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catalogue
Out of Control: UrbanFestival 11, preface
Vegetable Patch
Cepheus, DB Indoš i Tanja Vrvilo
Gap, Dušica Dražić
Master I Want to Make You Rich, Rafaela Dražić
The Big Picture, Ana Zubak
Hair Project, Clémence Agnez
Draft Proposal for a Public School with Musical Accompaniment, Nicole Hewitt
The End of History, Jonas Staal
Ilica 1, Michelle Teran
A Few Things I Know About Skyscrapers…, Dubravka Sekulić
On Buildings and People, Petar Milat
‘Walk Like an Egyptian’. Several Cities, One Struggle?, Srećko Horvat
Who Dares Wins Urbanism, This Is Not a Gateway
Architecture in the Service of Ideology, Irfan Hošić
Seven Days of Creation, David Belas
Beyond the Construction Site, KUD Obrat
Reflecting on the Current Urban Festival – Festival Framework and Its Evasions, Bojan Mucko

reader
Being Tihomir Simčić – Representation or Democratization?, Bojan Mucko
The Gap: 15 Kordunska Street, 5th floor, an interview with Dušica Dražić
Progressive Propaganda, an interview with Jonas Staal
Walking on the Knife Handle: Between Action and Representation, interview with Tanja Vrvilo and Damir Bartol Indoš
Reflecting Upon One’s Housing, an interview with Dubravka Sekulić
Vegetables vs. Parking Lots, an interview with the Urban Vegetable Patch crew
A Public Conversation with Musical Accompaniment, an interview with Nicole Hewitt

color plates

Impressum

presentations of projects:
Ana Zubak, The Big Picture
Rafaela Dražić, Master I Want To Make You Rich
House of extreme musical theatre, CEPHEUS
Nicole Hewitt, Untitled
Jonas Staal, The End of History
Dušica Dražić, Procjep [Gap]
Clemence Agnez, Hair Project
The Urban Vegetable Patch

Lectures and discussions:
David Belas – 7 days of creation
Trenton Oldfield (This is not a Gateway) – Who Dares Wins Urbanism
Srećko Horvat
Irfan Hošić – Architecture in the service of ideology
KUD Obrat
Bojan Mucko

film programme:
On buildings and people, visual course (curator: Petar Milat)
Precise program and locations coming soon!

Where are the heroes, the colonisers, the victims of the Metropolis?

Brecht, from his diary, 1921.

In an endeavour to make the interventions arising from this year’s UrbanFestival to be present longer in the public sphere, we developed the 11^th festival in a broken format. Without a clear thematic framework, with no fixed date, with no concentration on a particular neighbourhood, we continuously explored the experiences and changes in the use of the city, its memory, architecture as social space, the hypertrophy of the symbolic aspects of Zagreb’s skyscrapers, their relationship to the ideologies of the past, the transformative processes oscillating between the public and private, always tirelessly exploring possible strategies of resistance to the constant trend of disappearing public space.

The diversity of research topics and newly produced works arose from the necessity that as curators we do not assign a definitive framework for the artists, but instead listen to their interests and sensibilities, so that the expanding research can include a wider circle of people from different disciplines and work on collaborative projects that escape the typical classifications.

After the research and production of new site-specific works in the first half of the year, from the 6^th to the 9^th of October we are presenting the conference section of the festival that brings together scholars, artists and all those concerned about these issues: “He Who Dares, Profits: City Space as a Field of Struggle”, “Hidden Histories: The Ideologies and Identities of a City”, “Resistance to the Disappearance of Public Space,” and, “In the Gap: Exploring the Social Space Between the Private and the Public.” In addition, from Friday to Sunday, the visual course takes place: “On Buildings and People.” The conference is a space for the presentation of newly produced projects and the research behind them, a space of reflection, criticism and discussion. In this sense UrbanFestival ignores everything that enters into the standard definition of a festival and does not fit in to the current ‘festivalisation’ of culture.

Photo: Nina Šperanda

In the Museum of Pazin, French artist Clémence Agnes made ​​a sculpture of human hair. Presentation of her work in the old Castle was part of the guest performances of UrbanFestival at the Seven Days of Creation Festival in Pazin. Clémence and her assistant Magali L’huillier spent seven days working very closely and carefully producing a delicate and fragile sculpture in the space of the Castle. Clémence’s physical work and commitment always involves a certain loneliness, commitment and focus on the self and implies a long-term invisible work. The final product is also very difficult to spot, very subtle but spatially divorced, so this installation actually encompasses a considerably large volume. But to experience the sculpture, it is necessary to dedicate a special kind of attention. In this sense, it is not trivial that this sculpture is set in the Museum of Pazin, because it suggests how much attention, emotions and subtlety could, or maybe should, be dedicated to ones own heritage, which is also the thematic backbone of the Seven Days of Creation. Clémence’s sculptures, not only in this case, but predominantly, refer to the genius loci – the spirit of place that carries every space important to a particular community whilst also suggesting that the spirit of place is hard to rationally explain or descriptively exhibit, but instead needs to be, in the truest sense, experienced and undergone.

Foto: Nina Šperanda

Clémence Agnez – The Hair Project

Clémence Agnez (1984, FR) studied at École supérieure des beaux arts de Toulouse and École nationale des beaux arts de Bourges. She has specialized sculpture at Fibra Art Studio, Hong Kong University, China and is currently attending PHD program of philosophy and aesthetics at Université de Nanterre, Paris.

