PRAGUE QUADRENNIAL OF PERFORMANCE DESIGN AND SPACE

Pavilion of Republic of North Macedonia THIS BUILDING TALKS TRULY

Artist: FILIP JOVANOVSKI
Curator: IVANA VASEVA
Commissioner: FROSINA ZAFIROVSKA
MUSEUM OF CITY OF SKOPJE, Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia
6-16 JUNE 2019/ Prague, Czech Republic

- Installation with performance by KRISTINA LELOVAC, every day in the Macedonian pavilion,
starting from 13h;
- Promotion of publication on 7th of June, 2019 with performance by TELEMAMA.

Collaborators: Kristina Lelovac, Dragana Zarevska, Vlado Karaev, Andjela Petrovska, Biljana
Tanurovska – Kjulavkovski, Violeta Kachakova, Slobodan Unkovski, Boris Bakal, Simona
Dimkovska, Marija Gelmanovska, Jana Kastratovikj, Tome Dimitrievski, Ana Vilenica, koma.mk,
Jasmina Gjorgieva, Behar Dalipi, Ana Vasileva.
Realization: Ilija Tiricovski, Gorjan Atanasov, Marko Naumovski, Sashko Poter Micevski,
Aleksandar Kotevski, Stojanche Cavirovski, Vlado Dimoski, Toni Trajkovski (Constructions
design dooel, Skopje), Ivancho Velkov, Membraning studio Skopje).

Erasing, hiding or ignoring the traces of collectivity, solidarity, responsibility from the
collective memory of the local history is only a step towards accelerating the neoliberal
worldview, which privatizes and hierarchizes all relationships in the social life. This leads to an
almost unrecognizable change in the local context, influencing and transforming entire
communities and different social strata as well as the entire social fabric.
In the middle of the common yard and the common cinema hall of the residential Railway
building, one question resonates: how to live better together? And the echo increasingly repeats
the question in the almost ruined building, treasuring the ideas of community, responsibility
and solidarity, in the middle of the captured, ruined and corrupted city. It is here that existent
conflicts can open up potential ruptures for the change of the general social structure.
The Railway Residential Building in Skopje was built as a perimeter social housing block for the
employees of the Railway Company in Yugoslavia and was completed in the late 40's of the 20th
century. It has its own yard, had collective laundries, which were transformed into apartments
after the Skopje devastating earthquake in 1963, but also its own cinema hall as a sharing space,
where at one moment 400 children watched movies.
The initiative "If Buildings Could Talk" is a performative experience that exists from 2015 in the
Railway residential building, raised by the organization Faculty of things that can’t be learned
(FR~U). It develops itself by performing , i.e. it performs an active space as an aesthetic and
ethical process of creating relations and bonds. Thus, the performance design is not physically
built scenery, although it exists in a concrete building and a cinema hall, but is an experiential
and emotional modeling by an artistic process, forming and transformative, which wants to
become a caring community that will act beyond its own threshold. It carries a contemporary
cross-disciplinary engaged approach that unites elements of visual and performing arts,
extending their scope and framing and advocates for the preservation of the meaning of the
public and the public space.
The pavilion of Republic of North Macedonia on Prague Quadrennial titled “This building talks
truly” performs in size 1: 100 as a condensed experience of past activities, as a multi-time
archive, which live should also tell us: If we do it here, we can do it everywhere! And this is
exactly the design of the performative agonistic community.
“This building talks truly” represents the Republic of North Macedonia at this event and is
composed of three parts: installation with performative part, which is part of the “Exhibition of
countries and regions”; short video titled “Kino Kultura”, which is part of Performance Space
Architecture Exhibition „Our Theatre of the World“, and bilingual publication.
The project is supported by the City of Skopje and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of
North Macedonia.
We would like to thank for the collaboration to: Janez Jansa (Maska, Institute for Publishing,
Production and Education, Ljubljana), Mishko Zinoski (Faculty of Architecture – Skopje), Ana
Vilenica, Gjorgje Kraishnik, Slobodan Kocevikj, Ivan Dzijanovski, Tome Karevski, Pavle Ignovski,,
Filip Avramchev (Universal Hall – Skopje), Kino Kultura, Skopje, Cinematheque of North
Macedonia.