In January 2015, Jasmina Cibic's latest project titled Spielraum premiered at the Ludwig Museum Budapest and I had the chance to be the curator of the exhibition. Not only was I lucky because of the immense challenge it meant and the spectacular result that came from it. The critical content of the project also arrived as an essential tool at a pivotal moment when I decided to quit my position due to the newly constructed official cultural policies that started to orientate the priorities of the institution.
The exhibition presented the first of the three chapters of Spielraum and, as the synthesis of Cibic’s past formal and conceptual investigations, reflected her basic artistic gesture which is the dismantlement and careful analysis of the work of art, its representation, and its relationship to the viewer. This large scale installation, titled The Nation Loves It, unfolded as an immersive environment composed of film, performance, sculpture and installation. It addressed the instrumentalisation of visual language and rhetoric in the construction of the State as a spectacle and investigated modes of how art and architecture serve as soft power strategies of every political order. The exhibition articulated three interconnected sections, revolving around the building of cultural identity through architecture and design of public space, as appropriated in the redesign of the city of Belgrade for the occasion of the first conference of the Non-Aligned movement[1] in 1961.
Jasmina Cibic: Spielraum - The Nation Loves It (still), 2015, Single channel HD video, 15 min 45 sec, 16:9, stereo
The first section addressed the construction of a new visual language for this new political formation through the study of its basic building blocks. The second focused on language explored how political discourse is being elaborated lately. The third and final one operated a general synthesis between the new visual language and the new political vocabulary – of mediatic and conceptual levels – in the form of an immersive environment.
The heart of the second section was a video, eponymous of the exhibition title, in which an actress performs short concentrated actions; delivering snippets loaded with political significance. She first appears on stage moving geometric forms that run throughout the exhibition – in an almighty manner, as pawns on a chessboard. The next scene presents her rehearsing a text in which she weighs every word, measures its impact and chooses the most adequate combination for the best rhetorical result. The different parts of this verbal mosaic present extracts from different political speeches from different times and spaces, political regimes and uttered by diverse politicians engaged in large public and official state architectural developments. Amongst them are Mussolini, Thatcher, Mitterrand, Truman, Tito and Khrushchev, who all conveyed the idea of a new state, nation or policy through decoration in one way or another. Beyond just simply drawing a rhetorical average of the most often employed terminology in such official, inaugural announcements, the amalgam speech as rehearsed by the woman featured, highlights various aspects in nation-building strategies as it reveals how architecture is mentioned, approached and made use of in relation to the expression, representation, affirmation and diffusion of national identity. The strong figure of the woman, unidentifiable yet universal, stands in as a paraphrase of Mother Nation. She lets us catch a glimpse of the new power taking shape behind the scenes: she is both the architect producing and the product of nation building.
In the precise construction of a new spectacle, Jasmina Cibic seizes the nation-making elements: signals, words and forms that identify and represent a very particular way to make politics. With these she creates a universal system by collaging and combining them. The orchestration and mise-en-scène of these ingredients allows the spectator to recognize and therefore deconstruct the spectacle of identification as political processes, rhetoric and machinery.
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[1] While colonial regimes crumbled in the 1960s, the Non-Aligned movement came to life planned and designed as an alternative “third way” to the competing U.S. and Soviet-led alliance structures of the Cold War, as a creation of several national leaders Jawaharlal Nehru (first prime minister of India), Sukarno (first president of Indonesia), Gamal Adbel Nasser (second president of Egypt), Kwame Nkrumah (first president of Ghana) and its chief-leader Josip Broz Tito (marshal of Yugoslavia). In their own right, they claimed respect for the rights of peoples and nations to self-determination, struggle against imperialism, liquidation of colonialism and neo-colonialism. The birth of this power block was in need of a new ideological apparatus that had to be accompanied by distinguishable visual language in architecture and public space.
