 back still to get a coffee or a sandwich. Thank you all for coming out. We are super excited to be hosting this event with Martino Australia, with Phillip Johnson, Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at Museum of Modern Art, and with Anthony Gaggety, Associate Professor of Architecture at 10-1-2. So today, Martino is going to speak to us about the current exhibition at MoMA toward a concrete utopia of architecture in Buenos Aires, 1948 to 1988. This exhibition is first major undertaking since arriving at the museum, was co-curated by Vladimir Kulich, and is clearly necessary for the project of this scope to involve the team of researchers and writers who appear in this sumptuous publication, which you should all get. So after Martino's presentation, and I will talk relatively formally with Martino about this major work and then with some luck, and we'll all have better and more penetrating questions from Martino. I was really surprised. You likely know our guests, but just a few biographical highlights to remind you. Before coming to MoMA, Martino was Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Missouri. And among these are very abbreviated biographies. Among his other essays and books, he has recently published Montage of Metropolis, Architecture, Modernity, and Representation of Space, as well as Las Vegas and the Rearview Mirror, the City and the Theory of Geography of Film. And you probably all know, as part of them, you remember, he was part of a team for the US rebellion at the 2014 Architecture Biennial with the Project Office U.S. Among her books and publications, we find the Optimum Imperative Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1930 to 1968. And she's the editor of Terms of Appropriation, Modern Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Braceford-Lorenz. And I suppose even more germane to today's topic. I've learned that the more I don't notice, because I have a little friend of her. Her parents were architects of Yugoslavia during the period this show deals with. So she has knowledge of the material as a historian and theorist, and also through intimate personal experience, which is sort of hard to read. If I defer to Amanda throughout today's conversation, you will know why. Toward a concrete, Tokyo follows previous exhibitions devoted to the particular modernism of Yugoslavia. To know just a few, there was what Dan and Tina Yugoslavia distored from our architecture in 2005, curated by Marco Lujic, bulk technology, new architecture, and the urban phenomenon in southeastern Europe. This was architectured in 2008, curated by Loria, you were, you miss? I'm not reading them. I'm not. I'm going to destroy these names in Blackbird Koolidge. And unfinished modernizations between Yugoslavia and pragmatism, architecture and urban planning in the form of Yugoslavia and the successor states and a series of institutions. 13 curated by a team, including Vladimir and Loria. And so those exhibitions tell us something about the lead up to this exhibition in the moment, but as Martino and Vladimir are still observed in their introduction to the catalog, and I'm interpolating here, because of its legacy, because of its visibility within architecture and for a large public audience, and especially in light of MoMA's role in the former Yugoslavia as a participant in the Westernizing cultural diplomacy, they show up MoMA carries a special responsibility, a responsibility they have to provide as the revision of history. And I'm sure Martino will tell us in more detail how they see this revision playing out through the exhibition. But in anticipation of this comment and because of my background in interest in exhibitions and because I recognize how complicated this is, what they're trying to do, I want to suggest just a few of the challenges faced by this project, challenges that are related to historical vision, but also to exhibition practice generally and to exhibitions at MoMA more specifically as I imagine. So first, in turn to Yugoslavia between 1940 and 1980, the exhibition has to contend with what the curators call the parallel universe of the non-aligned movement of the post-war for which Tito's Yugoslavia was foundational on the field of art. So this is not just an exhibition about another place or another time, but an exhibition that confronts the curious alterity of the non-aligned movement both within and outside the territorial, political and discursive formation of the Cold War map. And then attempts to underscore, the exhibition attempts to underscore the possibility of other global network celebrations. So one challenge of the exhibition is how to keep this oscillation inside and outside this Cold War map, this Cold War logic present within the organization of documents and materials of the exhibition. How to glimpse this possibility of alterity within these documents. One aspect of the show's historical revision is its return to or its recuperation of socialist architecture. In the last night in the conversation with Martino, Rampulhouse showed some images of his meeting with that group or a confederation of Yugoslavian architects in reference to the creative bureaucracy that permeated the era. So another challenge as I see it for the exhibition is how to use the documents, photos, models, films to not only illustrate the extraordinary formal inventiveness of Yugoslavian architecture, but also to reveal some of the other modes of work, labor, authorship and creativity that they signal. At the same time, how to use those documents to show architecture essential to a socialist project of self-management and the reconception of reorganization of life through the new programs of the field in cultural centers and anti-fascist monuments alike represented. At the same time as showing the effects of the collective project in Yugoslavian modernism, the show also has to expose the complex national fabrication that is Yugoslavian. The show has to show how this fabrication both holds the stake together and keeps present the particularities of the country's institutional standards, especially because as we know, this national fiction of Yugoslavian seeds to emergent nationalist identities through the violent rupture as in conflicts of the 1990s. So have to show this material then not only as buildings and plans, but as the expression of historical, social and conflictual forces that are coursing through Yugoslavia and being held in tension over these years. And finally, maybe this is the most challenging if those challenges weren't yet enough. How does the show help us think through the problems of creative bureaucracy within MoMA? How to make the work of the institution relate to the topic? Or how to work with an institution in a project like this that could represent a subversion to its own forms and display the authorship of the audience? To put this differently, what does the show change at MoMA? What revision is there to MoMA for this exhibition? Last night, after seeing Martino or Rem Talk, so this has been an intense encounter with Martino and this exhibition in the last few days, and then I walked a mile long walker, which is spectacular, you should all do it. But one of the frames, for those of you who haven't seen this, which, and you've accused of relativism, is a series of ambivalent declarations that goes like this. Money changes everything, money changes nothing. Evidence changes everything, evidence changes nothing. So to extend that course, we could say, I show what MoMA and socialist architecture changes everything. I show what MoMA and socialist architecture changes nothing. So how to answer that everything or nothing or somewhere in between will depend on not only the accomplishment and the ambitions of this particular exhibition, but also on how we treat the capacity, agency, and impact of exhibitions and their institutions for our discipline and for our work here. So with that, I'd like to welcome them to the party. