Spielraum: an exhibition in three acts

Written as the foreword to Cibic’s monograph Spielraum, Alessandro Vincentelli’s text frames the project as the culmination of the artist’s long-term research into the entanglement of art, architecture, and political power—here extended across three exhibitions staged in distinct national public institutions, each increasingly shaped by the pressures of rising right-wing politics.

Drawing on histories of failed or transformed states, the project examines how visual languages—ranging from monumental architecture to rhetorical performance—have been mobilised to construct and sustain ideological narratives, and what remains once these systems fracture. Through film, installation, and performative re-enactment, Cibic assembles archival fragments, scripted dialogues, and symbolic forms into what Vincentelli describes as a “theatre of voices”: a layered staging of competing perspectives that both exposes and reconstitutes the mechanisms of authority.

Central to this expanded framework is Cibic’s sustained engagement with the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement, not as a fixed historical subject but as a lens through which to interrogate contemporary conditions. Across the trilogy, architecture functions as both stage and protagonist—its lifecycle traced from ideological conception to eventual obsolescence—revealing how built forms once tasked with representing collective identity become unstable carriers of meaning over time.

In bringing these works together, the publication extends beyond historical reflection into a critical reading of the present. It foregrounds the role of “soft power” in shaping public consciousness—where persuasion, aesthetics, and desire replace overt coercion—and situates Cibic’s feminist approach as a counter-reading of nation-building itself. By questioning who speaks, who frames, and who is rendered visible, the project exposes the structures through which cultural authority is produced and maintained.

As Europe once again confronts ideological fragmentation and the resurgence of nationalist narratives, this body of work—and the exhibitions from which it emerges—operates as both analysis and warning. It insists on the cyclical nature of history while opening a speculative space: a Spielraum, or room for manoeuvre, in which alternative forms of collective imagination and political articulation might still be rehearsed.

Jelena Vesić’s text reads the artist’s project Spielraum through the lens of “lost futures,” examining how Cibic reconstructs the twentieth century’s belief in progress as a fragmented archive of promises that no longer hold. Drawing on political speeches, architectural symbolism, and modernist rhetoric, Cibic’s work stages a performative repetition of historical narratives in which the future once functioned as a central ideological horizon.

Vesić positions the project between two key contemporary conditions: the collapse of utopian futurity and the rise of a culture of memory, in which history is replaced by fragmented, individualised recollections. Within this context, Cibic’s installations operate as a “theatre of voices,” where language becomes automated, belief erodes, and political rhetoric returns as echo rather than conviction.

The essay ultimately frames Spielraum as a critical meditation on forgetting and repetition—suggesting that today’s saturation with memory produces a form of collective amnesia. In this unstable space between history and memory, past and future, Cibic’s work opens a speculative field in which modernity persists not as a fixed narrative, but as a shifting potential.

In her text, Dubravka Sekulić reads Cibic’s film Tear Down and Rebuild through the architectural and political afterlives of socialist Yugoslavia, positioning the Palace of the Federation as both site and agent. Tracing the building’s shifting identities—from a symbol of a collective socialist project to its later reinscription within nationalist narratives—the essay reads architecture as a material record of competing ideologies and their transformations over time.

Sekulić highlights how the building embodies the ambitions and contradictions of Yugoslav self-management, particularly its emphasis on social property, participation, and collective life as alternatives to both state socialism and capitalism. These principles, once embedded in spatial and institutional forms, persist as latent “markers” that unsettle contemporary political frameworks, which seek to overwrite them with new ideological meanings.

Within Cibic’s film, the building emerges as an active interlocutor, amplifying the unresolved debate staged by its protagonists. The essay positions Cibic’s Spielraum as a critical inquiry into the production of space as a political act—revealing how architecture not only reflects but actively shapes social relations, and how its suppressed histories continue to challenge present-day assumptions about ownership, solidarity, and the possibility of alternative futures.

This text by WHW (What, How & for Whom) examines Spielraum as an inquiry into forms of public address and the construction of political voice through art and architecture. Drawing on fragments of speeches, historical documents, and modernist visual language, Cibic assembles a layered narrative that exposes how national myths and ideological discourses are staged, rehearsed, and naturalised.

Through strategies of fragmentation, repetition, and recontextualisation, the work destabilises authoritative speech, revealing its constructed nature and the mechanisms through which collective identities are produced. By juxtaposing ideologically opposed sources—from socialist rhetoric to monarchic and authoritarian discourse—Cibic collapses historical distinctions and challenges the possibility of stable, singular narratives.

