MAKING RUINS Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber

Tripwire Pamphlet # 6Oakland: 2019

MAKING RUINS Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber

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TRIPWIRE

a journal of poetics

editor: David Buuck

assistant editor: Kate Robinson

editorial assistant: Lara Durback

minister of information: Zoe Tuck

co-founding editor: Yedda Morrison

design and layout: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber

essay: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber

cover image: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber would like to thank Dr. Suzana Milevska, Sašo Stanojkovik and Dr. Jeff Derksen for generously sharing their knowledge. Thanks to Pantea Haghighi, Noah Friebel, Russna Somal and Andrew Curtis.

An earlier version of this essay was a contribution to the book Memory, edited by Philippe Tortell, Mark Turin and Margot Young, published by the Peter Wall Institute, distributed by UBC press, Vancouver 2018.

Published on the occasion of the exhib-tion Making Ruins by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber at Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC November 15, 2019 - January 18, 2020. www.republicgallery.com

all rights convert to contributors upon publication

ISSN: 1099-2170

tripwirejournal.com

Oakland : 2019

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reworked to project a vastly different histor-ical narrative than the one it originally repre-sented. What happens, then, to architecture’s capacity to constitute a collective memory when layers of a newly con-structed Grand History enclose and cover up the original material body of a built structure? Once obscured, how are we to reactivate archi-tecture’s capacity to hold lived history?

These questions were sparked by the unusual urban situation of Skopje, the capital city of what was then the

Architecture can carry meaning, hold memo-ries, and make history. This capacity can be expressed on a small scale, such as in the rep-resentation of buildings on a coin or a banknote. It can also occur on grander scales that in-fluence the construction and preservation of par-ticular urban histories. Such histories live most tangibly at the scale of the city, but they are also expressed at a national level, where architecture can be deployed to re-inforce or to challenge collective social memory. While architecture holds intrinsic meanings and memory, it can also be

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are intrinsically tied to questions of social and collective memory. To understand the cur-rent context, one must understand the mod-ern history of Skopje. On July 26, 1963, a massive earthquake hit the city, resulting in the loss of close to one thousand lives and 120,000 homes. About two-thirds of the city’s built space collapsed in ruins. Despite ongoing geopolitical tensions at the height of the Cold War, the United Nations launched an unprec-edented internation-al act of solidarity to provide immediate help, shelter, and resources

Republic of Macedonia. Through the “Skopje 2014” program, the federal government forcefully reshaped this modernist city into a historical city with ideals rooted in antiquity. This refabrication was driven by the construc-tion of monuments and zombie-like buildings aimed at erasing all trac-es of the city’s socialist history.

A sketch of the last five decades of Skopje’s history reveals what was at stake for the city then and why questions about the instrumen-tal use of architecture 36

In February 1965, the United Nations Special Fund and the Yugoslav government, in coop-eration with the In-ternational Union of Architects, invited four Yugoslavian and four in-ternational firms to par-ticipate in the “Skopje City Center Master Plan” competition. The winning prize for the “Open City of Skopje” was split sixty -forty be-tween the team of Jap-anese architect Kenzo Tange and Zagreb-based firm Mišcevic and Wen-zler. The Skopje Insti-tute for Town Planning and Architecture sub-sequently joined this unique international

for the city, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. At a time when all con-tact points between East and West Berlin were closed, Skopje was declared an open city. Yugoslavia’s “president for life,” Josip Broz Tito, welcomed the support of the United Nations and renamed Skopje the “city of solidarity,” a symbol of international assis-tance that would build bridges across the bor-ders of nation states and the boundaries of ideo-logical systems. Within a year, these interna-tional efforts gave rise to a plan to construct a completely new city.

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followers understood civic architecture as a flexible bridge between rapid technological de-velopment and the so-cial needs of humanity. Although Tange’s mas-ter plan for Skope was never realized in its en-tirety, some of the build-ings such as his train station and housing blocks of the City Wall (1966, 1965–68) and Janko Konstantinov’s Post and Telecom-munications Building (1970–86) were com-pleted, adding exam-ples of international modernism and local brutalism to Skopje’s post-earthquake Open City Center. Skopje,

collaboration, which was dominated by Tange’s dynamic vision but included iconic build-ings by the Macedonian architect Janko Konstantinov. At that point, Tange was inter-nationally renowned for his Hiroshima Peace Center, built in 1955, and for his experimental Tokyo Bay plan, pro-posed in 1960, which incorporated ideas of or-ganic biological growth and a belief in technolog-ical progress into archi-tectural design. These ideas would eventually grow into the Metabolist Movement, within which Tange emerged as a key figure. He and his 38

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had to come to terms with its new identity as a democratic state. The country was admitted to the United Nations in 1993 under the pro-visional description of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Greece has a province named Macedonia within its own territo-ry and the conflict over the use of the name Macedonia led to the renaming of Macedonia as the Republic of North Macedonia in February 2019. This struggle for naming is symptomatic of the recent wave of emerging nationalism within the European Union. Similar to other

though incomplete in its modernist grand vision and in the master plan, was a test case of the internationalism of modernism, ranging across different re-gional contexts, local spatial knowledges, and lingering national discourses. In the three decades since elements of Tange’s plan were implemented, geopo-litical shifts, the emer-gence of the European Union, and localized nationalistic struggles have put pressure on Macedonia and Skopje. Since its declaration of independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, Macedonia has 40

