retropolis

Project Retropolis is motivated by a basic question: are better futures anticipated  in the 20th Ct lost? In this particular case, the project probes the time in which designs of a better and more equitable society were simultaneously drafted along with the resistance against conservative forces which tried to divide people over issues of race and nationality. Modern Zagreb started to emerge in the 1930s, the town was projected across the river Sava (today New Zagreb) under then newly established Building Office, the town and the whole country swarmed with the ideas of progress in the places such as Božidar Adžija’s Worker’s chamber and Andrija Štampar’s School of Public Health, the artistic striving of Constructivism and Zenitism along with numerous worker’s and women’s magazines and journals. These were the times when significant manifests for the plausible futures were formulated, the manifests whose ideas are still relevant today: equal rights for all, the right to work, to have a decent dwelling and the right to health care, the right to artistic freedom and the freedom of speech, in short – the right to the city. Important in the present epoch of the Anthropocene, these manifests represent mental, emotional and imaginative repertoirs with the potential to transform the everydayness, whereby design becomes the tool of social progress and arts are ontologically linked to humanistic and natural sciences and technologies.
Project Retropolis in 2019. also comprises the artistic research that tackles socialist aesthetics and ethos as contingent issues of the Croatian society which is additionally burdened by falsified histories and brutalities of the neoliberal and conservative anti-political currents. This artistic study permeates into the roots of that aesthetics which grows deep into the times before WWII, emphasizing the role of women in forming a better society. One segment of the artistic research analyzes progressive magazines and journals, pinpointing "Women's World" (published from 1939 to 1941), while the second segment critically examines the work of the architect Zoja Dumengjic. Dumengjic was an employee at the School for Public Health, where she specialized in the designing health institutions, while she was inspired by the Finnish architect Alvar Alto.