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on this Friday afternoon. Spend some more time on the place long, long, that's what's in the case. I mean, it's still worth considering from a contemporary perspective. At the point that Marcus made I almost feel it should start immediately with the discussion. Then we actually really follow the presentation because he did raise obviously some very, very key issues related to this exhibition. Nevertheless, I think we're going to try 20 or 25 minutes to briefly, not so much if you survey the exhibition, as I think most of you have probably seen it by now, but more some general thoughts about the curatorial thing behind why you just love your wine now. And also perhaps a little bit of an introduction into the making of how you actually look at a project on this scale and particularly at the moment. So perhaps some of my brief remarks will maybe obliquely provide beginnings of an answer to the very interesting and important questions that Marcus raised. Only last. Anyway, recently, and while there was still fully immersive preparations for, toward a concrete etopia, which is going to be on you, I had a chance to listen to a tape recording of a lecture delivered by one of my predecessors along with the director of the department of architecture and design, Arthur Drex. This lecture was delivered on the occasion of his controversial 1979 exhibition, Transmissions in Modern Architecture. This is a little bit of a label-gazing, and hopefully I'll make myself clear why I think I'm doing this. What Drexel presented in this exhibition and what we'll talk about in this lecture was a stop-taking of architectural production roughly from 1960 to 1979. Drexel had in earlier instances perpetuated the heroic story of modernist architecture and its adaptation to it as the new label of Franco of the post-war US. The 1979 exhibition presented the story of the client, Swanson, to the modernist project, as it were, showing you an installation in the time of this 1979 exhibition. The show represented a large number of recent buildings that were a large selection of photographs and exclusively photographs, the display of which transformed the contents into a kind of architectural white noise, indicative of Drexel's critical stance. Referencing the political events of the most recent period, so this is what we're talking about in the 1970s, Drexel drew a somber and pessimistic outlook while he had left culture in general and architecture more specifically in the situation of disorientation. What struck me in particular in Drexel's lecture was the fact that he invoked the ability to make people happy as a measure for what is called architecture. Happiness as a category of architectural thinking is, of course, only recently being reintroduced into the discourse by Alain Poteau on the architecture of happiness, and so I found it remarkable that the concept was so central for Drexel's argument back in 1979. I'm quoting it. Among the things that architecture can do and the way we know that it makes us happier is that it gives us the feeling that we are living at the right time and in the right place. Well, the last 20 years has been a period in which more and more of us feel that we're living in the wrong time and holding in the wrong place. And further, still Drexel, we are the moment struggling with the consequences of our previous beliefs and actions. But the struggle has not yet revealed any new beliefs or actions. Drexel's words resonated with me because they seem to speak to our current historical moment as much as it is to his lectures on 14 years ago, the wrong time and the wrong place. Quite apart from the political repercussions, his comments addressed a moment in which architecture was able to provide society with a sense of community and was intended for to come good. You may wonder by now why I'm telling you all this and perhaps it's just a rather digressive attitude to the question why a major exhibition on the architecture of the Czechoslovakia in the post-op period should happen now under the moment. One answer I would want to give is that I believe it is necessary to remind the architectural problem of profession and perhaps more so the audiences that architecture can and should be more than a luxury commodity or an academic investigation. Even though socialism came with its own set of problems and as we know it's ultimately being doomed to fail, I believe that studying the architectural production of socialism with Slavia in the wider context in which it was produced is worthwhile to remind us of the role architecture can take in constructing a better society based on a shared vision. And indeed, it is my conviction that ultimately architecture as a discipline can only thrive from the climate where there is a shared understanding about its capacity to contribute to such a shared vision and how we should live together. Hence the title of the exhibition, the concrete utopia, which is of course a reference to the right things of the answer. It is this visionary potential in here is to unlike the four architecture that we seek to explore in our current exhibition. So much for our first political answer to why this exhibition and how it happened and why it happened. There is also a second answer to the question and it is an answer that I would like to give not so much as a citizen of the world today but as a historian. And once again, I would use Drex's lecture to make my point. Talking about the looms here on the other one, which is the same as on the other, Drex will discuss the past of the true perspective institution. Whereas in terms of the looms we hear is to quote validate news. It's also an interesting reminder how short it could be about this background. The task of museums is to validate quotes what he says, what is good. And he says, quote Drexler, sometimes that entails the reappraisal of what may have been ignored or neglected or overlooked or dismissed. And of course, the word of concrete in Tokyo is intended to be precisely such a nebulous text. We all know of the outsize power Noma has had historically in shaping the canon of modern architecture but we are only now starting to understand what has all been left out of this canonical narrative. The task of a global architectural history, in my opinion, is not just to add new places and names to such a history but to allow for alternative narratives that look in particular at how modern architecture was shaped through international exchanges, not merely between the West and elsewhere but also in dialogue between places that have been almost systematically overlooked, in particular between the East and what we now know as the Global Center. By looking at Yugoslavia and its global economic, political and architectural networks, I believe it is possible to sketch an alternative history to globalization. One is substantially earlier than our current neoliberal age and one that goes beyond and in fact counter to the strength of a Western and a modern world view across the world. Baldwin's regions has long been seen from a Western point of view as only peripherally associated with the project of modernity. The historical map of the territory and the historical map of the territory indicating sort of this land of inter-tweeness where the superpowers of the previous centuries, here is the map of the 18th century, intersected on the territory of what was to become Yugoslavia. Historian Maria Todorova has shown how the former Yugoslavia has been construed in Western art, and it has delivered German culture as Europe's internal other. Authority was mentioned previously. Following this logic, the region has been