Abstract Persuasion

Emerging from the research cycle Spielraum, the textile installation revisits the ceremonial interiors of the former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade — the political and architectural emblem of socialist Yugoslavia and the site of the inaugural conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. The work reinterprets fragments of a modernist tapestry installed within the Palace, translating its decorative language into a large-scale textile environment that functions simultaneously as architectural intervention, ideological trace, and scenographic device. By displacing this state decorative element into the exhibition space, Cibic transforms a historical symbol of political representation into a contemporary meditation on memory, disappearance, and the unstable afterlife of collective ideals.

Within Spielraum, Cibic examined how a visual language capable of representing a new socio-political horizon is constructed: how architecture, ornament, abstraction, and cultural production were mobilised to give form to Yugoslavia’s project of transnational solidarity, anti-capitalism, self-management, and decolonial internationalism. The Palace of the Federation functioned not simply as a governmental building, but as a diplomatic theatre in which a new geopolitical imagination was staged through interiors, textiles, artworks, choreography, and ceremonial display.

Abstract Persuasion extends this investigation into the afterlife of such political aesthetics. Across its surface, the pattern gradually shifts in density: darkest within the depth of the room and slowly fading towards the windows and light sources. This spatial dissolution evokes the unstable status of political memory itself — the way ideologies, ambitions, and collective imaginaries recede, fragment, or lose coherence over time. Here, light functions both literally and metaphorically: as illumination, exposure, but also erosion. The closer the work moves towards visibility, the more its ideological surface begins to disappear.

In this sense, the installation reflects on what happens to the symbolic and aesthetic infrastructures of political projects once the systems that produced them dissolve. What remains after the collapse of a state built around promises of solidarity and collective futures? What becomes of the unfinished visions embedded within its decorative surfaces, its institutions, and its architectures of representation? The curtain stages these questions not through direct narration, but through gradual disappearance — through a pattern that simultaneously reveals and withdraws itself.

Echoing reflections within Jelena Vesić’s writings on Spielraum, the work approaches political history through a condition akin to social or ideological dementia: a space in which fragments persist without stable continuity, where ceremonial forms survive after the disappearance of the political subject that once animated them. Decorative abstraction becomes a carrier of unresolved memory — an ornamental residue of historical aspirations that can no longer fully articulate themselves, yet refuse to vanish entirely.

Suspended between visibility and erasure, the curtain operates as both archive and membrane: a permeable surface through which forgotten political desires continue to flicker. Rather than presenting Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, Cibic examines its remains critically, asking how the visual languages of collective emancipation continue to haunt contemporary Europe after the disappearance of the futures they once promised.