Tear Down and Rebuild

The photographs are portraits of the four protagonists of Cibic’s 2015 film Tear Down and Rebuild, filmed in the former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade. The Nation Builder, the Pragmatist, the Conservationist, and the Artist/Architect are presented as allegorical figures, embodying a spectrum of ideological positions that confront the practical and symbolic stakes of cultural production and erasure.

Cibic composed the film’s script exclusively from quotes drawn from political speeches, debates, and proclamations that extract and emphasise the iconoclasm of architecture, art, and monuments.Drawing on sources as disparate as Ronald Reagan’s speech on the Berlin Wall, Charles III’s 1984 address at RIBA, and proclamations by ISIS concerning the destruction of temples, the film mobilises rhetoric that exposes demolition as an instrument in the construction of all new national or ideological narratives.

As the narrative unfolds, the viewer witnesses the protagonists’ final decision to demolish a contested arhitecture—an image assembled in the spectator’s imagination through a collage of references to historically charged sites and monuments. Filmed within the interiors of the former Palace of the Federation, the work uses the building itself as a stage par excellence, where temporal disjunction underscores the persistence of these debates and the enduring paradox of representation through architectural form.

The photographic series isolates and frames each of the four figures within this charged setting, positioning them against the monumental tapestries created for the inaugural conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. In doing so, the images extend the film’s enquiry into the scenography of power, foregrounding the female body as a site through which historically male-dominated ideologies of nation-building are staged and contested. By inhabiting roles from which women have been largely excluded, the protagonists expose the absence of female authorship in the design of political space, holding these inherited narratives in tension with the embodied presence that now reclaims and re-performs them.