Her work questions borderline perceptive situations by creating ephemeral and subtle interventions responsive to their surroundings, shaping three dimensional structures using different materials such as dust, water, resin, plaster and most of all hair. The structures, which are hard to perceive at first sight, start to appear to the sharpening eye of the audience. With minimal means the space is redefined and given a new sense. The work relays on direct perception on a specific location, eluding the verbal description.

Agnez created a series of hair sculptures in various sites, from gallery spaces to public areas and even private apartments, at La Vitrine (Maribor, Slovenia), Laboatoire Art et Botanique (Versailles, France), Secret Exhibitions (Zagreb, Croatia) etc. In the framework of UrbanFestival she is invited to explore and react to rich historical heritage of Pazin and its natural diversity.

Casting one’s memory over the contemporary and historic ‘city’; which streets, carparks, buildings or neighborhoods were forged beyond or adjacent democratic methodologies? Is it more revealing to list which spaces were not?

Are the fires that destroy historic buildings that have been standing in the way of new developments an act of expedience? Is the ‘Big Society’ concept as proposed by the current coalition government in the United Kingdom a daring device to compel the poor to carry even more burdens for the rich? Is the city official that searches out a bribe daringly shaping the future city? Are the ongoing attempts to enclose the commons acts of opportunism? Are the first gates and fences that go up around a house, park or housing compound realpolitik in practice? Was the first claim to the concept of owning land and property a daring risk that just stuck; it’s promoted narrative and ritual over centuries forming our current reality?

Is the conception, production and management of ‘the city’ a consequence of those that have dared and won? Is ‘the city’ and our urban lives forged by the daring and those actively working to generate and take advantage? Taking the cue from UrbanFestival10 with its direct interventions into Zagreb’s ‘Old Town’, what are the possibilities that arise from no longer reacting, lamenting and researching but rather employing the philosophy, training and tactics that are represented in the motto ‘who dares wins’.

This Is Not A Gateway

TRENTON OLDFIELD has worked for over a decade in non-governmental organisations specialising in urban renewal, cultural and environmental programmes. He was Coordinator of the Thames Strategy – Kew to Chelsea, Strategic Project Manager at Cityside Regeneration, and a Community Development Worker in North Kensington. Alongside his formal work he has continued to explore questions about cities via personal projects, including installations in the public realm, film, guest editing and guest lecturing, and has been active on the boards of the Westway Development Trust, London Citizens and Subtext. Current projects include research for a book that unearths the socio-political history of fences/railings in London, part of an attempt to find a way beyond the existing conventions around ownership, specifically land ownership in the 21st century. Trenton Oldfield formally established the not-for-profit organisation This Is Not A Gateway with Deepa Naik in 2007.
 
DEEPA NAIK (1976, GB) has worked with Art for Change, public works and the Serpentine Gallery, while co-ordinating projects with Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths) including: De-Regulation (MuHKA 2006, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art 2007); A.C.A.D.E.M.Y: Learning from the Museum (Van Abbemuseum 2006); SUMMIT: non-aligned initiatives in education culture (Multitude e.V. 2007); and Eye Witness (Birkbeck School of Law 2008). She continues to explore a set of questions that have resulted from her interest in post-colonial theory, the intersection of cultural movements and legal systems, critical art practice and alternative pedagogies. In 2007, together with Trenton Oldfield, Deepa Naik formally established This Is Not A Gateway, a not-for-profit organisation that creates platforms for critical investigations into cities.

In collaboration with neighbourhood residents and other interested people, Obrat association is transforming a long-fenced-off plot of land near Resljeva street in Ljubljana city centre into a community space intended for gardens, socializing, ecological projects, education, art and culture. In this way they are realizing the goal of the project, which is to examine and show the potential of degraded urban areas and the possibility of their receiving new value through temporary community-based interventions.

Beyond Construction Site has been a classroom for everyone involved, not only about gardening and ecology, but also about sharing the management of a space and its processual and participatory organization.

In the presentation authors will reflect upon what a project like Beyond Construction Site means in the context of the city of Ljubljana and its spatial and environmental policies, in the context of the rich local tradition of small-plot gardening, and in the context of the many other spatial initiatives in the region as well as other related projects on a global scale that deal with urban gardening and participatory spatial development.

Beyond a Construction Site
Location: Resljeva ulica, Ljubljana
Duration: August 2010–present
Authors: KUD Obrat (Stefan Doepner, Urška Jurman, Polonca Lovšin, and Apolonija Šušteršič), in collaboration with the members of the Beyond a Construction Site project
Co-producers: zavod Bunker, KUD Obrat
Plot owner: The Municipality of Ljubljana

KUD Obrat

KUD Obrat / Obrat Culture and Art Association is a small non-profit organisation which was established in 2006 in Ljubljana by Polonca Lovšin, Tomaž Tomažin, Stefan Doepner and Urška Jurman; later on Apolonija Šušteršič joined. Their program focuses on production, research, presentation and education on the field of contemporary visual art, sound and architecture. They work transdisciplinary while addressing diverse issues concerning contemporary art, architecture and society. Within this they pay special attention to different phenomena characterizing urban life and space.

Their collaboration started in 2004 when Polonca Lovšin and Urška Jurman realized Ready 2 Change in Ljubljana. Ready 2 Change was a transdisciplinary project that comprised temporary artist-in-residence, exhibition, lectures, presentations and workshops with the intention to provide a multi-facetted insight into the issues of possible life alternatives and innovative approaches to all kinds of systems that rule our everyday lives. The project focused on the principles of informal, temporary and self-sustaining architecture, alternative use of energy, parallel economy, the “do-it-yourself” principle as well as self-organisation and mutual collaboration.