The Architect

The Architect is a series of collages developed within the Spielraum project, in which Jasmina Cibic brings into relation the female body, architectural form, and the construction of political language.

Drawing on archival plans and design proposals for the redesign of Belgrade for the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, the works extract and reconfigure architectural fragments as a system of signs. These elements—originally conceived to articulate a new geopolitical formation—are repositioned alongside a female figure whose body performs a sequence of gestures that operate as an emergent sign language. As in the broader Spielraum project, architecture here is not treated as a passive backdrop but as an active agent in the production of identity, shaping relations between bodies, power, and space .

At the centre of the work lies a feminist revisitation of the theatres of power: while women have historically been excluded from the political structures that architecture serves, they have simultaneously been deployed as its symbolic foundation—as allegories of origin, unity, and nationhood. The figure in The Architect occupies this contradiction. She is neither merely represented nor fully autonomous; instead, she operates within and against the structures that frame her, exposing how the image of the feminine is instrumentalised in the staging of political order.

Through collage, the body and the architectural fragment are brought into a state of mutual construction. The gestures she performs do not illustrate a pre-existing vocabulary but attempt to produce one—an unstable, speculative grammar that reflects the desire for a new political language aligned with the Non-Aligned Movement’s project of articulating a position beyond colonial and Cold War binaries. Yet this language remains unresolved, caught between emancipation and inscription, between the possibility of self-definition and the persistence of imposed form.

Cut into these constructed surfaces are fragments of landscape imagery drawn from the archives of Yugoslavia’s official state photographers. Originally produced to frame diplomatic encounters and stage political territory, these landscapes appear here as residual strata—visible through incisions in the architectural field—reintroducing the terrain that underpinned the projection of political identity. As in the wider Spielraum project, the landscape shifts from backdrop to apparatus, revealing how political space is both constructed and performed.

In The Architect, body, landscape, and architecture are bound within a single representational system, each shaping and constraining the other. The work asks how a new language of belonging might be formed when its very syntax—its gestures, its forms, its symbols—remains entangled in the gendered and ideological structures it seeks to depart from.