characterized according to three basic conditions, namely those of peripherality with regard to an imagined center, of course, imagined in Western Europe. Under development, the second standard, condition and the third condition, colonization by forces from both East and West. These generalizations apply to architectural history as well, where canonical accounts of architectural modernism tend to completely ignore insignificant contribution that may have originated from this region. In considering the Yugoslav architecture production and networks of exchange between 1948 and 1988, a very different picture of the region seems to emerge rather than a secondary backwater of the modern world. Socialist Yugoslavia can, as our exhibition argues, instead be seen as a laboratory of globalization that undermined the world around the economies. Our exhibition argues that Yugoslav architecture was at the crossroads of an exchange of architectural knowledge and ideas across ideological divisions, political borders and cultural gaps, producing a cosmopolitan and hybrid body of work that demands retroactive inclusion into the history of architectural modernity if that narrative is to expand beyond the 12th century. Only three years after its founding in 1945, Socialist Yugoslavia in 1948 broke with the Stalinist Soviet Union and was subsequently forced to forge international alliances. Yugoslavia rapidly opened itself to the West, both politically and culturally. The break of Stalin had left the fledgling and Socialist Yugoslavia with uncertain prospects and without any ideological or financial support to construct its vision of a socialist society. However, this crisis also paved the way for a disproportionately large role that a small country was pursuing in the Cold War. Under President Strumann and Eisenhower, the United States sought to replace the Soviet influence in Soviet Yugoslavia, a wedge that could be driven into the communist bloc, the spirit of Western influence that would potentially destabilize the SSR's firm grip on Eastern Europe. Throughout the 1950s, the US generously supported the country with economic and military needs and his year of modern art took a key role in applying soft power politics by spreading the gospel of Western art and architecture to Yugoslavia. For example, a traveling exhibition, Modern Art in the United States, presented as a lecture works from Mont's permanent collection to audiences in various European cities, including Belgrade in the summer of 1956. Since his senior year, people lining up to see one of Mont's organized shows. The exhibition included an architecture section featuring 16 buildings, which were shown at the local fresco museum and on them the recently completed Gleber House, which is here and represented in that large scale, scale of photographic throw and brought right to women who are visiting this show. The exhibition marked the end of the Corbusian Fever that had raged Yugoslav a few years earlier, only to be replaced by a preference for American post-war modernism and its attributes of transparency, slab elements and curtain walls. The exhibition built in the USA was post-war architecture and also traveling to Yugoslavia in 1958. There's also a catalog that was published in the Soviet Correction on this exhibition, so much for the presence of soft towers applied by the international program. However, Tito's existence in sustaining Yugoslavia is independent from nature and commitment to a socialist system. According to its very old terms the centralize the ideology of self-managing, which is fundamentally different from the top-down and political apparatus in so many other and some of these countries, and in particular this eastern block, the self-managed system is a file in the U.S. now able to be seen more as a bottom-up system where power is much more distributed very thoroughly and centrally. I'm actually very curious to learn more from Anna's perspective how architects actually would operate in such an independent system. Our exhibition argues that the system of self-management have consequences for the architectural profession. Most importantly, it favor the strong system of competitions for public commissions and of course almost all commissions were probably to some degree which in turn produced a great visionary thinking and design for some of the eventually executed in real developments and included in the show. Of course I'm just showing a tool rather than a sign because perhaps particularly interesting work and high-rise power in Slovenia and drawing of the Institute of Statement by Olli Smagash for the same of spirit which was also a key one. Looking for new geopolitical alliances in 1956 Tito together with the leaders of India and Europe and Egypt, Nasser designed the declaration of Breone which is generally seen as the founding document of the non-aligned movement an alliance that saw to establish a middle ground between the two dominant building blocks of the Cold War. The movement was formalized in the first conference of the non-aligned countries in February 1961. A loose association of nations here and a map of the tenets of the 1961 original conference many of these countries were newly independent nations in Portugal, Africa and elsewhere in the World of South. Providing for Slovenia a powerful platform for securing economic independence for both East and West. It also opened up a multitude of opportunities for exporting its modernist architecture and engineering expertise overseas. I'm showing you here a photograph of me with a stitch who was the head of the architecture division of the Belgrade-based firm Ennego-Projet. Ennego-Projet was particularly successful in this regard. From the 1960s home work the company built a large number of large-scale infrastructure and architectural projects all across Africa. The most prominent example of course is the one of the trade fair complex which is based on ethnographically certain traditional settlement of technologies in Nigeria because of the president of the lecture last night and that Graham Kolas delivered, of course then later came into the focus of his own research interest. So here are some of the original plan drawings and the show of that. The trade fair compound and here some of the research, ethnographic research on traditional settlement structures in Nigeria, particularly here of course that was then translated to plan the trade fair. So these are just a few very brief remarks on the aspect of worldliness of the global network so it was a lot of architecture culture featured which is a topic of one of the four main sections of the show and this team here in a brief survey and in the different sections of the show. We start with a general introduction into the theme of modernization. With the underlying question, how was the formerly rural and relatively underdeveloped pre-oriented long-term reform in a high urbanized, highly industrialized society developed within only a few years after World War II. We then go to the global network which was the topic of what I was trying to sketch out. Very briefly here it includes also, of course, the reconstruction of small appeal tourism or infrastructure and so on and so forth. Then the third section is titled Everyday Life and they basically asked the question so how is the heroic project of modernization this utopian vision of transforming society according to the ideal image of a socialist society then actually how does it arrive in the everyday life of citizens so there's a strong focus on questions of housing also of design, design objects for the household and so on and so forth and also some questions of architectural education are addressed there. The fourth and final section deals with the questions, the question of how is this project of an overarching modernization