Sonja Jankov
Understanding Intermedial Quoting
Architecture of Yugoslav Modernism as Quotation within Contemporary Art…
A site-specific approach in combination with archival images is also something that the contemporary artists have been using more recently. In his most recent works, Viktor Popović quotes the architecture of Yugoslav modernism site-specifically and by quoting documentary photographs. In 2015, he started a long-term project based on the research of the archives of the urban-architectural project Split 3, where he grew up, following an invitation of the artist Neli Ružić, who was at the time art director of the Gallery of School of Fine Arts, located within Split 3. As he soon found out, there was no consistent archive of the project, due to the long-term negligence and disappearance of the construction companies that carried out the project but never fully implemented it. He found most of the archival photographs and documents in the Institute for Urban Planning of Dalmatia (Split, Croatia), the Department of Architecture of the Museum of Architecture and Design (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and the archive of the Slovenian architect Vladimir Braco Mušič.
Over the years, Popović created installations and objects by quoting photographs of Split 3 taken by Zvonimir Buljević in 1969, photographs of the destroyed scale model of Split 3 from 1968, technical drawings of the project, and chosen segments from the document “Split 3: Basic Urban Design – textual part: preliminary technical description and report” from November 1969, issued by Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia. In some installations, he added industrially produced elements, such as mechanical pencil leads to create isometric objects from them (Image 25), or color filters, scaffolding, and aluminum clips. In 2019, he quoted Ante Roca’s documentary photographs of the military hospital in Split 3 (arch. Antun Ulrich, 1958–1965) in his work
Untitled (Archive ST3: Military Hospital). To the photographs of the hospital’s exterior, he added industrial color filters, while the photographs of the interiors, presenting technically superior hospital equipment of the time, he printed on canvas, mounting them afterwards to the vertically positioned old metal hospital beds. By adding lights behind each photograph/bed, he created specific light-boxes that connected views of hospital appliances, once considered advanced, nowadays obsolete. The combination of historic photographs and artifacts, displayed as quotations from the same period, resulted in the installation that gave them spatial characteristics, becoming a specific simulation of the 1965 hospital space brought into the present time.
His most recent work that focuses on Split 3 was a two-part intervention
Untitled (Archive ST3: Content) in 2021. It was partly set up at the Cultural Institution Kula Gallery, a constitutive part of the perimeter of Diocletian’s Palace in Split (January 19 – February 19, curator: Jasminka Babić) and partly installed on the façade of the former Brodomerkur Company building in Split 3 (January 19 – February 1, curator: Dalibor Prančević). In the installation at the Kula Gallery, Popović quoted Zvonimir Buljević’s photographs that document the construction of Split 3, by placing them on scaffoldings and adding red fabrics. The location of the Gallery within the Roman Diocletian’s Palace played a great role in Popović’s work, since he aimed at highlighting the relation of good planning practices that are almost two millennia apart, yet both visible and experienceable in the present. Apart from that, the project of Split 3 directly refers to the harmony of public and private life achieved at Diocletian’s Palace, as well as to the Roman Centuriation.
The second part of his intervention was site-specifically appropriated to the offices building of the Brodomerkur Company, which was built for 500 employees within the program of providing jobs for the local population of Split 3 near their residential areas. Since 2018, the building has housed the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Split. Designed in 1985 by architect Danko Colnago, and completed in 1990, it “abounds in postmodern syntax (
‘the place of concentrated quotations and references’).”
1 The building has a parallelepiped structure, 141.05m long and 24.235m wide, that “retains tectonics, a feature of durability and power through size and weight,” clearly showing “the totality of its reinforced concrete structural origin.”
2 It has three floors, an inner atrium, and several facilities at the basement level, including a restaurant, coffee bar, and server rooms.
It is characterized by a defensive wall that gives it sculptural individuality, but more importantly, creates a shadow that protects the windows from the intensity of Mediterranean sunlight during the summer. Within the wall, there are two openings, resulting in a
double portal/bridge construction effect that “represents a series of historical associations, the most prominent of which is a metaphor for the city gate from one of the city’s two main roads.”
