Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research
In Croatian only.
Read more...Urbanologies comprise AIIR activities which tackle urban research, various forms of urbanity and urbanism, spatial theories as well as urban anthropology and sociology, and visual anhropology.
Read more...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.
Read more...With the project "Steps of the City" a new phase in our urbanological studies has commenced. By introducing the theoretical intersection of double onthology of the relationship between the cinematic and the city, last year we produced the first (small, but still first) theoretical reader in Croatian within that field. Through the project “Steps of the City: NEW NEW ZAGREB” our focus remains on the City of Vukovar Street. We will compare, to use Lefebvre's terms, “lived experience” with only partially carried out concept of the centre of Zagreb. Simultaneously, we are expanding the focus to the residential part of the city, which is still, 65 years after its emergence, called New Zagreb, as well as to the negative consequence of the modernist zoning – today still isolated (post)industrial zone Žitnjak in whose heart we find the Arts organization Ateliers Žitnjak. What has happened with the art community since the period of socialist modernism, starting from the artists' ateliers in the centre of the city to their planning in new parts of the city during the 1950s and 1960s, to nowadays marginalization of the artistic community in the industrial zone, is one of the main questions that the project tackles, while the heritage protection is demanded for the urban concept of City of Vukovar Street and New Zagreb.
Read more...Illuminovision is a project inspired by Šibenik, one of the first cities in the world where electrical energy power supply was established. This almost anegdotal fact is virtually non-existent in the dominant narrative of the city, which is now representing itself exclusively as a city of medieval heritage, neglecting the recent history of its modernization. The intention of Illuminovision is to incite innovative processes of articulation of light in public space via the format of the festival but also via the interdisciplinary collaboration of various professions which tackle our relation to the environment, in this case environment being the unique city of Šibenik.
Read more...Today's Avenue of Vukovar City is a metaphorical and physical polygon of socialist modernism where rebuilding of Zagreb after WWII began. In 1957. godine, then Avenue of the Proletarian Brigades was the locus of making propaganda films about the modern city in making.
Read more...In 2012., in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Zagreb, ArchitekturZentrum Wien and Memorial Site JUSP-Jasenovac, and in co-curatorial interpretation by Ivan Ristić and Sonja Leboš and with generous and kind support by Ksenija Bogdanovic who enabled Bogdan's personal library to be included, the exhibition "Bogdan Bogdanovic-the Doomed Architect", the first post mortem exhibition in Croatia about the work of the great architect of Yugoslav protomodernism, who granted this republic-to-be with the legacy of an array of monuments and memorial sites, took place in the Glypthoteque of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Science in Zagreb.
Read more...Mnemosyne is a project that commenced in 2009, as a concept of the cultural and urban anthropologist, as well as researcher, Sonja Leboš. During 2010, with the support of the Eu Commision (EU for Citizens - Active European Remembrance), the project "Mnemosyne. Theatre of Memories-Phase 1: Getting Together" comprised a wide scope of activites Belgrade, Zagreb and Prague. The catalog of the project you can find here, and here you can listen the music interpretation by Manja Ristić. In cooperation with the organization of multimedia artists Auropolis and with extraordinary engagement by Manja Ristić and the support of the City of Belgrade and Center for Cultural Decontamination, two theatre performances "Theater of memories" took place in the theater "Vuk Karadžić" and in the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade.
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