Tear Down and Rebuild

This essay examines how the filmic artwork of Jasmina Cibic foregrounds site-specificity, orality, and the voice as a means to explore socialist histories and sociopolitical sensibilities across Southeastern Europe. My argument, briefly put, is that Cibic’s films return to socialism’s sites and sounds in an effort to establish vital continuities that harness this contested history as a touchstone for crafting new aesthetic and political possibilities. Eschewing outworn narratives of nostalgia and typologies of the East European artist as an anti-state dissident or provocateur, Cibic’s artwork conveys a subtler dialectical approach that strives to not simply criticize the disaster capitalism and resurgent authoritarianisms of today but proposes alternatives in their place. Analyzing the artist’s films and situating her artwork as one example among many, this article charts a critical turn in contemporary art that aims to cull from socialism’s discarded histories new political horizons and revolutionary futures.

Ameli Klein’s text examines Jasmina Cibic’s work as a sustained investigation into the relationship between art, architecture, and ideology, focusing on how cultural production participates in systems of power. She frames Cibic’s practice as one that reveals the mechanisms through which nations construct and project identity—particularly through architecture, exhibition formats, and performative staging.

Klein emphasises Cibic’s use of historical material and reconstruction, noting how the artist reworks archives, fragments, and absent structures to expose the instability of official narratives. Rather than presenting history as fixed, Cibic’s works demonstrate how it is continuously rewritten through visual and spatial strategies.

A key thread in Klein’s analysis is the role of performance and display: bodies, buildings, and images are choreographed to articulate ideological positions, often masking underlying tensions between political ideals and their realities. Cibic’s work thus operates in a space between fiction and documentation, where constructed narratives reveal the artificiality of national myths.

Ultimately, Klein positions Cibic’s practice as a critical form of “world-making”—one that dissects the visual languages of power while proposing alternative ways of reading history, identity, and cultural representation.

In this extensive interview with architect and writer Miloš Kosec, Jasmina Cibic reflects on the central methodologies and political questions underpinning her artistic practice, focusing on the relationship between architecture, ideology, representation, and the instrumentalisation of culture as a form of soft power. The conversation traces the development of Cibic’s projects from For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Biennale through Spielraum and NADA, situating her work within broader discussions surrounding Yugoslav modernism, transnationalism, feminist critique, and the aesthetics of political authority.

Cibic describes her practice as a form of “a double game,” in which she adopts and reenacts the visual languages of ideology in order to expose the mechanisms through which political systems aestheticise and legitimise themselves. Through highly constructed installations, films, performances, and archival reconstructions, she examines architecture and art not as neutral cultural forms, but as scenographic instruments through which states stage identity, consensus, and authority.

A major focus of the interview is the legacy of Yugoslav architecture and the Non-Aligned Movement. Cibic discusses her interest in the ways architecture functioned as a tool for constructing a new political language during the formation of socialist Yugoslavia and the emergence of the “third path” of non-alignment. Rather than approaching Yugoslav modernism nostalgically, she positions it as a completed ideological project that allows for a forensic reading of the relationship between aesthetics and political power.

The conversation also addresses Cibic’s engagement with overlooked architects and historical figures such as Vinko Glanz, Dragiša Brašovan, and Adolf Loos, as well as her interest in forgotten narratives, secondary actors, and the feminist shadows of dominant architectural histories. She reflects critically on contemporary forms of cultural production, discussing the changing political role of artists, the transformation of institutions, the limits of participatory art, and the increasing precarity of interdisciplinary practice within contemporary capitalism.

Throughout the interview, Cibic emphasises her interest in the “soft power” of art and architecture — the ways cultural forms frame, seduce, and naturalise authority while concealing ideological structures beneath aesthetics, ornament, and spectacle. Her projects, she argues, deliberately resist singular interpretation, functioning instead as complex theatrical environments in which audiences encounter the unstable mechanisms through which political realities are constructed and performed.

iLiana Fokianaki’s essay situates the Cibict’s work within a broader reflection on the shifting conditions of state power and its cultural manifestations.

The essay traces how the artist’s practice critically examines the evolution of political authority, from early 20th-century models of social welfare and soft power to contemporary forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on histories of architecture, culture, and political spectacle, Fokianaki highlights how art and cultural production have long functioned as instruments of persuasion, governance, and ideological framing.

Central to the analysis is Cibic’s film The Gift, which positions culture itself as a political tool—operating simultaneously as a vehicle of power and a site of critique. Through staged narratives, symbolic architectures, and archetypal figures, the work reveals how cultural forms contribute to the construction of national identity, diplomacy, and influence. These elements combine to form what Fokianaki describes as a “visual genealogy” of power, connecting historical strategies of representation to their contemporary expressions.

