Building Desire

The installation Building Desire is composed of sketches and maquettes for Cibic’s film The Pavilion. Here, the artist’s search for the lost architecture of the Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, built for the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition, is expanded into a series of intermediary forms that oscillate between drawing, model, and scenographic prop.

Designed by Dragiša Brašovan, the original structure was reportedly awarded the Grand Prix in Barcelona before losing it—through political intrigue—to the German Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Yugoslav pavilion subsequently slipped into obscurity, leaving only fragmentary records and myth.

The watercolours and maquettes that form Cibic’s investigation function as suspended states—neither preparatory nor final—translating absence into form and constituting the material vocabulary of the film.

To bridge missing evidence, Cibic draws on other subjects that were also designed to represent various authoritarian visions of desire in the same period. Though serving different purposes, these structures employ similar formal and visual tactics to choreograph the spectator’s gaze and share the emblematic skin of the Brašovan Pavilion: the striking black-and-white striped façade. Such examples include the house by Adolf Loos for Josephine Baker, and the British naval camouflage developed by Norman Wilkinson.

Cibic merges these references into the final model: a hybrid architecture that combines Brašovan’s design with the striped logic of naval camouflage and incorporates Loos’s interior dispositif—a swimming pool around which spectators were imagined to gather, observing Josephine Baker as she swam, framed as spectacle from an overlooking bar.

By collapsing these typologies—a building representing a nation-state, one staging eroticised desire, and a system of military control—the project frames architecture as the ultimate device for staging power, where spectacle, control, and desire converge across variations of performed patriarchal authority.