An inconvenient utopia – Weekend – Kommersant
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Pristina, the capital of the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo, hosts the European nomadic biennale Manifesta 14. Every time Manifesta strives to choose the most turbulent and at the same time the most promising points in political, social and cultural terms on the map of Europe. In 2022, the choice turned out to be very accurate.
The Ibar River divides Mitrovica into two parts – northern, Serbian, and southern, Albanian, and the New Bridge, built on the site of the old one, destroyed during the war, connects (more precisely, it conditionally connects: vehicular traffic on the bridge is blocked at the entrances) barriers and posts of peacekeepers , but the passages for pedestrians are left. These few, frankly, pedestrians have the best view of the installation “Europe without monuments” by Ukrainian artist Stanislava Pinchuk, located right in the river, near the bridge piers. The installation consists of three gigantic structures, or rather, three giant steel skeletons of some kind of columnar structures that, as if from heaven, fell into the Ibar. Inside the structures there are benches for sitting, as in a park: Ibar becomes shallow in summer, you can wade it, so the benches are not decoration, but quite functional. This is an invitation to a dialogue, ideally a dialogue of those who are separated not only by the river. However, the current political aggravation in the region suggests that dialogue is a utopia. Columnar structures also refer to utopia – proletarian unity, internationalism, the brotherhood of the Balkan peoples and other universalist ideas of modernism.
“Europe without monuments” – a phrase from an interview with Bogdan Bogdanovich (1922-2010), an outstanding Serbian architect and urban theorist, who became famous for monuments to partisans and victims of Nazism – he built more than two dozen such memorials throughout the former Yugoslavia, and the most famous of them – “Stone flower” in Jasenovac. No, he was not a opportunist – he himself participated in the Resistance, devoutly believed in communism and hated nationalism. All his monuments are about unity in spite of interethnic hostility. In 1982, Bogdanovich became the mayor of Belgrade, but he did not have time to turn his native city into a city of happiness (one of his urban treatises was devoted to the problem of happiness in the city) – nationalists came to power. Bogdanovich resigned from all posts, back in 1987 wrote an open letter to Milosevic, calling him a “narrow-minded warmonger”, became an implacable critic of the regime and ended up in exile – he spent the last years of his life in Vienna, where he worked on theoretical writings, in in particular, about memory and utopia in Tito’s Yugoslavia. In an interview to which the name of the installation refers, he said that he dreams of a Europe without monuments to wars and disasters. And at the same time, he perfectly understood that in order to realize this dream, all his creations must be destroyed.
Stanislav Pinchuk symbolically fulfills the wish of Bogdan Bogdanovich: the steel structures are the ghost of his “Monument to the Fallen Miners”, as if thrown into the Ibar from the top of the Partisan Hill. Once the emblem of Mitrovica, the Bogdanovich monument still towers over the city, although it has lost a number of elements. The monument dedicated to the uprising of the Trepci miners, during which Serbs and Albanians fought together against the Nazi invaders, is a twenty-meter concrete trilithon: two massive columns, like two hands, Serbian and Albanian, stretching to the sky from under the ground, hold a semicircular in cross section of a beam resembling a miner’s trolley. The monument, like all of Bogdanovich’s works, is abstract, but conducive to such literal readings. In addition, the monument resembles a bridge – a bridge of friendship between peoples and solidarity of workers. Pinchuk was three years old when the USSR, which officially preached the same ideals, collapsed—until recently, it was customary to be proud that the Soviet Union, unlike Yugoslavia, collapsed almost bloodlessly, even if over time this “almost” seemed more and more controversial . The artist was born in Kharkiv, grew up and studied in Melbourne, lives in Sarajevo – apparently, the geography of life determined the thematic field of her work: wars, conflict zones, forced migration. In “Europe Without Monuments”, she first addresses the heritage of modernism – this is a problematic heritage and became one of the main themes of Manifesta 14 in Pristina.
Europe Without Monuments is Manifesta 14’s only major project outside of Pristina, and its documentation can be found at the Biennale’s main venue, the Grand Hotel. Without a guidebook and a Manifesta map, in a crumbling high-rise building in the city center, it is difficult to recognize the former pride of the Kosovo capital, a luxurious hotel with Tito’s personal room (now open to the public) and a large collection of art by Yugoslav artists, plundered during the war and murky privatizations. Nine floors of the “Grand Hotel” are occupied by a huge exhibition, with almost 40% of the participants – artists of Kosovo, classics of modernism and contemporaries, more precisely – contemporaries, the emphasis is deliberately placed on women’s art. Manifesta for the first time in its history gives such a head start to the local art scene, which even in the neighboring countries of Europe is known very superficially, by stars like Flyaka Haliti or Petrit Khaliliai. The rest of the biennale venues are scattered throughout Pristina (Manifesta, as usual, is engaged in the cultural-urban mapping of the city – this time with the help of one of its “creative mediators” Carlo Ratti, an Italian architect, urbanist and activist, professor at MIT). A good half of the sites are monuments of Yugoslav modernism that fell victim to the war, ethnic strife and the collapse of the socialist utopia.