Fokianaki further interprets Cibic’s work as a practice that exposes the mechanisms through which power operates while maintaining a critical distance from them. In this reading, the artist’s engagement with culture becomes a means of examining how systems of representation are produced, circulated, and sustained.

The essay positions Cibic’s work as a critical lens through which to reconsider the role of culture in shaping political narratives, opening space for reflection on how these structures might be understood—and potentially reimagined.

This essay by Maja and Reuben Fowkes examines Jasmina Cibic’s film practice as a critical exploration of cultural diplomacy and the ideological role of art and architecture in shaping political identities. Focusing on works such as Fruits of Our Land, The Pavilion, the Nada trilogy, and The Gift, the authors show how Cibic constructs scripted debates performed by archetypal figures within historically charged architectural settings—to reveal how culture has been instrumentalised in moments of political crisis and international representation.

The text highlights how Cibic reactivates overlooked histories of modernism and re-stages past cultural conflicts to expose recurring tensions between artistic autonomy and state agendas, particularly around how nations present themselves on the global stage. Across her films, architecture becomes an active agent, while dialogue—assembled from historical speeches and cultural discourse—unfolds as a performative negotiation of ideology, memory, and power. The essay ultimately positions Cibic’s work as a form of critical “Trojan horse,” reintroducing the emancipatory, transnational, and feminist potentials of socialist modernity as an alternative to contemporary capitalist and nationalist frameworks.

Balsom centres her analysis of Cibic’s NADA film trilogy on the recurring figure of “woman-as-nation,” highlighting the contradiction between women’s symbolic role as embodiments of national ideals and their historical exclusion from political power. For Balsom, Cibic exposes this gap between representation and lived reality, using it as a critical entry point into the mechanisms of nation-building.

Balsom also emphasises the role of myth and spectacle: in NADA, cultural narratives are reconfigured to show how art is mobilised, manipulated, and sometimes sacrificed in the service of national agendas. The figure of “Mother Nation” becomes both agent and victim within these processes, embodying the tensions between desire, control, and representation.

Rather than proposing a return to past political or artistic models, Balsom reads Cibic’s work as a critical engagement with the legacy of modernism—foregrounding how art, gender, and state power remain entangled, and how their historical contradictions continue to shape contemporary political realities.

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.

Written as the foreword to Cibic’s monograph Spielraum, Alessandro Vincentelli’s text frames the project as the culmination of the artist’s long-term research into the entanglement of art, architecture, and political power—here extended across three exhibitions staged in distinct national public institutions, each increasingly shaped by the pressures of rising right-wing politics.

Drawing on histories of failed or transformed states, the project examines how visual languages—ranging from monumental architecture to rhetorical performance—have been mobilised to construct and sustain ideological narratives, and what remains once these systems fracture. Through film, installation, and performative re-enactment, Cibic assembles archival fragments, scripted dialogues, and symbolic forms into what Vincentelli describes as a “theatre of voices”: a layered staging of competing perspectives that both exposes and reconstitutes the mechanisms of authority.

Central to this expanded framework is Cibic’s sustained engagement with the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement, not as a fixed historical subject but as a lens through which to interrogate contemporary conditions. Across the trilogy, architecture functions as both stage and protagonist—its lifecycle traced from ideological conception to eventual obsolescence—revealing how built forms once tasked with representing collective identity become unstable carriers of meaning over time.

In bringing these works together, the publication extends beyond historical reflection into a critical reading of the present. It foregrounds the role of “soft power” in shaping public consciousness—where persuasion, aesthetics, and desire replace overt coercion—and situates Cibic’s feminist approach as a counter-reading of nation-building itself. By questioning who speaks, who frames, and who is rendered visible, the project exposes the structures through which cultural authority is produced and maintained.

As Europe once again confronts ideological fragmentation and the resurgence of nationalist narratives, this body of work—and the exhibitions from which it emerges—operates as both analysis and warning. It insists on the cyclical nature of history while opening a speculative space: a Spielraum, or room for manoeuvre, in which alternative forms of collective imagination and political articulation might still be rehearsed.

In her text, Dubravka Sekulić reads Cibic’s film Tear Down and Rebuild through the architectural and political afterlives of socialist Yugoslavia, positioning the Palace of the Federation as both site and agent. Tracing the building’s shifting identities—from a symbol of a collective socialist project to its later reinscription within nationalist narratives—the essay reads architecture as a material record of competing ideologies and their transformations over time.

