The broadcasting of TV Zagreb started in September 1956 with live coverage of the opening ceremony of the Zagreb Fair across the river, on the south bank of the Sava. Around the same time Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Gamal Abdel Nasser signed the Brioni Statement with which the Non-Aligned Movement officially became a world-wide organization. A year later, in 1957, started the construction of the first neighborhood of high-rise apartment buildings in Novi Zagreb, thus beginning the transformation of the rural area of satellite villages south of the river into a modernist city quarters of high density.
In Novi Zagreb, neighborhood after neighborhood was built throughout the Sixties and the Seventies according to the modernist zoning principles of the Athens Charter. Tenants’ rights for thousands of apartments were given to the workers. The social ownership of the agricultural land enabled large-scale urban planning interventions, and despite the fact that many of the optimistic goals of the urban planners were never accomplished1, in contrast to present-day urban developments, great care was given to green areas, distance among the buildings, and child care and educational facilities. Conceived as the biggest post-WW2 development of the city, Novi Zagreb housed all strata of society, and whole generations born in Sixties and Seventies grew up here. The Zagreb Fair became central point of Novi Zagreb, as well as one of the prominent new symbols of ‘vigorous growth’[2] and post-war reconstruction of the city, epitomizing the optimism of this time of economic prosperity, strong international alliances, and new technology. It was one of the focal points of the city economy, and still based on the World’s Fair model, it featured numerous permanent national pavilions, as well as experimental temporary exhibition structures, which were often designed by leading architects of the time, such as celebrated architects Ivan Vitic, Zdravko Bregovac, or Ninoslav Kucan. Two of David Maljkovic’s works, These Days and its counterpart Lost Memories from These Days take place in front and inside the Italian pavilion, designed by Italian architect Giuseppe Sambito and finished in 1961.
In These Days several people in their late twenties and early thirties are sitting in and around strangely immobilized cars in front of the building. In Lost Memories the cars, made immobile by the same contraptions, are surrounded by a group of beautiful young women, seemingly idly waiting and ready to go. But again, the cars are clearly arrested and are going nowhere. In both videos the pavilion is conspicuously empty—nothing is disturbing the protagonists, who are almost notmoving, and who all seem as if they are waiting for something, but it is not clear for what.
Besides being close in their age, the two groups have little in common. The people in These Days are architects, artists, publishers of comics, some of them protagonists of non-institutional cultural practices in Zagreb, that in recent years have developed various ways of working in opposition to dominant models of representation, capital and ideology constructed by national culture and pragmatic demands posed on the way to European integrations. The women in Lost Memories from These Days are models that have been found through an agency, and they often work as hostesses during the car shows and trade events. The contrast between the two groups is not only in their immediately discernible difference in clothing style, but rather in the striking difference in their usage (or refraining from usage) of language. Protagonists of These Days talk in English, but it soon becomes obvious it’s a strange and incomprehensive talk—with a slow, tired, disinterested voice they pronounce sentences from the tapes for learning the English language. In Lost Memories from These Days, just as in previous video, camera often zooms in on the faces and at the first glance it seems that the women don’t mind being observed so closely, but soon there is a sense of nervousness accentuated their quietness. Barely discernible interplay of sound and silence plays an important role in this video showing scene after scene of unspeaking women—the sound of the car engines stops at intervals, bringing about complete silence, and it is only then that we become aware that there was a sound, and that now there is none.
The use of English in These Days, as well as the silence in Lost Memories from These Days —different ways of muteness expressed through language, body gestures, suspended movements, contradictory spatial memories and disposition—could be related to certain trauma that haunts ghost geographies hidden under more or less charged or politically correct terms such as the Balkans, South-Eastern Europe, postcommunist Europe: trauma of validation and recognition from the West, of belated inclusion into the company of the ‘normal, developed European world’. The date of accession of Croatia to European Union has not been set yet, and for several years now it has been sliding back and forth from 2009 to 2012. For the country in which one of the biggest public obsessions, as in most of its neighbors, is fastest possible dissociation from the Balkans—nevermerely a geographical label, but rather a word that during the 1990s acquired social and cultural meanings that transformed it into a symptom of Europe that embodies all that is wrong in the utopian notion of the aseptic (multi)cultural consensus of the ‘European Union’—one of the biggest insults came in early 2008, when it was announced that Serbia, arch enemy of a kind, might be accepted into the European Union at the same time as ‘us’. Both of the groups in the videos are coping with this arrested development in their own way, the first one by learning English, striving to be westernized by knowledge, and being disillusioned in the very process, the other through the need to be pretty, to be westernized through the clothes and style.