On the outskirts of Pristina, there is a memorial cemetery with a monument to the fallen partisans in the center – another “stone flower”, giant concrete petals and metal stamens gathering into a globe, the work of Bogdan Bogdanovich’s colleague, Belgrade architect Svetislav Lichina. The partisan myth was one of the foundations of the Yugoslav ideology of brotherhood and unity of the peoples that make up the SFRY. During the war, the cemetery turned into a burial place for soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the grave of the first president of the republic, Ibrahim Rugova, is also located here. As for the “flower” of the Mask, it is covered with graffiti and a layer of broken glass, and is destroyed, like the internationalist dreams of modernism. Kosovo artist Sisley Jafa installs inside this monument of socialism, created for centuries, a temporary monument to capitalism: at the gas station, located in one of the petals, a gas station attendant is on duty for a hundred days of the biennale, multiplying the absurdity of the entire memorial structure. The Swiss artist Hugo Rondinone is even more ironic about another Pristina masterpiece of modernism, the “Monument to Brotherhood and Unity” by the Belgrade sculptor Miodag Zivkovic: a twenty-meter triangular obelisk, symbolizing the indestructible friendship of the Serbs, Albanians and Montenegrins, is wrapped in pink foil, which is why it took on the appearance of a Christmas tree decoration – false , tinsel and nothing more.
The interventions affect not only the monuments, but also the architectural ensembles of modernism in Pristina. Turkish artist Cevdet Erek makes a light and music installation “Brutal Times” in the cellars of the Rilindya Printing Palace. Before the war, the Brutalist monument of the early 1970s served as both the headquarters of all the central Kosovo periodicals, starting with the newspaper Rilindya (Renaissance), and the second largest printing house in the Balkans. Then there was a ban on printing in the Albanian language, war, privatization, the sale of printing equipment, desolation. Then came the era of raves – empty workshops turned out to be an ideal space for electronic music. In Erec’s Brutal Times, scarlet flashes and industrial noises erupt from the cellars of Rilindya – the ghosts of communism fraternize with the ghosts of globalism. The Palace of Youth and Sports, a masterpiece by the Serbian brutalist architect Zivorad Janković, was badly damaged in a fire in 2000: South Korean artist Lee Bul’s signature silver airship hovered over the burnt-out winter stadium, now serving as paid parking and free toilets; the theatrical space of the Red Hall was reserved for the performance of the young multi-gender Kosovo artist Astrit Ismaili — the post-humanist future depicted in his dance-sculptural composition somewhat contrasted with the dilapidated interior of the mid-1970s.
As you know, the success of Manifesta largely depends on the assistance of local authorities – in Pristina it was evident. Kosovo calls itself the youngest country in Europe – both in terms of the date of birth and in terms of the huge percentage of young people in the population. The new government of the country is also young, educated (at the opening, 47-year-old Prime Minister Albin Kurti said, apparently improvising, that the exhibition structure of the biennale that sprawled across Pristina reminded him of the Deleuze-Guattari rhizome), and considers the European Manifesta Biennale as another bid for EU membership. The biennial cartography of Pristina, which connected all the cultural nodes and at the same time exposed all the sore spots of the city, was made with the blessing of the 46-year-old mayor of Pristina, Perparim Rama, an architect and urbanist like Bogdan Bogdanovich: in 2012, Rama was the curator of the first Kosovo pavilion at the Venice Architecture biennale, so such events are taken seriously.
“Holy father, I am a Muslim, but I wanted to ask: is it a sin to be born in Kosovo? What is my sin? – A native of Pristina, Driton Hayredini, who studied in Munster, went around all the confessionals in Munster churches, asking the priests why he, who was born in the center of Europe, needed a visa to travel to any European country. The video “Sin” shown at the Grand Hotel was filmed in 2004 – the issue has not been removed to this day. However, Kosovo does not lose hope of building on the ruins of Yugoslav modernism with all its utopias something more suitable for modern life. Petrit Haliliai collects letters and stars left over from old Grand Hotel signs to form a line for their song Njomza, an American pop star of Kosovo origin. Letters and stars light up in the night, blink randomly, but sometimes they gather in a verse: “When the sun goes down, we will paint the sky.”
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