Jana Konstantinovska: Civic City

The exhibition titled ‘Civic City’ has emerged from the materials initially collected for the research (doctoral dissertation) of Jana Konstantinova, conducted at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne EPFL in Switzerland. The exhibition has been curated by Oliver Ilievski, who selected and arranged the material with the idea to permit the visitor an active engagement and become a temporary citizen of the Civic City. The materials (selected from the rich collection of the entire 400 artifacts, such as event posters, movies, photography, and architectural drawings) have been gathered for the framework of the interdisciplinary research.

The exhibition aims to place the contribution in the scientific field and announce it as a manifesto in the hearth the public discourse. The core concept is to contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field and to depart from the current definitions—often judged for being one-sidedly profit-oriented— of a ‘creative city’ or tackling energy efficiency through the sustainability paradigm, the exhibition thinks urban planning and human culture as one whole and questions the role of creativity in the city context.

In the same spirit, it aims to substitute the current ‘creative city’ with a new “counter model” discovered in the Yugoslav cities and characterized by particular social, cultural, and artistic qualities that are beneficial to both individual talent development and community well-being. By borrowing the examples of the past, it is illustrated how cities of the future— now choosing merely solutions in the field of sustainability technologies — would benefit from integrating those human-centric innovations, and strategies, as well as social, cultural, and artistic elements in their development.

A documentary by Ilija Pavlov will be projected in the framework of the еxhibition; Exhibition design: BaC2SX; poster design: Mateja Nikolić. The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture in the framework of the Interdisciplinary Programme 2022.