Month of Design continues its pro-active approach, by organising design workshops for the young, and connecting business communities with designers in order to facilitate joint solutions to design problems. At this year’s workshop, which was carried out in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, students, on the basis of briefs, presented their solutions for two projects: the Glass/Bottle and Events Chair.

THE BRIEF FOR THE GLASS/BOTTLE PROJECT
Idea: How to avoid service, renting glasses and hiring staff, waiting on guests and doing the dishes, while maintaining the noble character of service and uniqueness and prestige of an event? How to simplify bottling, carrying and transportation? How to add a marketing message to a product? How to impress and indulge the user? And what about recycling? Perhaps by combining a glass and a bottle in a single product containing somewhat less drink (e.g. 150ml). Drinks in appealing containers are transported to an event directly from the producer, and the guests serve themselves.
Material: glass
Workshop leader: Prof. Tanja Pak
Participating students: Mojca Greif, Nuša Jelenec, Eva Klepec, Nina Oman, Tilen Šepic, Andraž Tarman

THE BRIEF FOR THE EVENTS CHAIR PROJECT
Idea: So light, cheap and portable you can carry it home with you as a souvenir. Event-goers are ensured comfortable seating, while the organiser can choose from a wider range of venues for the event - lecture, seminar, etc. Add to this originality and the possibility of applying a marketing message to the product.
Material: liquid wood, plastic, cardboard
Workshop leader: Prof. Vladimir Pezdirc

When & where: 18 October – 18 November 2007, Ljubljana

Practices and Parties offer opportunities for designers, creative individuals, groups of designers, companies and organisations to present themselves to the broader public. The aim of the events is to rediscover the significance, diversity, and effects of good design.

Every year in Ljubljana some 20 accompanying events are organised in line with the theme and semantics of Month of Design – this year Mediterranean Identities.

THE SEMANTICS FOR PRACTICES AND PARTIES 2007

Legends inspire.

The people of Ljubljana like to believe that the legendary Jason and his Argonauts stopped in these parts on their quest for the Golden Fleece. Not only that, it is here, where the river meets the moors, that Jason conquered the dragon, disassembled the ship and – like some ancient predecessor of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo – carried it over the land to the Adriatic Sea so that he could sail back home.
Seemingly timeless legends always talk about time – the time of their birth, and even more tellingly, about the time of their reawakening. If you were to start a journey from the ancient South, the cradle of civilisation, up the great rivers, time would lead you to Ljubljana, where the urban meets the natural.
You should think well and literally disassemble the past, so that you can rush back home into the future.
And the future, once again, is the South, and the home is, once again, the Mediterranean.
If the Mediterranean identities of today are to face new challenges, they need a safe haven deep in the mainland to reconsider, disassemble and transform themselves – and launch themselves forward. Ljubljana, where the moors meet the river, and the sea touches the Alps; Plečnik’s new Athens, connected to roads which lead to Rome, is an ideal venue for such reflection.
Welcome, Mediterranean.

NEW: For the first time this year as part of Month of Design, we are organising open-door days, offering an opportunity to different design and architecture firms to open their doors on selected days between 18 October and 18 November 2007, present themselves to the broader public, and provide an insight into their work and creativity.

Photo: Matevž Paternoster

Sandra Debanić, a young Croatian fashion designer, likes to travel through time in her designs; back to the 30’s is where she goes. Particularly interested in costume design, her knowledge of fine arts and design gives her a different view on fashion design, which she’s studying at the Textile-technological faculty.
Author: Vanja Hočevar

When & where: 7 and 8 November 2007, Ljubljana Castle

Month of Design was born from the desire to closely connect professional designers and industry. Time has shown, however, that without the collaboration of marketing experts the process of creating brands will yield neither well-designed products nor good services; while the absence of a constant dialogue with academia results in a lack of the know-how necessary for reconsidering contemporary phenomena.
Since creating brands and acquiring professional know-how are inextricably linked to the design process, they have become the cornerstones of the annual design conference, suitably entitled this year Brands and Brains.

