Under the full moon, the taxi glided along the empty highway and towards the city centre. Unexpectedly, it crossed a bridge over the river, revealing several more bridges. A number of statues stood on pedestals overlooking the riverbank. Behind these pompous figures were buildings of imposing size and elaborate facades. Still, everything looked so familiar that it could have been any other European capital.
These were my first impressions of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, where I was invited to take part in a Summer Lab that would bring together a dozen cultural workers selected by partner organisations from across Europe. The host organisation, Lokomotiva (which turns 20 this year) is a cultural platform with progressive values and an independent spirit. Under the direction of Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski and Ivana Dragsic, the Summer Lab invited us to reflect on and experience the theme of “Public Negative Spaces”. The tone of the event was hinted at with a few key words: ecofeminism, generosity, degrowth, commoning, tenderness, undercommons. I already felt at home, far away from home.
I had a free day to explore the city on my own terms before the Summer Lab kicked off. Armed with a smartphone and sunscreen, I ventured towards the city centre I had glimpsed at the night before. I have to admit that I hadn’t done my homework: I knew little about the city, other than a rough idea of its Ottoman and Yugoslavian heritage. I was born in Turkey, so the town was no stranger to my ancestors. For five centuries, Üsküp was an important centre of Ottoman rule over the Balkans. The imposing Stone Bridge over the Vardar River, the bazaar, the mosques and the baths all bear witness to this period. A familiarity reinforced by the considerable presence of Turkish tourists and businesses in the modern Skopje through which I wandered.
The city centre, which I had glimpsed from the taxi the night before, became increasingly uncanny as I walked the streets in daylight. There weren’t just a few monuments, but dozens of statues crowding every public space in a somewhat haphazard yet remarkably consistent way: warriors, rulers, priests, lions. I suppose it was intended as a literal and rather persistent walk down memory lane, real or imaginary. I sensed that this had something to do with nation-building in a young and small country, and that its ideology had been shaped in space and form over the last 30 years. To my ignorant eyes, Skopje seemed the inevitable consequence of the post-Yugoslav transition.
Unfinished project
Another oddity was the number of cranes and scaffolding perched above building sites all over the city centre. Everything seemed to be under construction, yet none of them were actively being built. Those that were complete looked empty, and some were even falling apart. It all felt like an abandoned film set, half classical re-enactment, half Las Vegas kitsch. But who was I to judge? I already felt like a double coloniser, with Turkish ancestry and Western European residency. I kept my opinions to myself. Still, I couldn’t stop myself when I saw the Memorial House of Mother Teresa (who left Skopje when she was 18). A hideous pastiche of architectural styles. Stone masonry and arches. High-tech glass. Rustic wooden window frames. Jettied extensions. Egyptian-inspired post-modern columns. A steel staircase. Escher-like bird and fish patterns. It doesn’t make any sense, and yet it creates a unique sensory overload that no starchitect has ever achieved. It is easy to ridicule such iconicity, given that it is unironically and reverentially associated with a highly controversial figure. Both saintly and corrupt, the building inadvertently captures the full public perception of the missionary.
Next to the Memorial House stands another unfinished building: this time an imposing Orthodox church, revivalist in form and modern in finish, clad in geometric white limestone tiles and topped with gleaming gold domes. I would later learn that this church had its own share of controversy. When it was first announced in 2009 by then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, it was intended for the city’s main square, not unlike Erdogan’s obsession with building a mosque in Taksim Square, which was one of the many reasons that sparked the Gezi Uprising in Istanbul in 2013. The church was also met with protests: while architecture students and secular citizens (“faggots, communists, atheists” according to the PM) were violently repressed, pressure from the muslim community led to a concession that it would be built alongside the Memorial House instead.
Overwhelmed by this architectural potpourri, it took me some time to realise that something was conspicuously missing from Skopje. The 1963 earthquake had destroyed much of the city and killed over a thousand people. For its reconstruction, a UN-sponsored competition chose in 1965 Kenzo Tange’s master plan, which featured “concrete utopian” examples of Yugoslav brutalism. I was eager to see socialist values cast in concrete or experimented in public space. I half-expected to be immersed in Yugo-nostalgia and saddened by the crumbling legacy of modernism. It was nowhere to be found, except for Janko Konstantinov’s striking masterpiece, the Telecommunications Centre. As I feared, it was badly damaged by fire in 2013 and has still not been restored to its original glory. In a way, its neglect echoes the neglect of all new builds, giving the entire city partial ghost town vibes. How come nothing remained from post-war modernist architecture?
Shock doctrine 2014
Fortunately, my questions were answered on the very first day of the Summer Lab, which allowed me to rise above my tourist gaze and read the city in its political economy and social history. First, the lectures by architect Victor Velkovski and architecture professor Meri Batakoja sketched the conceptual, historical and political contours of what had been unfolding in Skopje. It turns out the city had undergone a complete transformation from 2009 to 2017, led by the conservative and corrupt Gruevski government. The plan, dubbed “Skopje 2014“, was a wholesale spatial re-enclosure that aimed to rewrite history, bolster nationalism, and embezzle public resources at an unimaginable scale. In a breathtakingly comprehensive “Kitsch Tour”, Ivana Dragsic led us through the audacity, insanity and violence of this klepto-revisionist and turbo-capitalist shock doctrine. Suddenly everything I had seen started to make sense.
