Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act

Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act, Armin Linke & Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, JRP|Ringier, 2012 (132 pp, €50)

Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act is a collaborative project between photographer Armin Linke and architect Srdjan Jovanovic´ Weiss. They have worked together since 2009 to visit selected locations of former Yugoslav socialist architecture in order to document the condition they are in today. The Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia vanished during the early 1990s and was balkanized into a number of emerging democracies and former socialist states. Each of these new states inherited monuments, buildings, landscapes and infrastructure which were specifically constructed for former socialist conditions and representations. After Yugoslavia vanished, most of the inherited architecture was left vacant and in a state of limbo between repurpose and reuse or simply continuing as a modern archaeological ruin. By creating documentation, The Vanishing Act captures the indecision facing five particular emerging democracies today: Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. It also records the distinct effects their irresolution creates in terms of the spatial experience as well as the fate of former Yugoslav ideological architecture.

Co-author Srdjan Jovanovic´ Weiss states: "The Vanishing Act is not solely disappearance of socialist matter. Like a magic trick, the vanishing act constitutes the reappearance of the disappeared in other forms and other locations. For traditional architecture, which is materially and spatially bound to its own body and loci, vanishing is a particular and destructive process of removal and dismantling. However, for architecture tailored to socialism, the disappearance of the very ideology that constructed it can call into question the traditional relationship between body, form, and social and political intentions in architecture. Instead of claiming that the vanishing of an idea causes the non-negotiable material appearance of neglect of the past, we could pro-pose that the vanishing act of socialism leaves this ideology safe in the past. Thus, the vanishing act pushes the remaining socialist architecture as an act towards the future. What has vanished always reappears in an unexpected form."