then moderated with the needs for self-expression of different ethnic cultural factions in a multi-cultural society of course it was only defined in the features of the Islam project. I would like to wrap up this lecture with a general comment on how I see the role of architecture curator in a large museum such as the Museum of Modern Art perhaps also referencing what Mark was developing as his court points. This has obviously quite different from that of a colleague in an architecture museum or an architecture gallery in an educational institution such as Columbia University the key difference is probably that of the audience while an architecture museum person for most addresses the architecture community an art museum has a much larger, more general audience this is certainly true for now with our roughly 3 million visitors annually many of whom come to museums for the very first time as tourists and many of whom will not have any particular interest or even prior knowledge of modern architecture or actually architecture quite today. So in an ideal world I think in architectural exhibition in such an institutional setting we'll always try to be speaking on two different levels simultaneously on the one hand we'll address the architectural profession and the design audience and we will try to make a new contribution to architectural knowledge through the presentation of the research on the other hand it will also try to capture the interest of the general audience and who have raised their awareness for architecture as an art and as a discipline. In other words a successful architectural exhibition means to be in my opinion double coded in that it speaks to different languages at once and I think this sort of if you want to call it populist secondary language that I think is important to have is not it's not something that is just populism for populism's sake but I think it's actually a great opportunity and responsibility for a curator in such an institution to address an audience that has no prior interest in architecture and hopefully sensitize these kinds of audiences for what we think is important to know what. So how is this achieved? A few insulation shots that I am going to show you now perhaps give an indication of how we try to resolve this problem. Needless to say a large chunk of objects in you are original drawings as well as some original models that we were able to collect from a large number of sources just showing you two more or less randomly examined and of course as an architectural historian I don't mentally believe the significance of the original drawing and the original model and the aura that such an object can unfold so the responsibility is obviously to elevate these drawings from a large number of sources to something that you have studied in an idea or a musical setting. I shall realize some 50 lenders some of which are institutional and of which are private persons which is an example of a major logistical operation. We have two more insulation views and one of them is done original in the monographic space which gives you a further indication of the enormous breadth and diversity of the original material that we are going to assemble. Architects and aficionados of architectural drawings will not be disappointed by our show I don't believe. In addition and as a counterweight we also made sure to bring a variety of different mediums into the mix in order to draw the audience. One of these mediums are the large-scale photographic blow-ups with contemporary architectural photographs by Valentin Jankov that are arranged strategically throughout the exhibition and we use this very large blow-up to make the two sort of work as guideposts to attract the attention of audiences who may be scared by looking at an architectural drawing because they think it's too technical that they don't understand what the show is and so on and so forth. I know about this work from the time in Switzerland and so we commissioned him to produce these images exclusively for the purposes of the exhibition. We feel they not only express the architectural and structural qualities but also have a sense of texture and atmosphere and almost visceral by mention to the show that we felt would be a good way to convey some of the meaning that we wanted to bring across. We selected some 25 minutes from several hundred and these images are as I already mentioned situated strategically across the galleries and serve us as the kind of guideposts. Another medium were foregroundings, film and video. Collaborate with the Serbian born film maker Mila Turalić who produced three short video pieces for the show. All these works are based on original footage from the period and serve as an imitation to visually dive into that post-war period. The most striking of these three productions is probably the introductory triptych which I've shown you here some stills right at the very beginning of the exhibition. This is a four minute short loop supported by an evocative soundtrack. The video tells the heroic story of the rapid modernization and the urbanization of Ljubljana in the very short period after World War II where there was some really fun sort of found footage pieces such as this parading of models in the streets of Belgrade and then of course this massive construction effort included to youth brigades and so on and so forth and in general this very sort of forward looking optimistic outlook to a common shared future. There's another 12th video installation in the design in the everyday life section that we see here which is a sort of ironization of the housing projects that I'm showing because it's also found footage from TV and future film productions that look in a humoristic way at the problems of moving into these newly provided apartments and spaces of the smallest bad construction there is corruption in constructions that people don't get along in these other spaces and so on and so forth. So the other film was important to build in this self-referential critical knowledge that was already present in youth love popular culture at the period mainly through film and TV productions. Milo's films are complemented by a number of traditional drone videos of what we think particularly successful examples of urbanism projects in Yugoslavia such as the reconstruction of the city of Zadar after World War II when it was destroyed in a bomb attack or the new city of Split 3 which is built for 50,000 people within only 10 years next to the existing city of Split here again some stills from these drone videos highlight not only the massive architectural assertion of this project but also the interesting to see of the details on the street level as well as the architectural formulation which we think is extraordinary. The third addition to the mix are the new models that we produce in collaboration with students from the Cooper Union we knew from the beginning that we were able to find the original mount for some of the key works that we had to highlight in our exhibition and so what do you do when you have that you turn it into a pedagogical project so one of my collaborators Massey Worthnig and I we co-taught a course of Cooper Union in spring of 2017 which introduced students to Yugoslav architecture and we asked each of the students to pick their favorite project from of course our list and before the groups we would then collaborate over the space that we worked on in these models the task was rather challenging because in many instances we were lacking basic plans and of course there was also no information about what size, the format what materials level of detail and so on so that was basically the major challenge of this project and the class eventually expanded into a three semester endeavor and I can't stress how it's doing the rightful we continued