Soft Power

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.

Jelena Vesić’s text reads the artist’s project Spielraum through the lens of “lost futures,” examining how Cibic reconstructs the twentieth century’s belief in progress as a fragmented archive of promises that no longer hold. Drawing on political speeches, architectural symbolism, and modernist rhetoric, Cibic’s work stages a performative repetition of historical narratives in which the future once functioned as a central ideological horizon.

Vesić positions the project between two key contemporary conditions: the collapse of utopian futurity and the rise of a culture of memory, in which history is replaced by fragmented, individualised recollections. Within this context, Cibic’s installations operate as a “theatre of voices,” where language becomes automated, belief erodes, and political rhetoric returns as echo rather than conviction.

The essay ultimately frames Spielraum as a critical meditation on forgetting and repetition—suggesting that today’s saturation with memory produces a form of collective amnesia. In this unstable space between history and memory, past and future, Cibic’s work opens a speculative field in which modernity persists not as a fixed narrative, but as a shifting potential.

Una Popović’s curatorial introduction frames Tear Down and Rebuild, the final chapter of Spielraum, as both culmination and synthesis—bringing together the project’s investigation into architecture, rhetoric, and ideology as instruments of political representation. Set within the former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade, Cibic’s eponymous film positions the building not only as a historical site but as an active, symbolic stage for negotiating past and present political narratives.

Popović highlights the broader exhibition as a spatial collage of reconstructed forms, archival references, and performative acts, in which fragments of visual and rhetorical language are reassembled into new constellations of meaning. She reads Cibic’s project as an interrogation of what remains of ideological structures once their political context dissolves, proposing architecture and language alike as mutable signifiers—capable of being reactivated, contested, and reimagined within new historical conditions.

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.