This year’s topic of Month of Design and the Design Conference is Mediterranean identities. We explore the pluralism of identities, the edges and borders. We seek to know whether it is possible that, along the shorelines of the turbulent Mediterranean, creativity could become the strongest weapon, and the most precious energy. We seek to know more about know-how that has accumulated along the shores of the Mediterranean since Antiquity, and the brands which are able to transform it into market opportunities.

Designing is an activity hovering between culture and economy, ethics and profit, between an immediate answer and sustainable responsibility. A critical debate on design is a debate on a unique material culture, which should no longer be an exception, but our everyday reality. Great and ever more rapid economic changes in Europe demand that we reconsider our relationship towards the past and the present, and above all, that we engage in a multi-faceted debate about the principles of our future coexistence.

The countries included in the new map of Europe are not only facing fierce competition from the more developed, technologically advanced and richer countries with mature markets, but also the problem of their historical identity. Some have only started to discover it; some have redefined it, while others are rushing to explore its new manifestations. Having established new political, economic and social systems which aim to be competitive while striving for compatibility with senior democracies, they have found themselves in a great cross-fire of problems.
What is the role and responsibility of designers in this situation?
Is the (re)defining of the cultural identity of a nation possible through reflection on the contemporary tools of constructing cultural identities?
What if tradition is only really constructed through reconsidering the future?

The field of professional design, which is present in practically all spheres of material culture, and often constitutes the most potent medium for appealing to the whole society to change, is an ideal framework for discussing these issues. It is only through serious reflection on the various material dimensions of identity, such as the living environment, architecture, food, clothing, and interior design, that we will be able to draw a demarcation line between national identity and the petty provincialism of nationalism that all too often seeks its proponents within design circles.

The two-day conference will host 20 domestic and foreign speakers delivering 10 lectures on the theoretical, design, architectural, fashion, and market aspects of Mediterranean identities, and presenting 10 actual/concrete brands from the region.

Photo: Matevž Paternoster 

Month of Design continues its pro-active approach, by organising design workshops for the young, and connecting business communities with designers in order to facilitate joint solutions to design problems. At this year’s workshop, which was carried out in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, students, on the basis of briefs, presented their solutions for two projects: the Glass/Bottle and Events Chair.

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“Nebesa” is an old name for the mountainside pasture on which the Nebesa resort stands. The name translates into English as “Heaven”, a title the locals conferred on this place long ago, when they recognized – celebrated – the special qualities that constitute divine transcendence; the ultimate escape.

While many, if not most, other offers of hospitality and accommodation are about an array of services, activities, facilities and more, the more often ends up being less; the whole ends up being less than its composite parts.
Nebesa, however, is about less, and proves – explicitly illustrates – the familiar yet ill-applied maxim of ‘less is more’. Instead, the Nebesa experience (for that is what it surely is) is about two things: the place, and moreover, you.
Although the resort – a mere four cabins plus common building – sits perched precariously more than half-way up a lush green mountainside, it doesn’t so much command a view as opens up a hypnotic gaze both across and down into the magical green and turquoise Soča valley below. Because Nebesa isn’t about commanding anything – what you need and desire is there; the rest is yours for the creating.

