Soft Power / Power Verticals

The curtain draws into its decorative language a collection of ornamental floor and interior patterns sourced from the foyers of former Yugoslav hotels built along the Adriatic coast during the 1960s and 1970s. Conceived at a moment when Yugoslavia was repositioning tourism as a key economic and diplomatic strategy, these modernist resorts were designed to attract an increasingly affluent international clientele, particularly visitors from Western Europe and Germany. Their interiors therefore adopted the visual language of international modernism, while simultaneously functioning as representational spaces through which the state projected an image of openness, prosperity, and cosmopolitanism.

Many of these hotels and civic commissions emerged within what architectural historians have described as Yugoslavia’s “spaces of representation” — sites where architecture became a testing ground for the ideological ambitions of socialist modernisation and non-aligned internationalism. The foyers, murals, carpets, and decorative surfaces of these buildings were frequently developed in collaboration with artists and designers whose practices circulated between Yugoslavia and Western Europe, producing interiors that negotiated between local identity and the aesthetics of transnational modernity.

Into these appropriated decorative systems, Cibic inserts fragments of decomposed political speech addressed to architects, planners, and builders of the state. Drawn from inaugurational rhetoric, ideological declarations, and public speeches concerning architecture and nation-building, the textual interventions expose the performative relationship between decoration, political language, and soft power. The curtain thus operates simultaneously as ornament, stage set, and ideological surface — collapsing the languages of tourism, diplomacy, and statecraft into a single theatrical environment.

At the same time, the work activates a lingering question surrounding the afterlife of former Yugoslav modernism within contemporary cultural production: the persistent Western fascination with the region as a site of geopolitical exoticism, ideological ruin, and trauma tourism. By reanimating these decorative fragments outside their original contexts, Cibic does not simply recuperate the aesthetics of socialist modernity, but interrogates the systems of desire, projection, and historical consumption through which they continue to circulate today.