Public Art Project and Conference: Kale – Cultural Fortress

Drawing attention to the undiscovered values ​​contained in the large and almost completely neglected expanse, which hovers over the rooftops and the panorama of Skopje, the Museum of Contemporary Art wants to warn of the dangers from which the Kale Hill area could very quickly turn into another victim of aggressive turbo-capitalism, but also to outline ideas and directions for the arrangement of this extremely valuable public space in the name of the general interest of the citizens of Skopje.

“Kale, Cultural Fortress” deals with the architectural-urban aspects of the central Skopje hill in the stretch from the fortress to the French cemetery. In the current situation, the hill is marked by two large cultural buildings: the Medieval Fortress and the Museum of Contemporary Art. But despite their potential for a complex cultural, educational, touristic, and recreational offer, the Kale and these buildings exist in mutually isolated spaces, with large areas of wild and inaccessible green space, inadequate temporary buildings, and in a world without properly urbanized content. The Kale, cultural fortress project is aimed at the search for conceptual solutions that would lay the foundations for the transformation of Kale into a gravitationally strong cultural center.

The project consists of:

> conference > Friday, 07.10. 2016, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.;

> exhibition of master’s and undergraduate theses on this topic defended at Arch. Faculty in Skopje > 07. – 17. 10. 2016;

> international competition for young architects for conceptual solutions on this topic > November 2016 – February 2017

The second project dedicated to Kale in Skopje is entitled “Sculptural” and includes eight sculptural and site-specific installations in the surroundings of the Museum of Contemporary Art. As the title suggests, the exhibition starts from the sculptural medium and the exploration of its possibilities for interaction and for shaping the open public space. In a sense, the project is a reminder of the successful and popular “Interventions in Space” that were organized several times at MSU in the mid-1980s under the leadership of Simon Shemov and Kocho Fidanovski. The goal of “Sculptural” is to initiate the use in the future as a regular manifestation or in the form of individual projects of the museum park and the wider area of ​​Kaleto for ephemeral sculptural, architectural or multimedia projects.

The following artists are represented at the exhibition: Petar Hadji Boshkov; Simon Shemov; Jovan Shumkovski; Nada Prlja, arch. Daniel Serafimovski; arch. Dejan Ivanovski; Igor Tosevski and the OPA couple, ie Denis Saraginovski and Slobodanka Stevchevska.

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PROGRAM of the conference:

October 7, 2016

10.30 – 10.35 Laze Tripkov, director, NU Museum of Contemporary Art; (greeting address)

10.35 – 11.00 Zoran Petrovski, NU Museum of Contemporary Art;

“Kale, a Cultural Fortress”

11.00 – 11.30 Vlatko P. Korobar, Faculty of Architecture – Skopje, UKIM;

“Kale – City Between Cities”

(the Kale location and its space in the plan documentation of the city of Skopje; place, role and meaning)

11.30 – 11.45 Damjan Tsingarski, architect, employee of Centar Municipality;

“Local self-government and the area of ​​Kale” (current municipal policies for the Kaleto area)

11.45 – 12.00 Aljosha Shopar, architect, employee of the City of Skopje;

“The Castle of the City” (current city policies for the Kaleto area)

12.00 – 12.15 coffee break / refreshments

12.15 – 12.45 Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Faculty of Architecture – Skopje, UKIM;

“On the Value of the MoCA Facility and its Surroundings”

The Museum of Contemporary Art is one of the symbols of world solidarity towards the destroyed Skopje – because of the collection of donated works of art from over 40 countries in the world, but also because of the construction of a building that would house them, again in the spirit of international solidarity.

The position of the “temple of art” located on a kind of Acropolis high above the city, and in close proximity to the medieval fortress, testifies to its role as a status object, which the museums of contemporary art acquired in the second half of the 20th century. The position of an isolated object located in a wider green space follows/represents continuity with the postulates of the Modern on the one hand, and on the other it opens space and points to the possibility of animating the environment in a park of modern and contemporary sculpture. Today, the building is still flexible enough to accommodate different settings, and the environment is still insufficiently articulated to respond to the original idea. Hence the need for its revitalization and putting it into operation as a museum, but also for a wider cultural and artistic entity.