The roof over your head is simply that: a strikingly simple roof taking its form (as does the entire cottage) from traditional highland building motifs. You’re made well aware of it as you ascend the stairs to your bedroom loft, which has everything anyone on an escape needs: a bed. A bed with a view. Next morning you’ll awake to visions of wispy cloud sweeping slowly – and silently – across the mountains opposite, without leaving the thoughtful comfort of your sumptuous nest.
Returning from an invigorating walk – Italy is less than an hour on foot past an abandoned war-era crossing-point – overlooking the tiny Slovene towns of Livek and Kobarid, you don the thick bathrobes from your cottage and sink into the warm arms of the small sauna nestled in the lower ground floor of the small common building nearby. You cool off in the intimate pool surroundings which too overlook the valley via a sweeping panorama window. Again, however, despite the great potential for drama, the impressions are all yours; it’s all there for the (your) making.
An adjacent cellar/storeroom holds a handful of little treasures for the (your) taking: homemade salami from a local farmer, fragrant (just this sensuous side of stinky) local cheese, wines and grappas. You take what you need, how and when the need strikes. Not that the resident-owners Katja and Bojan Roš wouldn’t be happy to do it for you; they’re just not around much – invisible even – most of the time. Like the perfect hosts, they’re there for you when you need them; for the rest, you’re on your own.
Similarly breakfast is your affair: your kitchen cupboards and fridge are full of the luxurious breakfast essentials; supplement from the common kitchen with whatever you want in the way of fresh, local seasonal fruits – now grapes, plums and apples – and maybe a bit more of that outrageous cheese. Coffee’s on your private terrace off the living room, maybe with a thick wool blanket to keep out the fresh morning chill.
Morning unfolds in a strangely appealing surreal serenity out here; the night before, the profound silence of a late-night grappa nightcap on the terrace was broken only by an elk buck leaving his territorial calling card – it’s rutting season for the local deer who graze the hillside pastures immediately below. It’s very dark; and very quiet.
Katja feels it important to do what they can do and do it best: there’s no restaurant here, but brilliant alternatives down in the valley, including their daughter’s celebrated Hiše Franco. She says this is a place for people in need of escape, and for people in love. It’s not a place to fix or deal with things, issues, concerns; it’s about indulging each other, indulging yourself; it’s about you.

Author: Jeff Bickert
Photos: Miran Kambič, Nebesa
“Nebesa” Mountain Resort
Livek 39, 5222 Kobarid, Slovenia
tel: +386 53844620; mobile: +386 4176 9484; fax: +386 5384 4621
info@nebesa.si; www.nebesa.si

Made-to-order shoes with ice-like glass bead ties aren’t for everyone; for Ljubljana-based Leonora Jakovlevic, the spirit behind Ave Femina, they’re the mischievous realization of free-flight dreams.

Leonora is an artist: impulsive yet meticulous. She’s spontaneous, and doesn’t quite understand careerism. Instead she plays and improvises. She saves the meaning and the final shape for later. Once ‘later’ arrives, she creates images that sweep us off our feet. She creates stories and bids us enter with our shoes on – not barefoot; shoes through which we learn – and live – the story.
A shoe demands responsibility. All too often a girl – or woman – puts on high heels and becomes an object; not just an object in the eyes of others (the others are others), but in her own eyes as well. She becomes an object by herself, for herself. In the process she loses her spontaneity, simplicity, freedom.
The world upon a pedestal is, after all, different. A high heel is a pedestal, and a woman in heels is an object of admiration. A woman on a pedestal is not only taller, but suddenly becomes exalted, superior to those looking up to her and those just looking; superior to those willing to follow her or those wanting to seduce her.
But Leonora is not comfortable with this scenario, she’s seen enough of it. This is not the story of an individual, rather it’s the story of an exotic bird in captivity. A shoe should be an object that is subject to a woman with a will, a personality. A shoe without a woman is merely a promise of the attainable.
“Too often women ignore the shoe” says Leonora. “As strange as it may sound it’s true. They’re familiar with the status symbols at work, they know the brand. They know it assures them of quality and prestige. Women invest in symbolic capital. Only few of them dare to look beyond, where individualism resides, where their self is at home. Women don’t trust themselves; instead they’d rather follow trends.”
Is Ave Femina Leonore Mark a trend? No, she is ‘chic’. For a personality doesn’t change with the season. A personality is not trendy. The French, she says, understand this, the crucial difference in approach.