to meet with Cooper Union for their application enthusiastic support of this project and the result that we this spectacular this monthly outstanding and excellent contribution to our the show and of an extraordinary technical quality and they really have significant dimension to the exhibition I think that helps better understand the extraordinary quality of some of the buildings represented here are some making of photographs at the Cooper Union so I've already mentioned the term research in passing and I've just elaborated a little on our collaboration with Cooper Union some of you will know Mark mentioned that of course I would have an academic background and I was teaching at the university before I came to MoMA three and a half years ago but because of this background perhaps it was very important for me to be able to continue working as a scholar in the museum and to use exhibitions as strikers for large scale research projects and indeed my team and I worked on this exhibition for some three years basically pretty much after I started at MoMA and in this sense the project is comparable to writing a book in an academic setting at least in terms of the duration of the project unlike in academia however where researchers often understood to be a solitary endeavor in archives, libraries and at the desk research in the museum is very much a collaborative effort came perhaps to a lab situation in the sciences moreover I also speak to the museum work as a sort of research in public but we do at the museum have great public interest and visibility which is both intimidating and empowering it endows our work with a lot of responsibility but it's also very gratifying to see the outcome eventually in such public display so how do you undertake such a gargantuan operation already mentioned in the aspect of collaboration so another really significant aspect of the exhibition was that curatorial advisory board with scholars, young scholars based in the respective countries of the former Yugoslavia that were really seminal to help us not only gathering and tiering establishing contacts to all the different archives resources, architectural offices individuals and so on for whom he puts then land materials but they were also important for us to shape the narrative as a critical sound or for endeavor I'm showing you here just a photograph from one of the workshops that we organized in the region in relatively early projects this is our first workshop that we organized in Skopje where of course we also took the opportunity to go see some of the extraordinary buildings in that city but of course then we also sat down and had a seminar where we discussed what the scope and the use of the show might be because you also had to see the scholarly conferences and lectures and Roma and elsewhere, this is my co-curator but in the college we are lecturing in the CMAP program in Roma and research focuses on non-western geographies and there's a group focusing on Eastern Europe and so that was also an idea of a sort of resource for us to use to explore research and help us get a better understanding of how we would want to frame the exhibition then of course research in space gathering the material and devising interesting questions about how do you actually convey these questions or problems in space in a model with our chips very significantly working on this for many, many months and many durations to have space to be organized and so on and so forth and perhaps unlike what Mark seemed to hint at in his introduction I believe that there's a fundamental and significantly important difference between a book on the one hand and the sort of the information that is you can convey the text as opposed to the material of the exhibition which has its very own fundamental principles of organization that are significantly different from those of the book and so for this reason as we work on a model here for this reason it's often critical that the people important for me to stress that our project not only exists in a relatively temporary exhibition that's up for six months and then it's gone of course we have an exhibition or installation shot but there's also a book and for me the book is not or the exhibition catalog is much just a representation of the exhibition but in my opinion has to be an important contribution to state of the art research on the topic and so we spend a lot of time and effort in putting together the scope which includes a great number of obviously as a photograph and portfolio at the beginning but then a great number of essays a relatively long three essays and then policies and shorter essays that would have a very specific aspect that we found more important to address and then make a useful and unique and different and important to discuss as we go from a contemporary perspective and also and again I think the book allows to dive into issues such as the sociology of the architectural progression or perhaps the question of gender relationships in new style architecture that are very difficult to convey in an exhibition and for which I think the essay of the book is much better sorted. So once again speaking on two levels perhaps included in my example fundamentally important about how I think curation should work. I wanted to ask questions about the reflectivity of the frameworks that you view of this level in detail about the exhibition from this conceptual approach how that's not best in every form of spatial or perceptual interaction. In a way I'm already upstaged by those questions that you posed at the beginning because they are the questions I'm posing or maybe some level way of the show in various reviews of it so maybe I'll zoom out a little bit in 2017 a youngish Serbian writer published a book published a book called Embašno Vlado which says thanks a lot now I don't expect you to have read it obviously it's still not translated it's in Serbian I'll show you the cover so it's a cover with the mother country once upon a time in Yugoslavia with some partisans coming out of it and so in the story this novel which is a kind of a satirical psychotic which he himself describes as an engaged novel the key event that basically allows the narrative to unfold is that somehow in 1989 a plane crashed with the entire central committee that was in actual history headed to decide the history of the country or the direction of the country and the whole central committee was basically erased in that event and what continued is Yugoslavia Yugoslavia continued in the moment that the novel is written in super power it basically has cell phones that compete with Apple it has just about a thousand ones like Super Hugo it has magnetic magnetic power trains between Skopje and Ibliana and certain elements of authoritarianism little bits of nationalism and that kind of socialist salutations that you would experience in that moment but through that country through that reality that I mentioned there's another one that seems true at moments in the novel and that reality is the real reality that is expressing a kind of poverty hack phones more nationalism reality TV maybe building life the reality yes photographs I would say and so for me for a few minutes so I'll speak now in one of the hats that I wear with respect to this show maybe the only one that I don't wear as a kind of possible audience is the general MoMA audience that mildly is interested in socialism everything else I am a child of architects someone who was forced to be socialist youth or became socialist youth regardless of what happened in the history of the family also a historian a supporter of the effort in the second book by architects but so for me for a few minutes entering into the show I'm hearing the music of a kind of a revolutionary anthem in the MoMA courtyard which was that