Spielraum

Spielraum is a publication accompanying Jasmina Cibic’s trilogy of films and exhibitions—The Nation Loves It, Give Expression to Common Desires, and Tear Down and Rebuild—which examines the relationship between art, architecture, and political ideology.

Structured across three chapters—genesis, life, and death—the book traces how architecture functions as a stage for nation-building, from its conception and symbolic construction to its use and eventual obsolescence. Drawing on the historical context of post-war Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement, Cibic explores how modernist aesthetics were mobilised to project political identity and ideological ambition.

Through essays by Alessandro Vincentelli, Giovanna Zapperi, Jelena Vesić, Anna Gritz, Róna Kopeczky, Una Popović, Dubravka Sekulić, and What, How & for Whom (WHW), the publication frames the project as a feminist and critical analysis of soft power—examining how visual language, rhetoric, and cultural production are instrumentalised by the state.

Combining film stills, installation views, scripts, and archival documents, Spielraum reveals how political narratives are constructed through repetition, performance, and aesthetic strategies. It foregrounds the instability of these narratives, showing how the same visual and rhetorical forms recur across different ideological systems.

Rather than presenting a fixed history, the book exposes nation-building as a process of continuous staging and re-staging—where meaning is produced through shifting alignments between architecture, language, and power.