Socialist Architecture – The Reappearing Act

Description

Socialist Architecture – The Reappearing Act is a cooperation between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke. Since 2009, Jovanovic Weiss and Linke are documenting the current state of selected places of socialistic architecture in the former Yugoslavia. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disappeared in the early 1990s and was “balkanized” in various new democracies and former socialist states. Every of these new states inherited momuments, buildings and infrastructures, which were built for the earlier socialist society. After the disappearing of Yugoslavia, this inherited architecture often remained empty in a kind of limbo between reutilisation and modern archaeological ruin. The documentation Socialist Architecture – The Reappearing Act considered this indecisiveness in five emerging democracies: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, and investigates the relative impact on the spatial perception and the fate of the former ideological architecture of Yugoslavia. This book dares the assertion, that socialistic architecture is insofar successful to date, as it creates public space, even if the system, which produced it, disappeared.