specifically a song called the fight produced to you in the MoMA it was like being in this novel in that novel the first version of the novel I mean the first reality of the novel here we are at MoMA celebrating its products with mild elements of democracy, nationalism that don't quite make it through but I was and that song so for someone from that moment in time a song like that would immediately make you save it in your head because you have signed it many times and so there's a certain amount of vibrance that that produces entering that show but I think so I'll just continue speaking in that mode so for me one of the interesting ways to think about the show is for that audience I do think the show is as I think you wanted to be an engaged politically engaged show at least on two accounts so a piece of political engagement on both curatorial and historical terms and both in this context and in the context that it represents in this context because it is challenging audience to think alterity, to think a world that they don't understand and know in that context in the Hugo context it is basically saying these products are valuable think about them in a different way before you are painting over them with the kind of developer economy which is happening it's also I think important in that context as a as a as an innovation of a kind of architect that that career produced for the context so for someone who comes from that context from the Hugo context in the show it is an amazing piece it certainly produces forms of nostalgia and I think there are forms of couple of two types of nostalgia that at least Petrona Boyan gives us one is a kind of reflexive one and the other is a more serious simplistic one one that sort of just wishes the world could be as it once was even though obviously it never was we cannot situate or talk about it in those terms it's not like that was a great world in every aspect of it but we can be nostalgic for it and there is a version of nostalgia that I think is very useful for the audience from that region which would be that reflexive kind the kind that maybe allows for conversation to begin happening again in that context but what is important about that is that as one of these sort of audiences when I arrive to the show I bring the difficulties and the problems and a kind of understanding of the way some of this works happen to my love of the kiosk and love of the e-square telephone and recognition of the buildings that were part of the use but I worry about that sort of dimension I sort of wish the show was more complicated was able to hold that contradiction a little more clearly and I think an exhibition ought to be able to do that just like a book differently but I think this is not something we have to necessarily validate to the historical text we can challenge the show to do it so when I think about the Valentine's photographs I actually try to give them that role in the show though I think they don't explain the difficulty or the other reality that is here behind the one but they certainly produce it through a kind of mood that they bring into the show I have many other things Martina, why don't you tell us obviously thank you for these reflections and I actually precisely I actually think first of all I think it's not necessary our role as curators to prescribe a certain reading but it should be a Valentine's act I think what an exhibition should try to do is offer sort of give an offering that makes the members of the audience wherever they are in the background they have think about that proposition and so you could walk through this exhibition and I think come out and think oh this is actually a kind of a glorification of sort of Titoist whatever politics and it's how for whatever strange reasons allowed for the surprising amount of creativity and also that much of that creative potential was actually made into the real existing buildings and that's also actually extraordinary but I do think that it was very important for us to of course have this corrective built into the show as well and how did we do that precisely through the insertion of art works the Antibes piece for example with the Richter Bibelian where he sort of seen the metaphorization of the instrumentalization of art architecture and part of the state power in order to convey any sort of progressivist image of that state in the world through the Yankees photographs and of course on the one hand they are you could say they they've been related to this obsession with brutalism in the current period at the same time we felt they were really good in conveying and obviously conveying exactly an atmosphere of the after now that we didn't want to express in any context to us and then there's of course also for example the last video piece by a primary filmmaker which is from film and it's obviously it's a short play of the film of where three men visit the site of the Yosemite Memorial which is the site of concentration camp in Malaysia Fascist Occupiers killed hundreds of thousands of people and so these men visit and revisit that prominent about sort of the oblivion that it's history faces that people are forgetting the fact that this was the concentration camp that people work in here and of course and the problem as you know they're reflecting nostalgically in a way about this problem of history which is a problem of our losing weaknesses of World War II because at the same time we felt that the films also making a very sort of you know, was also referencing of course the Civil War that's late in the break of so we felt also we didn't want to be in your face with that other history we wanted it to be something that's carried on and I think that it's very present if you want to have but you don't necessarily need to to get an explanation of that so I think in exhibition it's more interesting to convey information and intellectual and other opportunities to do it and creation of films here by illusions and so on and so forth I think that is actually a strong point for anybody who saw the show and sees the images the photographs are unforgettable, nominated and it's so interesting to hear you talk about it because of your invocation of Brexit and transformations and the role of the photographs in that show and the idea of insecurity that perpetuates through Brexit this conversation and so thinking about how do you try to mobilize those images which at one level are grand and urban work and glorifying but also deeply unsettling images of the form of insecurity and so that seems like an incredibly interesting curatorial gambit to think of how those images can work against the easy complacency of somebody how can those images unsettle that narrative and I think how you try to do that is a fascinating proposition so are we wondering how else could one extend curatorial strategy of insecurity through the exhibition I'm not sure if that's something you would think through but this is where I'm sort of going so I think there's a bit of a paradox between the kind of curatorial voice that we do hear as a text and these are their decisions in which text in the Yugoslavia beginning text in almost every type all the curatorial parts that are on the walls in the exhibition are really supporting a particular kind of history so you may tell us that we should walk through this and collect our own understanding but it is praying by the curatorial voice and for me this is where I'm questioning it a little bit the kind of reading of the country and its history and the kinds of questions that I think you're asking us to learn from it so there's a kind of proposal in that opening text of the exhibition that says this is valuable for us right now and I agree as a body of historical knowledge I think it's valuable but then I think the depth of what we walk away with is