3 The façade is covered in grey-blue tinted thermos glass (modernist glass “curtain wall”) and in stripes of black granite and beige limestone from local sites in Jablanica and the island of Brač. In the black and white façade cladding in rows, Dina Ožić Bašić finds references to antique architecture, the Tuscan medieval architectural tradition, modernity and the 1980s postmodern architecture that invokes historical styles, such as Mario Botta’s the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan (1985–1990) and the Mediatheque in Villeurbanne, France (1984–1988).
4To the limestone stripes of the façade, Popović added short quotations from the 1969 document “Split 3: Basic Urban Design – textual part: preliminary technical description and report” (Image 26). Some of the quotations are specifically related to Split and Split 3, highlighting the significance of the project: “The new value that appears in the Split 3 complex is conditioned by the character of this complex as an organic continuation of the city center towards the east,”
5 “The remains of the Roman Centuriation could be used in the planning of traffic connections and other structural elements in the new part of the city.”
6 Other quotations reflect the ideas behind the Split 3 project, but, more importantly, they can be applied to any urban-planning process in the future: “The city is an act of the will and must increasingly be the subject of a conscious shaping effort and preoccupations of the most conscious and intelligent forces in the social community,”
7 “The street becomes a social center again.”
8 By adding the quotations to the building that is “at the crossroads of two epochs with different socio-political paradigms, as business and commercial building,”
9 Popović turned the façade “into an active drawing; questioning the appearance and temperament of the city today.”
10Apart from quoting the historic and present Split 3 in an attempt to highlight good examples of urban planning, Popović quoted the architecture of Yugoslav modernism in his 2020 work
Untitled (Archive Zenčišće). Here, he connected archival and present photographs of the former children’s resort complex at the Zenčišće Bay beside Jelsa, on the island of Hvar in Croatia (arch. Bogdan Ćosić, Branislav Simović and Milena Đurić). The complex, now completely ruined, used to be an exemplary piece of the architecture of Yugoslav modernism, visited by many generations who could spend 21 days at the seaside at the expense of the state. It was built during 1972/73 by the Children’s Resort and Rehabilitation Center of the City of Belgrade, which was established in 1956, and had built resorts in the mountains, as well as additional five resorts at Croatian seaside, on the islands of Hvar and Brač, near Makarska, Dubrovnik and Split. The resort beside Jelsa had a capacity of 400 beds and an adapted shore that was suitable for children and for smaller boats to dock. It was like a small village, spreading over 64,000 square meters of land and comprising dormitories, classrooms, workshops, a library, shops, a health clinic, a swimming pool, restaurants, kitchens, sports facilities, a TV room, storage units, garages, gas station, tower-observatory. It was closed after the break-up of Yugoslavia and since 2006, it is no longer the property of the City of Belgrade.
Popović intervened in the living urban space by using archival rather than recent documents and photographs, which “speaks of a critical departure from the current state of urban chaos and an insistence on the values by which those spaces were originally intended.”
11 Popović’s work builds upon the discrepancy and incompatibility between contemporary proliferation of commercial urban contents and good practices of urban planning presented not only by the example of Split 3, but also by its connections to the Roman grid in the city. In contrast to those good planning practices (
text), the recent influx of profitable content in the same area (
intertext) functions as the opposing sides of one urban unit. While quoting the history and ideas that made the Split 3 project as it is, Popović harmonizes the significance of the initial ideas with the present reality, arguing for their importance for the future development of Split, or even some other city.
Popović’s works related to the architecture of Yugoslav modernism can be described as artistic practice that creates archives, given that a complete and unified archive of Split 3 project does not exist. Such practices, according to Nikola Dedić, “reject the romantic and nostalgic return to the ‘good old days’ and instead insist on the hard politicization of both art and all segments of depoliticized everyday life.”
12 By replacing nostalgia with an archive, contemporary artistic practices intervene in the field of the current, articulating a space of resistance to decay and ruin, and thus directly changing everyday life and a wider social context.
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