The text situates Spielraum within the broader collapse of modernist grand narratives, where competing histories and political claims coexist in tension. It highlights how Cibic’s use of female protagonists, aesthetic excess, and performative ambiguity disrupts dominant modes of representation, opening a space for alternative, non-nationalist forms of belonging. Ultimately, the work is framed as a critical engagement with the enduring structures of modernity—exposing their contradictions while reclaiming a “manoeuvring space” for art beyond ideological instrumentalisation.

Zapperi focuses on Cibic’s use of architecture as an active agent in the construction of power relations and identity, arguing that built space is never neutral but deeply implicated in shaping social and political hierarchies.

Central to her analysis is the figure of the female performer, who appears throughout the trilogy as both subject and symbol, suspended within architectures that stand in for variations of the concept of the nation-state. While women are historically excluded from positions of political authority, Zapperi shows how they are simultaneously instrumentalised as allegorical figures—embodying ideals such as the nation, unity, and continuity. This dual position exposes a fundamental contradiction: the feminine is central to representation, yet marginalised within the structures it represents.

Across the three films of the Spielraum trilogy, Zapperi traces how repetition, fragmentation, and rehearsal destabilise authoritative narratives. Speeches assembled from historical sources never fully resolve, conversations remain disjointed, and actions oscillate between collaboration and conflict. This performative structure reveals the constructed nature of ideological language and the rituals through which national identity is produced and maintained.

Zapperi ultimately frames the Spielraum project as an allegorical system that interrupts linear historical narrative. By foregrounding the tension between history and representation—mapped onto gendered roles—the work exposes the aesthetic and ideological mechanisms underpinning nation-building, suggesting that these structures remain active and contested within contemporary political realities.

Anna Gritz’s curatorial introduction frames Give Expression to Common Desires, the second chapter of Spielraum, as an exploration of architecture as both political stage and ideological medium. Building on references to the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, Cibic isolates and reconfigures architectural elements—most notably the stained-glass ceiling of the former Palace of the Federation—transforming them into performative objects that operate between sculpture, scenography, and symbolic language.

Through choreography, film, and spatial intervention, these fragmented forms are continuously rearranged, suggesting that meaning is not fixed but produced through shifting relations, much like language. The accompanying film extends this logic by collapsing exhibition space and architectural reference into a single semantic system, where built forms become active agents in the construction of political narratives.

Gritz highlights how Cibic’s use of architectural “quotation” functions as a kind of masking or drag—displacing ideologically charged forms from their original context and reactivating them within new institutional frameworks. The essay foregrounds fragmentation as a critical method, inviting viewers to reconstruct meaning while exposing how architecture and spectacle operate as instruments of power, ritual, and collective imagination.

Una Popović’s curatorial introduction frames Tear Down and Rebuild, the final chapter of Spielraum, as both culmination and synthesis—bringing together the project’s investigation into architecture, rhetoric, and ideology as instruments of political representation. Set within the former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade, Cibic’s eponymous film positions the building not only as a historical site but as an active, symbolic stage for negotiating past and present political narratives.

Popović highlights the broader exhibition as a spatial collage of reconstructed forms, archival references, and performative acts, in which fragments of visual and rhetorical language are reassembled into new constellations of meaning. She reads Cibic’s project as an interrogation of what remains of ideological structures once their political context dissolves, proposing architecture and language alike as mutable signifiers—capable of being reactivated, contested, and reimagined within new historical conditions.

In this extensive interview with architect and writer Miloš Kosec, Jasmina Cibic reflects on the central methodologies and political questions underpinning her artistic practice, focusing on the relationship between architecture, ideology, representation, and the instrumentalisation of culture as a form of soft power. The conversation traces the development of Cibic’s projects from For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale through Spielraum and NADA, situating her work within broader discussions surrounding Yugoslav modernism, transnationalism, feminist critique, and the aesthetics of political authority.

Cibic describes her practice as a form of “a double game,” in which she adopts and reenacts the visual languages of ideology in order to expose the mechanisms through which political systems aestheticise and legitimise themselves. Through highly constructed installations, films, performances, and archival reconstructions, she examines architecture and art not as neutral cultural forms, but as scenographic instruments through which states stage identity, consensus, and authority.