also valuable precisely so that we don't fall into a kind of nostalgia which I think Reng was really resistant yesterday in the lecture he didn't want to uphold the show for as a model but in the text themselves I think things are offered as a model whereas then at moments we have maybe the I'm a little bit about the young photographs more generally because I think they are very personal and specific and stylized in addition of that architecture but I like that maybe they are capable of or at least the symbol of your character a desire to imbue the show with a certain amount of uncertainty and security so that was indeed why you chose the photographs and think about your photographs well yes, obviously we do have a narrative and we are certainly foregrounding and something and I think that is necessary if we were just wanting to show an individual project that we liked for some reason I think that's not enough for a show we had a project so I think there are certain things that are promised in that opening the talk about the lessons from that conference the engaged architect who is working on behalf of the collective who is engaged in the kind of allegorical materialization of that state and self-management in objects so there are some of the lessons there that were supposed to really take away well for example you could look at the fact that there's basically exclusively public buildings in the exhibition I mean if you were attentive to that fact you could perhaps wonder what is that meaning what is the background of the and sort of the system that allows for this or that or be completely at least a certain other levels of well let me just say here it wouldn't be enough to show several buildings to do this job and I wonder at what point do you decide that the national framework is the right framework to address these questions as opposed to a few buildings that have their own deep histories of labor of interconnections of sites of self-management of the state and I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by national Yugoslavia is no longer a nation but that's a national it's a kind of a national exhibition it's like built in US, built in Japan built in Yugoslavia to some extent I disagree I think we chose Yugoslavia and Yugoslavia is a completely different form of national exhibition that in itself it was divided into these relatively autonomous constituent republics and what we were interested in exploring there was not so much the construction of a national whatever heroic story but rather investigating how this overarching project of the shared modernity was moderated and reflected on a counter to some degree by the need to give specific identities to the different ethnicities and religions and so on that this body constituted so the first section of the show is titled Identities and again, obviously we're using historical material but I think the underlying question behind this module I don't know if you're interested but it's really about how do you moderate and how do you express an alternate society and how do you help express its internal diversity through architecture and I think that is actually very relevant for our content Thank you both Do any of you have the penetrating questions that I promised you might have Well, I think we can't Anyway, I don't fully understand the conversation I mean what's at stake because I think we're not going to the show also in the present context worldwide content I think one should look at the show in the context that's present in historical reality where the swing to the right worldwide is enormous and the fact that there was nothing to stand for a kind of certain way the whole modernized thing was pretty astonishing the fact that it survived not to break the standard but the third way gave possibility for some kind of certain way and we're long from that today and so I think that's the context for the show and the other thing is that one time it shows from the space free and zada as they have to part of the day with these drone photographs which are pretty remarkable things to look at one view of the chaos which we are proliferating in one of the world is to begin with any kind of collective consequence and then the show ends with these memorials and with this absolutely mind-blowing map of the number of war memorials in Yugoslavia and the narrative tells you that these war memorials have been destroyed by certain factions and so on and so forth so if you really do look at this exhibition and go to the end with it things pretty much go like you just referred to and also the ruined filings that the photographer takes ruined monuments which you don't really understand because they were partly also buildings and there's nothing quite artistic about the entire exhibition but you don't see it as a flattening out of the vital race which divided the Balkans before and divided the Balkans again and so I think that that speaks to at least in the country but I think there are many levels of which he operates but all for me because I happen to be an admirer of Ravnica showing Ravnica and also what Ravnica could teach for 30 years and many others so I think that when you I understand maybe if you demonstrate the the wound of such a skin you know would be home in present but I think this map is just devastating what are you talking about except the same thing absolutely I mean I think the fact that we have a show on a body of art by socialist artifacts that was coordinated in large part across the state or within each state of the Yugoslavia is amazing I think it is very important to think about that right now so in that sense I am absolutely aligned with the kind of hope that I think the curators hold that we can learn from the difference and that it is crucial that we do it as soon as possible but I also think that there are certain dimensions of that history that are flattened and that are relevant relevant precisely to support the desire to learn from this further and they are in part I think flattened through certain territorial choices so for me the key one is the one about authorship and we have it has come up a little bit and you said the best place to deal with authorship in this show is in the book or the kind of sociology of authorship is in the book I am hoping to think that basically if you look at the show right now anyone from the context that is in second world context is going to walk away thinking here are these great architects who in their own bureau somewhere are inventing projects that allegorize self-management and the collective they are not going to understand the kind of complexity of the enterprises self-managed enterprises of architects who worked on it they have only received the name of the architect that is understood to be somehow the ideator of the project there is no sense of the kind of architectural machine that stands behind the production of socialist country in this way so for me that is a really important dimension that isn't there right I mean the other thing I would say is that you don't understand the machine behind your own production I mean the way in which you think one person produces the building well it always takes a multiple so you don't recognize that I'm disputed but in this case we have a kind of a collective machine that is producing for collective once again though I think of course we could have produced some visuals some diagrams try to explain that probably we have been a failure most diagrams in architecture shows are usually conflicting so I'm illegible nobody would have been interested or we could have filled our walls with lengthy texts explaining and I think that's precisely what an architectural exhibition should be doing and that's precisely why I think it's equally important to understand a project that's having two paths one of