12.45 – 13.15 Jovan Ivanovski, Faculty of Architecture – Skopje, UKIM, followed by short presentations of the participants in the research;

“Design Strategies for the Kale Hill”

During the almost 70 years of educational and research activity of the Faculty of Architecture in Skopje, several generations of teachers from different departments and on several occasions have been engaged in studying the space of the Skopje Kale. At the invitation and in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art from Skopje, the last research projects for this space were carried out within the framework of the topic entitled “Architectural redesign of objects, places and spaces”, and as the final task of the students from the second cycle of studies in the academic 2013/14 and 2014/15. The current state of the Kaleto space, which is neither connected nor functional and in which the relations between the natural landscape, architecture and public space are not harmonized, was an incentive for its new reading, interpretation and shaping. The main goal of this research through design was to test a whole spectrum of architectural strategies (from pragmatic to radical), which would be aimed at finding new contents and forms in which the existing elements of the space would be protected (conserved) at the same time. ) and developed (changed). A broader discussion and interpretation of the obtained results is intended to be a starting point for a conversation regarding the possible futures of this valuable urban space.

13.15 – 13.30 coffee break / refreshments

13.30 – 14.00 Maroje Mrduljash, architect, editor of the architecture and culture magazine – ORIS, Zagreb, Croatia;

“About Cultural Institutions and Their Contexts in Croatia”

From the second half of the 20th century until today, cultural buildings in Croatia and especially museums are often built as part of the strategy of urban development and revitalization. But the views on their participation in urban life are changing. In the period of modernization, the symbolic-cultural meaning of the museums followed the ambitions of the architecture, and the realization of the museums often meant the “final word” or “completion” of the urban physiognomy. Those actions culminating in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb did not raise the question of the elitist character of exhibition institutions. With the transition to the post-industrial phase, which in Croatia coincides with the post-socialist period, new practices of urban revitalization appear aimed at recycling abandoned, discarded or unfinished complexes. Those practices are regularly followed by a new attitude towards the character of institutions that are designed structurally and architecturally as more inclusive systems. The lecture on this topic has no ambition to build a synthesis, but offers a synoptic overview of the modern and contemporary institution and its contexts.

14.00 – 14.30 Luchezar Bojadziev, visual artist who works with personal interpretations of social processes, with urban visuality and interventions in public space, and expresses himself through installations, photographs, objects, drawings, video and performative lectures; Sofia, R. Bulgaria;

“Places of Wisdom”

The theory says that in a city (country, culture, etc.) there are places of shared memory. These can be museums, monuments, squares, temples, holy places, places of tragic events and what not. These sites may be marked or unmarked, marked by folklore or history; with the help of words, fairy tales or objects: with the help of documentation of artistic events, etc. – it depends on the culture, city and communities. But even though we share places, the memory of those “places” does not necessarily mean that they are shared. On the contrary, memory is different and can be quite the opposite. In a city with a conflicting memory of communities, minorities, groups and collectives, families or individuals actually constitute the urban matter. This is the basis for dialogue and negotiation in the use of the public space of a city. Each new event, each new position, each new work of art and each new intervention in the public space represents a new layer placed on top of the other “memory”.

14.30 – 15.00 Open discussion;

(mediator – Zoran Petrovski, MSU)

15.00 – 15.30 – conclusions from the conference;

– announcement of the international architectural competition;

– announcement of the Sculptural exhibition/event;

– closing the conference.

15.30 – 16.00 cocktail

8th – October 2016

12.00 SCULPTURAL – exhibition

1:00 p.m. “Christo & Jeanne-Claude: Beauty is Yours, Money is Ours, Publicity is for All”, lecture by Luchezar Boyadziev about the art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Sculptural Institution and its contexts.

Organizer / location: NU Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje

Curators: Zoran Petrovski and Jovan Ivanovski