Union and create a post-Yugoslavian na-tional identity. It was in this context that the “Skopje 2014” pro-gram was launched in 2010. Seen in this light, “Skopje 2014” can be understood as a constructed portrayal of a false Macedonian history, pointedly and intentionally obfuscat-ing traces of the coun-try’s collective socialist past in favour of a hero narrative rooted in the era of Alexander the Great, who ruled the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon in the third century BC. This na-tionalist government lasted until May 2017,

states that have recent-ly emerged from the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union, Macedonia faces a surge in ethni-cally based nationalisms and religious identities. While Skopje was never subjected to a civil war on its territory (unlike cities such as Sarajevo), the force of emergent nationalisms has never-theless shaped its city spaces. In an unexpected turn towards Western neoliberal democracy, Macedonia elected a conservative nationalist government in 2006. This nationalistic po-litical shift was under-pinned by aspirations to join the European

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decolonization. Impor-tantly, also lost in the construction of a new national and urban nar-rative is the unique mo-ment of local modernity and international sol-idarity represented by Tange’s post-earthquake city design and build-ings. Tange’s modernist architecture, and the concrete brutalist build-ings of his Yugoslav contemporary Janko Konstantinov, haven’t simply been destroyed, erased, or replaced. In a strange program of reverse facadism – a practice that preserves only the facade of a historical building – the exteriors of these

when a new government took power in Skopje and turned towards a more considerate progressive politics, getting rid of the damages of false his-torizations.

In 2016, during our visit, the central city square was still dominated by newly created monu-ments to Alexander the Great, scaled to over-shadow those structures that are reminders of Macedonia’s recent so-cialist past and Yugosla-via’s historical position in the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries – a movement that stressed independence and 42

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leaving no trace or ma-terial rubble to be com-memorated. How are we to understand the con-flict and contradictions produced when the existing cultural mem-ory of a city is covered over by a false narra-tive constructed from an imagined antiquity? Can art enable citizens to remember another past, to recall the body of architecture evapo-rated or absorbed into those freshly fabricated “historical” buildings? Indeed, the “Skopje 2014” program has been met with significant re-sistance. Citizens, archi-tects, artists, activists, and intellectuals have

historically significant modernist and brutalist masterpieces have been disguised by a thick layer of baroque architectural elements and columns manufactured from polystyrene foam and cheap plastic. Although these architectural stage props are meant to represent antiquity, they are fabricated with contemporary materials that ironically deprive the architecture of its capacity to be a carrier of authentic memory, even as that architec-ture proclaims histori-cal remembrance. This destructive make-over process is a form of im-posed cultural amnesia, 44

to show the corpses of this architecture as it was being hidden un-der foamy camouflage. Making Ruins emerges out of the moment of local and international protests that questioned the thick layer of ficti-tious history placed on top of Skopje’s unique modernist buildings. The artistic intervention reworks the still-visible architectural remains into ruins to interrupt the linearity of false his-torization, preserving memories of the partic-ular moment of inter-national solidarity and claiming an alternative future for Skopje.

criticized the program in local and international media and have initiated a “colourful revolution” in which activists shoot paint balls or throw paint bombs at the mon-uments and buildings central to the new con-structed narrative of Macedonian history.

In November 2016, we realized Making Ruins as part of the exhi-bition What is left? at MuseumsQuartier Vienna. The spatial installation reworks photographs of both Skopje and of the last remains of Tange’s and Konstantinov’s buildings

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Biography:

Vancouver- and Vienna based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber collaborate on proj-ects addressing the politics of how cities, ar-chitecture and urban territories are made into images. Dealing with architecture as a frame for spatial meaning, their ongoing research includes projects such as “Fleeting Territories”, “Educational Modernism,” and “Housing the Social.” In 2004 they founded the cultural re-search collective Urban Subjects with Canadian writer Jeff Derksen. Sabine Bitter is Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

www.lot.at

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Photocredits:

Colour photographs in white frames by Sabine Bitter during her research in Skopje 2016.

Cover: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Panel # 6, 45 1/2 x 97”, copyprint

Page 5: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Making Ruins #1, city-view of Skopje, colour photo-graph, framed 12 x 15”

Page 6, 17, 21, 22: exhibition view of Making Ru-ins at MuseumsQuartier Vienna. Photo: Suchat Wannaset, 2016

Page 9, 11, 15: exhibition view of Making Ruins at Carinthian Museum of Modern Art 2018

Page 10: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Panel # 2, 49 x 64”, copyprint

Page 12: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Panel # 4, 35 x 85 1/2”, copyprint

Page 19: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Panel # 5, 45 x 97”, copyprint

Page 20: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Panel # 3, 45 3/4 x 86”, copyprint

Page 33: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Making Ruins # 2, traces of the “Colorful Revolution”, Skopje, 2016 colour photograph, framed 12 x 15”

Page 34: exhibition view of Making Ruins at MuseumsQuartier Vienna. Photo Oliver Otten-schläger, 2016

Page 39: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Making Ruins # 4, Team of Kenzo Tange, Skopje, 1967/2016, colour photograph, framed 12 x 15”

Page 43: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Making Ruins # 3, Kenzo Tange’s masterplan for Skopje, 1967/2016 colour photograph, framed 12 x 15”

Page 46,47: exhibition view of Making Ruins at Republic Gallery, Vancouver, 2019.

Tripwire pamphleT # 6Oakland: 2019