which is a book in which this is addressed and at full scale you can come back to it until you hear interest in any particular question you will find the answers in the book we have some other questions from the audience but to come back into this one reason to think about what's unsettling about the architecture how they represent some kind of insecurity is not to allegorize but to represent what the project has to do it is a better vision of Christ who's unsettled in turning through socialist architecture a new side of its period Christ who's unsettled coded history, Christ who's unsettled movement Christ who's unsettled the way we think about architecture at this moment in time so I think all of these questions are also offered understanding that understanding the ambition of the show and understanding it but the harder question for everyone which is why I fully, I think all of these questions recognize the impossible challenge that we showed at MoMA now is like how to bring that into the structure, the form the management of the perceptual management of the documents within that space, such that the insecurity, the unsettling ambition of the project can come to the foreground and you've already pointed out that it's almost impossible because everything has to be coded at MoMA it has to both perform that way and it has to perform in a populist way and so every gesture toward making that reading more acute simultaneously has to step back from it and so there's a very curious, I mean I think every exhibition has this problem to some degree but this is what I was also getting at MoMA, I think it's a very particular problem which is why it's almost unimaginable how one can also have that in this context which is why we are happy to be able to talk about this but that's not really a question it's just to come back to this problem for vision what I wanted to say that's actually a very interesting point you're actually seeing it a little differently of course you can say that having the need to address a larger audience leads to a certain dumbing down or flattening out to you guys it's a problem that makes an architecture's vision somewhat I think actually you can also see it actually completely differently in that exactly precisely because you know that a large audience and not just a professional audience is going to see the show you have the responsibility and the opportunity to tell that the world a large sample of texture is exactly what this exhibition is trying to do I think it's actually going to quite successfully at least for the many reviews that I've read in that people actually get the fact that this is a political position in a world that I feel I'm improving I'm not quite sure I'm actually really not living in the right place in the right time and so maybe it's not substantial but it's important to remind people there are often ways to think about society and how architecture should interact with society this is one historic composition may not be the best one but I think it's an interesting one to consider for us I mean I love that part so for me I am totally with you for me the question that I heard Mark pose is partly what we have happening is that this material is coming to Loma and challenging its audiences to think otherwise or to think alternatives what we could also have or maybe the question is how does this body of art challenge Loma when it's presenting it because maybe some of the ways in which Loma has been used to thinking about objects images could be challenged by this body of art what's interesting could you make an example so for me when you were presenting the kind of drawings and talking about original models for example there's a love of the original object maybe this body of art challenges that love in some way so Loma changes its way and understanding of what it is showing to the audience or for example if we think of the exhibit as it is right now and you look at the pictures of the Franklin Wright exhibit in the same space they are not fundamentally different and yet the way in which this work is produced is fundamentally different in those bodies there are many things that are fundamentally different about the archival material in those two exhibitions how it occupies space how it communicates to its audiences I think this work has the capacity to re-train us and the institution to talk about architecture in all of the fundamental way in which you're interested certainly okay, first of all thank you everybody I think actually I'm also fascinated with this idea so you can take me like that in a slightly schizophrenic world in a breaking about it and books about it and also living as a child the exhibit I really do not do this idea at that show I would rather refer to this person that something is not really shown in the show which is experience it's a rather documentary exhibition which is quite liberating for me because as a matter of fact I do not have questions about I took my son this summer he wanted to see that his child was in there and in the camera he made about 204 of them systematically and if he stayed with me he just took care of me but I was thinking it's very interesting because it may be a prolonged stage for him who never lived it I think that's something to think about and secondly that I'm writing about right now was a future period on the show one of the years it's on the focus of the documentation and the documentary which we spoke about and I'm really curious because all I know is the documents that we presented in a true historian fashion if not traditional it's a graduate traditional which I do respect and I like and the person who was reading my son says how easy it is because I know so many architects actually called me why is my building not being shown but allowed there's something quite fascinating about that it's a very creative architecture from one system into the global architecture modern history so between them as immigrants the difference is not if they're documented in the front and not in the back which may be far off and for that that's a question for you how do you manage to go for that challenge to keep that so strict because I know you have a lot of questions about metals and we'd be glad for this and most of the time I must say I'm really exhilarated for the opportunity to open up a scholarship for the armed doctors because there are methods today to treat people as documents so I'm curious what you're thinking about yeah that's actually an interesting very interesting methodological predicament and it's just basically the rule that we apply to ourselves first of all it was rather dramatic it said nothing except originals and I think fundamentally in a situation where you're dealing with a world that is not at all secured where of course there are some institutions in the region that have collected for many years thank god that a lot of the material actually comes from high insecure backgrounds where you really had to find an exile for these potential immigrants maybe they'll become exiles again but at least for a temporary period of 64 they could even survive the immediate future and you know in that sense the show to some degree is also intended as a rescue operation not only with regard to the imminent threat that many of these buildings are facing not just to move to Serbia it's something that protects most of the architecture globally 60s and 70s architecture developed in this welfare state it's just highly contested but also as a body of work but also the representation of these states in large numbers and so forth by putting so much stress on the original it was also trying to that there is a problem there you know paying attention to these states before they're all gone thank you Martina thank you Anna we have to wrap up now and thank you all for coming