But this is a resigned generation, one that has already started to feel, and think the unthinkable, that not everything coming from the West is necessarily for the better. Representatives of resigned generation in These Days are tired of waiting for the ‘better tomorrow’, of repeated attempts to get ‘integrated’ into Western system, of feeling constantly exposed to the outside gaze and of the need to position and define themselves in relation to this gaze. Along with the phrases I am tired today or I feel sick, we hear the typical nauseating optimistic phrases from the English language primers, like: “It’s beautiful sunny day!” and “Fantastic!”, pronounced with a tired, depressive voice. The oppressiveness of the goodmood is striking. In one of his first videos, Scene for the New Heritage I, Maljkovic uses the incomprehensible language composed of the so called ‘gange’—folk songs which in the urban racism of Croatia in the 1990s became linked with refugees and immigrants fromrural areas who contaminate Croatian ‘Europeaness’, while in These Days hemakes the so called ‘urban Croatia’ incomprehensible in ametaphor of its disillusionment with the project of accession to Europe.
And yet, the disheartening contradiction arises fromthe fact that this very same European Union, which scorns and rejects, full of its own contradictions, conflicts and exclusions, remains all too often the only ally and the prevailing argument in fighting the local battles against variety of negative phenomena of the so-called ‘transition’, such as endemic corruption, rampant homophobia, or extreme nationalism and glorification of the war criminals of the 1990s.
The presence of so clearly immobile and immobilized cars suspends the last remnants of the feeling that there is a bright future waiting across all the obstacles and borders on the ‘get away’ fromthemess (of Balkans). It also diverts the reach of fetishistic adoration of the car and its naive liberating evocations. In Lost Memories from These Days, more pronounced fetishist role of the cars is being accentuated by the presence of beautiful young women, all dressed up and with make-up on, on a suffocating
hot summer day. Their work as hostesses is obviously the sphere of work, which in the light of accepted role of the women in Croatia today as mothers, themost evoked figure in any shrinking demography, become the focal point and litmus tests of women’s discrimination today. But obviously, the change in gender identities that took place during full force conservative backlash of the war and post-war years affected male identities equally powerfully and Lost Memories touches upon it rather uncomfortably.
The car, the ultimate fetish of consumerismof the new post-communist era (in Croatia, for instance, the number of carsmore than doubled during the last decade3), in its irritating immobility clearly fails as male gender-coded obsession with control over powerful machines, rather revealing its very collapse.
One of the main preoccupations of Maljkovic’s research is historical, cultural and theoretical heritage ofmodernist project in Croatia, andmapping of its relationships, as one of the so-called ‘peripheral’ modernisms, with the ‘real, ideologically unburdened’ Western modernism. On the other hand, Maljkovic questions the very notion of high Westernmodernismas never completed project, whose promises of progress and security from today’s perspective appear as ‘unfinished future’. But although they continuously confront us with the heritage that is forgotten, or not perceived as valuable for the presentmoment, his works are not about nostalgia.What they offer is rather a clear and precise diagnosis of the inability to recompose desire that is the project ofmodernism.
The two distinct groups in These Days and Lost Memories from These Days in certain way stand still under a shadow of the two paradigmatic buildings of our times being built in Novi Zagreb, just across each other and couple of hundred meters from the Zagreb Fair. One is the Museum of Contemporary Art, whose construction started in 2003 and whose completion date was originally set for 2006, but whose building is still dragging on, stalled by incompetence of state administration, aggravated by fighting between the City of Zagreb and theMinistry of Culture, currently under control by two different political parties. The other building is AvenueMall just across the street, which got completed in mere 18 months, and which according to its web site, boasts 130 stores, 9-screen cinema, 3,400 m2 supermarket, and an impressive number of 25,000 visitors daily. The center of economy may not have moved very far but it has completely changed its character—as much as it was about the commerce, the function of Zagreb Fair was primarily rooted in presentation of industrial development, while today the interface of production, as well as public imagination, has moved completely to the consumerism of them all and the adjacent Museum depending on its proximity for the phantom of audiences. “Fantastic!” Who said we are tired?
NOTES
1 Notorious was the lack of sports and cultural facilities, and in many occasions Novi Zagreb was referred to as sleeping quarters of the city.
2 Phrase taken from the official site of the Zagreb Fair, http://www.zv.hr
3 In 1999 Zagreb had 220,000 and in 2006 450,000 registered cars. Data taken from Statistical Annual Reports of City of Zagreb.