Europa

Europa is a series of silkscreen prints developed alongside Jasmina Cibic’s broader investigations into the role of architecture, exhibition design, and cultural spectacle in the construction of national identity throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on the visual languages of parliaments, world expositions, and national pavilions, the series examines how architecture has historically operated in service of ideological cohesion, collective aspiration, and the staging of political power during moments of social and geopolitical friction.

At the centre of the series is the recurring figure of Europa, drawn from her historical representations within romantic nationalist painting and allegorical state imagery. Traditionally depicted as an emblem of civilisation, conquest, or cultural unity, Cibic’s Europa appears suspended in a state of falling, drifting, or precarious balance. Rather than carrying the symbolic attributes historically assigned to her, she holds sculptural maquettes and architectural models—miniaturised projections of the “national” as conceived by modernist architects, planners, and state scenographers.

Across the series, the monumental forms of political architecture are reduced to geometric scaffolds and abstract frameworks, becoming unstable stages upon which the female figure negotiates her relationship to power. In works such as Europa II, the floating body re-enters the architectures that once defined and instrumentalised her, reclaiming space within systems historically structured through patriarchal authority. Elsewhere, the strict verticals and scenographic compositions evoke the visual regimes of parliamentary chambers, exposition halls, and diplomatic interiors in which aesthetics functioned as instruments of ideology and statecraft.

Through the recurring motif of suspension and fall, Europa proposes a feminist re-reading of political allegory. Cibic transforms the act of falling from a symbol of collapse into a gesture of refusal and liberation—a rejection of fixed identity, monumentality, and inherited narratives of belonging. Detached from the ideological architectures that once framed her, Europa becomes both subject and structure: a body in perpetual negotiation with the systems that seek to define it.

Balancing between choreography, architectural drawing, and political symbolism, the series reflects on the role of culture in constructing collective imaginaries while simultaneously exposing the fragility of the ideological frameworks upon which these visions depend.