Since May 10 and the opening ceremony, which began with a sixteen-minute silence, a large audience of the 19th Architecture Biennale in Venice in the pavilion of the Republic of Serbia has been visiting, observing and commenting on the installation called Disentanglement: New spacesAuthors Disentanglements are Davor Ereš, Jelena Mitrović, Petar Laušević, Igor Pantić, Sonja Krstić and Ivana Najdanović.
The impression of the exhibition is formed and assembled in the visitor's mind (for me, it took almost a week) through effects similar to film montage, with the help of which "Figure 1"I"Figure 2" seen one after the other give birth to meanings, not present in either of them alone. The cinematic experience of architecture allows to condense time and space in the "mind's eye", gathering the images of spaces seen along the line of time into a single impression. Sometimes that time flows linearly, forward, together with this general time we are used to, sometimes it is interspersed, and sometimes, as we will see, it flows backwards, from the end to the beginning.
The installation in the Serbia pavilion, and the former Yugoslavia pavilion, consists of a system of carefully networked elements, of which we focus on three here: a massive vault woven with woolen thread, more than a hundred electric motors that gently untangle this weave and the performance of the "Belgrade Hand", a pioneering robotics project from the mid-20th century, the first functional prosthetic robotic hand in the world. The mechanical unraveling of the vault and winding of the woolen thread is projected to last as long as this year's Biennale, somewhere around the end of November. The unraveling process is conditioned by the amount of sunlight, because the entire unraveling process is powered by electricity from carefully installed solar panels. At the end of the exhibition, nothing will be left of the woven vault except the primary material neatly wound into spools of woolen thread.
Crossing the threshold of the pavilion of the Republic of Serbia, we physically feel a change in the flow of time. The line by which time unwinds in the pavilion of the Republic of Serbia flows in the opposite direction compared to the time we are used to. The unraveling of the "vault" breaks down the installation, making it less present and less visible every day.
Modern (or better, modernist) lines of progress, movements from the past to the future, led the 20th century towards the end of history. (Someone has already connected one of the possible ends of history with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, in whose pavilion all this is happening - by chance? Hardly so.)
The political state of things in contemporary Serbia, but also in the whole world, is, to put it mildly, opportune. Time is running backwards and we, through the decisions of the political and financial elites, are returning to the Middle Ages, only with the Internet. (Thanks to Varoufakis for the term “techno-feudalism.”) Wealth accumulates in the hands of a rich few, and vast masses of impoverished and disenfranchised people are left in their misery by various proxy wars, corporate speculation, and calculated crises.
In such a state of affairs, let's go back for a moment to the historical early Middle Ages: "Manus dei", a representation of the hand of God, from the time when the display of the body was still taboo, is present at the exhibition through "Belgrade Hand". The metaphor of "God's hand" in the performance of the robotic "Belgrade Fist" can also lead us to reflect on the role of artificial intelligence in today's world. In April 2024, the British "Guardian" published a text disclosing the role of the "Lavender" artificial intelligence system, which was entrusted with the role of selecting targets in Gaza. To this day, through destruction of an intensity never before recorded, Gaza has been turned into an unrecognizable desert of human remains and rubble. It has been transformed into something else – a space for the realization of perverse ideas, also illustrated by the recently published video on Trump's Instagram profile, which was generated by artificial intelligence. For a world watching it all through phone screens, the destruction, killing and AI videos of the future for the privileged stream through an also cinematic experience in fast-paced mode almost-Fastforwardand back. We have a microdosed version of that in our own backyard, the bombed-out building of Dobrović's General Staff, the former DSNO, which has become a field for similar speculation.
Disentanglement in the Serbian Pavilion, as in a film that has just turned a century old, Cinema-read Dzige Vertova, animates a focused body by going back through time. In the scene where a slaughtered bull comes to life simply by rewinding the film. The workers in the slaughterhouse put the organs back in place, put on the skin, the slaughter is played out in reverse, the bull miraculously comes back to life and starts running! The (absent) creator drags his creation from the present moment to the past, to the initial state of things.
One of the most intriguing ideas about architecture that I have come across so far is that any architecture that is executed cancels out the possibility of any other that could have been created. Disentanglement it offers exactly that, invites us to imagine possible origins, possible futures.
The solar panels that power the entire process are a discreet reminder of the global energy and climate crises. The high technology that we all rely on more and more in our daily lives and jobs requires more and more energy, which heats up the planet more and more, making it uninhabitable in the foreseeable future. Disentanglement it shows us the way, the "emergency exit" is in returning natural materials and processes, but in vain, the path leads us into the abyss and the only thing left is to play "rewind" in our heads and revive the dismembered bull in our imagination, as the only consolation.
Pantić, Sonja Krstić and Ivana Najdanović and I would like to thank them once again