An estimated price tag of around 600 million euros. Media propaganda to promote the project. Complete lack of public consultation. Repression of dissenting voices. Cutting down trees to discipline urban space. Colourful musical fountains. Construction boom to inflate economic indicators. Historical revivalism cast in plaster. I am familiar with all these tropes, as they are from the same playbook that Erdogan and his allies have been using in Turkey for more than 20 years. But Skopje is the most condensed, complete and excessive spatial expression of this ruthless and unjust urban transmogrification that I have yet seen. Perhaps it is apt to call it peak-populist total-art.
In her lecture, Batakoja remarked that the problem with the reconstruction of Skopje in 1963 was that “it was not built-thought, but built-form devoid of meaning”. In stark contrast, Skopje 2014 is completely wrapped in ideology, a brutal attempt to crystallise histories, identities and power relations. It centres a Slavic/European, Ancient/Greek and Orthodox/Christian self while simultaneously erasing Ottoman/Muslim, socialist/secular and foreign/migrant others from the public sphere. Skopje 2014’s blitzkrieg may not be as ambitious as Albert Speer’s plans for the Nazi capital Germania, but it fits perfectly the pattern of a neoliberal shock therapy as described by Naomi Klein: it is deliberately fast, chaotic and all-encompassing, designed to be disorienting, without a broad and strong opposition (let alone participation) to even taking shape.
In some ways, Skopje 2014 did not last very long. In the following two years, the government was brought down after the wiretapping scandal that led to the Colourful Revolution. Throwing paint-bombs to the white-washed neoclassical facades became the iconic act of protest and defiance. Gruevski ended up fleeing the country (and by extension justice), seeking political asylum in Orbán’s Hungary. At the same time, nothing has fundamentally changed ever since. There have been no substantial attempts to revert the damage or to transform the half-finished buildings according to social needs. As a result, the cityscape is still stuck in limbo. Neither the fantasy past revived nor a fictitious future envisioned, the city is full of emptiness; it is filled with negative spaces that are depleted of vitality, both in cultural and natural terms.
Resistance and reclaiming
What is to be done with this Dyskopia? How can cultural practitioners reclaim and repurpose these empty concrete shells devoid of meaning and life? These were the questions that confronted us at the Summer Lab. And then some: we noticed how such boondoggles (big, unnecessary and imposed projects) almost always leave irreversible scars, while successful social resistance that effectively prevents these projects are often harder to inscribe in memory and in space. Must monumentality be the go-to way to remember? Can’t we cultivate the values and practices of ecofeminism, generosity, degrowth, commoning, tenderness and undercommons, precisely to valorise and revitalise what capital cannot?
One such attempt was a project space for contemporary performing arts, culture and civil society, founded by none other than Lokomotiva. Founded in 1937, Kino Kultura was one of the first cinemas in Skopje, but the building had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1990s. The space was reopened in 2015, when Lokomotiva and the Theatre of Cvetko the Navigator convinced the former owners and the municipality to support them in reactivating parts of the building. It proposed new ways to practise public governance, collective stewardship, civic participation and co-programming. Unfortunately, after five successful years, the space was shut down in 2020 when the local and national subsidies were withdrawn. The building, adjacent to both the unfinished church and the National Assembly, remains empty to this day. While experiences and connections have been carried beyond its walls, it is worth wondering how such initiatives can be made more resilient and long-lasting.
Perhaps inspiration lies elsewhere, outside the city itself. Nature is said to have a horror vacui, a “fear of emptiness”. It spreads life to every nook and cranny. It reclaims dead space and fills it with aliveness. From Fordlândia in the Amazon to Chernobyl in Ukraine, from nuclear test sites in Pacific atolls to the development zone earmarked for an airport project in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, biodiversity takes over wherever civilisation is forced to retreat. From the viewpoint of the living world, nature is the positive to the urban negative space. On the second day of the Summer Lab, we were invited to shift our perspective in that direction: we sharpened our senses for the city’s avian inhabitants with the ornithological tour by Danka Uzunova, and celebrated the partial transformation of an otherwise dull urban park into an oasis with the Bostanie community garden. Finally, comrades from Berlin told us the awe-inspiring story of Floating University, hinting at how a forgotten piece of infrastructure hidden in plain sight can be transformed into a vibrant autonomous organism in the caring hands of a skillful community.
Probably, the best antidote to the dystopian ruination of Skopje was our excursion to the anti-fascist memorial in Pelince, near the Serbian border. Designed by architect Georgi Konstantinovski, it commemorates the founding of the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM), the underground resistance movement that established the post-war republic. Surrounded by woods, bordering the Pchinja River and covered by a magnificent mosaic façade, the appropriately unostentatious memorial houses a reconstruction of the room where the ASNOM held its first clandestine meeting. In a simple yet moving gesture it inscribes memory without force-feeding a distorted version of history, inviting visitors to slow down and reflect. We bathed in the river and washed the dirt of Dyskopia from our bodies. We left replenished, and full of determination.
Summerlab Observants
wrote this text on the occasion of the 2023 ACT Summerlab in Skopje. As independent observant he was invited to participate in the Summerlab, and asked to create a critical reflection, based on the Summerlab’s programme, participating artists and its social and ecological context. The Summerlab programme was organized by ACT-partner Lokomotiva and can be found here.
Selçuk Balamir is a designer, educator and organiser working on postcapitalist politics, commoning practices and climate justice campaigns. He co-developed creative-strategic frameworks for disobedient actions (Climate Games, Shell Must Fall) and he co-initiated social housing cooperatives (NieuwLand, de Nieuwe Meent). His PhD in Cultural Analysis is on postcapitalist design. He was the 2022 Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, and currently teaches New Earth at Willem de Kooning Academy.