Sekulić highlights how the building embodies the ambitions and contradictions of Yugoslav self-management, particularly its emphasis on social property, participation, and collective life as alternatives to both state socialism and capitalism. These principles, once embedded in spatial and institutional forms, persist as latent “markers” that unsettle contemporary political frameworks, which seek to overwrite them with new ideological meanings.

Within Cibic’s film, the building emerges as an active interlocutor, amplifying the unresolved debate staged by its protagonists. The essay positions Cibic’s Spielraum as a critical inquiry into the production of space as a political act—revealing how architecture not only reflects but actively shapes social relations, and how its suppressed histories continue to challenge present-day assumptions about ownership, solidarity, and the possibility of alternative futures.

This text by WHW (What, How & for Whom) examines Spielraum as an inquiry into forms of public address and the construction of political voice through art and architecture. Drawing on fragments of speeches, historical documents, and modernist visual language, Cibic assembles a layered narrative that exposes how national myths and ideological discourses are staged, rehearsed, and naturalised.

Through strategies of fragmentation, repetition, and recontextualisation, the work destabilises authoritative speech, revealing its constructed nature and the mechanisms through which collective identities are produced. By juxtaposing ideologically opposed sources—from socialist rhetoric to monarchic and authoritarian discourse—Cibic collapses historical distinctions and challenges the possibility of stable, singular narratives.

The text situates Spielraum within the broader collapse of modernist grand narratives, where competing histories and political claims coexist in tension. It highlights how Cibic’s use of female protagonists, aesthetic excess, and performative ambiguity disrupts dominant modes of representation, opening a space for alternative, non-nationalist forms of belonging. Ultimately, the work is framed as a critical engagement with the enduring structures of modernity—exposing their contradictions while reclaiming a “manoeuvring space” for art beyond ideological instrumentalisation.

Zapperi focuses on Cibic’s use of architecture as an active agent in the construction of power relations and identity, arguing that built space is never neutral but deeply implicated in shaping social and political hierarchies.

Central to her analysis is the figure of the female performer, who appears throughout the trilogy as both subject and symbol, suspended within architectures that stand in for variations of the concept of the nation-state. While women are historically excluded from positions of political authority, Zapperi shows how they are simultaneously instrumentalised as allegorical figures—embodying ideals such as the nation, unity, and continuity. This dual position exposes a fundamental contradiction: the feminine is central to representation, yet marginalised within the structures it represents.

Across the three films of the Spielraum trilogy, Zapperi traces how repetition, fragmentation, and rehearsal destabilise authoritative narratives. Speeches assembled from historical sources never fully resolve, conversations remain disjointed, and actions oscillate between collaboration and conflict. This performative structure reveals the constructed nature of ideological language and the rituals through which national identity is produced and maintained.

Zapperi ultimately frames the Spielraum project as an allegorical system that interrupts linear historical narrative. By foregrounding the tension between history and representation—mapped onto gendered roles—the work exposes the aesthetic and ideological mechanisms underpinning nation-building, suggesting that these structures remain active and contested within contemporary political realities.

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.

Gordana Nikolić’s essay approaches The Pavilion through the lens of spectacle. Writing in relation to Cibic’s earlier projects, she situates the work within a broader inquiry into the visual languages through which political power stages itself.

Her focus rests on the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona World Exposition—a building that once embodied the ambition of a modern, outward-looking state, yet has largely disappeared from dominant historical narratives. For Nikolić, this absence is telling: it reveals how certain forms of modernism are canonised while others, particularly those emerging from the periphery, are marginalised or forgotten.

Cibic’s reconstruction of the pavilion becomes, in this reading, less an act of recovery than a critical intervention into how history is assembled. Nikolić underscores the artist’s attention to the seductive qualities of modernist aesthetics—their capacity to persuade, to conceal, and to operate as tools of cultural diplomacy. Through comparative references and archival substitutions, Cibic exposes how these visual strategies circulate across different ideological contexts, producing a shared language of power.

At the centre of the installation, the act of building is performed by a group of women, a gesture Nikolić reads as a deliberate disruption of the masculinist frameworks that have historically underpinned both architecture and state formation. The theatrical staging further distances the work from any claim to documentary truth, instead foregrounding the processes through which narratives are constructed, rehearsed, and maintained.

Nikolić ultimately positions The Pavilion as a re-staging of a historical spectacle that reveals its own mechanisms, opening a space to reconsider how national identity is fabricated, remembered, and continuously rewritten.