A major focus of the interview is the legacy of Yugoslav architecture and the Non-Aligned Movement. Cibic discusses her interest in the ways architecture functioned as a tool for constructing a new political language during the formation of socialist Yugoslavia and the emergence of the “third path” of non-alignment. Rather than approaching Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, she positions it as a completed ideological project that allows for a forensic reading of the relationship between aesthetics and political power.

The conversation also addresses Cibic’s engagement with overlooked architects and historical figures such as Vinko Glanz, Dragiša Brašovan, and Adolf Loos, as well as her interest in forgotten narratives, secondary actors, and the feminist shadows of dominant architectural histories. She reflects critically on contemporary forms of cultural production, discussing the changing political role of artists, the transformation of institutions, the limits of participatory art, and the increasing precarity of interdisciplinary practice within contemporary capitalism.

Throughout the interview, Cibic emphasises her interest in the “soft power” of art and architecture — the ways cultural forms frame, seduce, and naturalise authority while concealing ideological structures beneath aesthetics, ornament, and spectacle. Her projects, she argues, deliberately resist singular interpretation, functioning instead as complex theatrical environments in which audiences encounter the unstable mechanisms through which political realities are constructed and performed.

Róna Kopeczky’s curatorial introduction presents The Nation Loves It, the first chapter of Spielraum, as an immersive dissection of the state as spectacle. Bringing together film, installation, performance, and sculptural elements, the project examines how visual language, architecture, and political rhetoric are orchestrated to construct and project national identity, drawing on the historical context of Yugoslavia’s staging of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.

The exhibition unfolds as a spatial and narrative system in which geometric forms derived from architectural plans, archival imagery, and fragments of political speeches are reassembled into a new visual and rhetorical vocabulary. Through this process of fragmentation and recomposition, Cibic reveals the mechanisms by which power produces meaning—transforming ornament, language, and space into instruments of ideological persuasion.

At its centre, a female protagonist rehearses a composite speech assembled from archival sources, including foundation stone ceremonies, official inaugurations, and presidential addresses marking grand state projects. Fragmentary and iterative, the speech continuously shifts through variations of similar rhetorical formulas, exposing how political language is constructed, rehearsed, and repeated across different contexts and regimes. Embodying both the architect and product of nation-building, the figure reveals the circularity and theatricality of these processes, in which each new political formation depends on the reinvention of its visual and linguistic codes.

Balsom centres her analysis of Cibic’s NADA film trilogy on the recurring figure of “woman-as-nation,” highlighting the contradiction between women’s symbolic role as embodiments of national ideals and their historical exclusion from political power. For Balsom, Cibic exposes this gap between representation and lived reality, using it as a critical entry point into the mechanisms of nation-building.

Balsom also emphasises the role of myth and spectacle: in NADA, cultural narratives are reconfigured to show how art is mobilised, manipulated, and sometimes sacrificed in the service of national agendas. The figure of “Mother Nation” becomes both agent and victim within these processes, embodying the tensions between desire, control, and representation.

Rather than proposing a return to past political or artistic models, Balsom reads Cibic’s work as a critical engagement with the legacy of modernism—foregrounding how art, gender, and state power remain entangled, and how their historical contradictions continue to shape contemporary political realities.

Gordana Nikolić’s essay approaches The Pavilion through the lens of spectacle. Writing in relation to Cibic’s earlier projects, she situates the work within a broader inquiry into the visual languages through which political power stages itself.

Her focus rests on the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition—a building that once embodied the ambition of a modern, outward-looking state, yet has largely disappeared from dominant historical narratives. For Nikolić, this absence is telling: it reveals how certain forms of modernism are canonised while others, particularly those emerging from the periphery, are marginalised or forgotten.

Cibic’s reconstruction of the pavilion becomes, in this reading, less an act of recovery than a critical intervention into how history is assembled. Nikolić underscores the artist’s attention to the seductive qualities of modernist aesthetics—their capacity to persuade, to conceal, and to operate as tools of cultural diplomacy. Through comparative references and archival substitutions, Cibic exposes how these visual strategies circulate across different ideological contexts, producing a shared language of power.

At the centre of the installation, the act of building is performed by a group of women, a gesture Nikolić reads as a deliberate disruption of the masculinist frameworks that have historically underpinned both architecture and state formation. The theatrical staging further distances the work from any claim to documentary truth, instead foregrounding the processes through which narratives are constructed, rehearsed, and maintained.

Nikolić ultimately positions The Pavilion as a re-staging of a historical spectacle that reveals its own mechanisms, opening a space to reconsider how national identity is fabricated, remembered, and continuously rewritten.