir, throughout the day.
In Tilmann Meyer-Faje's work, the focus is on the failure of utopian urban dreams. In addition to his interventions in Dutch cities, he also dealt with the urbanization of the Soviet Union, and this is his first work related to the modernist heritage of Yugoslavia.
The model of the Trogir motel made of clay will be subjected to subtle but definite dis-aggregation and will be slowly disappearing in public, in front of the eyes of passers-by.
The work set up in Fortin Park is located in the immediate vicinity of the Trogir motel, which since 2013 has the status of a permanently protected cultural property of the Republic of Croatia, however, it is still in decay.

Tillman Mayer-Faje's stay in Trogir is part of the Motel Trogir Arist in Residence Program in the framework of the international collaborative project Collective Domain of Cultural Memory (CDCM). The first part of the residence occurred in October 2019 when a study visit was organized and now the work is being carried out as a site-specific intervention.
Born in Germany in 1971, Tilmann Meyer-Faje works and lives in Amsterdam, where he studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Institute.

This residence is conceived in two parts, the first being a study visit and the second focused on art production of a new, site-specific work.
Tilmann Meyer-Faje born 1971 in Germany, works and lives in Amsterdam.
There he studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute. He focuses on the failure of utopian urban dreams. Beside his interventions to Dutch city plans from the 60's and 70's he is working with the industrialized urbanisation of the Soviet Union.

Vlado Danailov (1990, Macedonia) is an architect and researcher. Vlado interests in theater, art and literature. After obtaining his Master degree from the Faculty of Architecture, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje in September 2013, Vlado was enrolled as a researcher at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow (2013/2014). As a part of the Dwelling studio he worked on developing an alternative strategy 'Dwelling without a house': a model that offered an integrated approach to housing and planning policies an extreme and radical measure inspired by the current rules and regulatons in Russia, while also being a critique of the existing situation.
Vlado worked as an associate teaching assistant at the Chair of Public Buildings at his Alma mater. He is co-founder of the experimental studio for architecture and culture 'Studio 90', editor-in-chief of the monthly publication 'Arhi.tek', and moderator and organizer of 'Extra-ordinary Sessions', Architecture and Culture Talks at the Faculty of Architecture in Skopje. Danailov is interested in exploring the political, social and cultural contexts in which architecture exists. In 2018 he was invited author in team project 'Freeingspace' – Macedonian Pavillion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

For citizens interested in cultural heritage and active citizenship, the Motel Trogir project is presented in a workshop by Natasa Bodrozic at the Klovicevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb. In the same event the North Macedonian and the Dutch projects within CDCM are presented.
Organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia /EU desk and the Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs.
 

After five years of activist and broader cultural work on the issue of re-evaluation and recognition of the architectural heritage from the period of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (commonly referred to as the former state) Loose Associations is about to scrutinize their actions and reflect on what has been done so far and what is to be done in the future. The safeguarded, but abandoned Yugoslav modernist buildings like Motel Trogir, designed (in 1965) by Ivan Vitic, raise questions: What is the purpose of these buildings within a new societal paradigm? Which agency decides on their preservation? Is a construction designed with utopian ideals bound to time and history or does it have a transformed significance in contemporary society? What remains if the progressive form is devoid from its original content?
The Motel Trogir program within the CDCM project will pursue a wider reflection on the significance of the architectural structures from the period of state socialism, what do they represent today? What is their social potential beyond the profit oriented tourism industry, where they are often placed as elements of 'estrangement'? We would like to address these issues through collaboration with artists, theorists and activists from different geographies, with knowledge of endangered cultural heritage, to explore areas of consensus and controversy unfolding local experiences concerning the particular value of cultural heritage as a space of representation. The international conference and several artist-in-residency programs with participants from former Yugoslavia, post-Soviet territory, North African post-independence context and The Netherlands post-imperialist context, will occupy a central place in the Croatian activity cluster within the project.

Open call two weeks artist residency in Amsterdam for Croatian artist In the framework of the CDCM project, Slobodne veze/ Loose Associations are launching a call for Croatian artists to express interest for a two weeks residency in Amsterdam that will take place in February 2019/ March 2020. The topic is re-visiting archives and developing new approaches of engaging with cultural heritage.
Whereas in North Macedonia and Croatia we witness a level of negligence, that unveils an attitude of disavowal towards cultural heritage from a specific period in history, in the Netherlands cultural heritage is well protected through governmental policies. Consequently, depots are congested with heritage and cultural budget is spent to protect what cannot be seen by the citizens. Do these artifacts, piled up in storehouses, ripped from their meaning in life, have the capacity to retain their meaning or produce new meanings? Voices are raised to alter the attitude towards such heritage and look for different ways in which it can be perceived.
Interested artists from Croatia please send a short motivation letter (1 page max) and a portfolio showing the interest in the proposed topic.
Deadline: March 1st, 2019
For all questions, write us to slobodne.veze@gmail.com
The chosen artist for the CDCM residency in Amsterdam is Luiza Margan.
We would like to thank to all the artists who responded to our open call.

The projects are kindly supported by: