Orbits of Belief

In her text, Katia Baudin situates Cibic’s Gesamtkunstwerk The Spirit of Our Needs and the NADA film trilogy within the historical and architectural context of the Mies van der Rohe villas in Krefeld, framing the exhibition as a site-responsive inquiry into the entanglement of modernism, cultural production, and power.

She highlights Cibic’s research-driven, interdisciplinary approach, showing how the artist reactivates modernist architecture—particularly its function within world exhibitions and trade fairs—as a vehicle of national representation and soft power. The villas themselves emerge as spaces shaped by cultural capital, private wealth, and patriarchal structures, which Cibic critically reworks through installation and film.

Baudin emphasises how the work exposes the alignment of aesthetics with systems of authority and identity formation, using immersive environments and allegorical strategies to reveal the tension between artistic autonomy and ideological function. Rather than treating modernism as a neutral legacy, she frames Cibic’s project as a re-engagement with its contradictions, underscoring the continued political charge of cultural production within contemporary institutional contexts.

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.