Leonora’s shoes are a promise of erotica. Real erotica begins with a gait, poise, and a rhythm dictated to the shoe by the woman. Whether she’s 16 or 60, a good shoe mistress knows how to tame a shoe. Timeless sex appeal is her reward. There are women out there who know this: young women, who want to be and, as such, already are different; and older women, who look for the beauty and quality of individual craft and care.
Alongside her driven creativity resides a girlish mischievousness. The protruding ears that refuse to cooperate with the tiny face crowning her slender figure are not the only indicators: it’s there in her story. Leonora follows her instincts; she can be very naughty, she gets crazy ideas into her head – and acts on them. She tells us of her dreams: she’ll move to an island she loves in Dalmatia, plant an herb garden, open up a small inn with a shoe shop. We believe every word she says.
Tonight she measures my feet. Now I’m waiting for my custom-made shoes: gold-rimmed, with a tie made of two glass-circles that look like broken ice. She says I’ll look like Mini Mouse, Micky’s girlfriend. I find that very very chic. But I still have the feeling that we’ll end up running around barefoot together in her Dalmatian herb garden.

Author: Lucija Stupica
Photos: Tomo Brejc, Luka Dekleva

New media creative subversive Vuk Ćosić refuses to be an employee of his own ideas

When Mitja Doma showed Vuk Ćosić email and Yahoo! at the Soros Foundation back in 1994, Vuk knew that was it. That same day he sat down in front of a PC and wouldn’t budge for the next 18 hours, surfing through the entire Yahoo! site of the time in just a couple of sessions.
He started thinking about art within this new sphere that was constantly expanding. Vuk then met Luka Frelih, the only Slovene hacker who sympathized with the art scene. While creating free websites together with Luka for anyone who wanted them, Vuk met Heath Bunting and other web enthusiasts, critical, articulate people who weren’t hackers but used computers and the Web as both a creative and a subversive medium.
In 1997 Vuk came up with a brilliant idea and created a copy of the homepage of the prestigious exhibition event Documenta; as a result, the event had not one webpage but two. Only some time later did a passionate discussion surrounding copying and file and data sharing arise. By this time Vuk had already decided he didn’t want to be an artist – and an employee of his own ideas, rushing headlong from exhibition to exhibition, always presenting himself with the same or new projects.

– I reject development in art, but am not repulsed by it –

In 1999, two years after the Documenta exhibition, net.artists themselves announced that net.art was dead. In this way, they drew attention to the unappreciative attitude of the art institutions towards the systematic collecting, purchasing and archiving of digital works of art, not least by declaring that the line between art and web art should be eliminated, since it’s all plainly art; on the other hand, they drew attention to the detached development of technology which increasingly pursues corporate logic.
But back as early as 1998, Vuk reinvents ASCII (1). He and Frelih create Instant ASCII Camera. This camera takes and “spits out” photographs in ASCII form. Deep ASCII, Vuk’s re-make of the porn classic Deep Throat, was even screened at film festivals, which means that people watched 50 minutes of a graphic black-and-green film in complete silence. Then came the global ASCII comeback, as webcam ASCII streams to the ASCII opening in the film Matrix. Impressive ASCII projections on architecture represents the other extreme through which Vuk has drawn attention to the technological development which offers a hi-tech scenario of reality and final sublimation for the super-user. This year he’s going to lecture on ASCII art at the GEL (Good Experience Live) Conference, where Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, will also be.

– In the rain, a cockroach will keep looking upward until it drowns, and can only be saved by a lucky coincidence –

Particularized development in the telecommunications industry is based on economic growth, paying little attention to the real usefulness of products. Therefore, a product which is truly useful or helpful to the user or society at large can only be created by lucky coincidence. Vuk, however,  says it is this very same communications industry that gives art its texture; but it might be better if the artistic, creative – or, if you will, the popular sphere – gave texture to the communications.
On average, Vuk’s work is being exhibited once a week in various institutions around the world. Recently, Antonio Pinto, the curator of the MEIAC museum in Badajoz, in the Spanish province of Estremadura, bought 30 works of new media art for the museum’s permanent collection – and Vuk’s old work, Metablink, was among these. This is the first systematic and therefore historically relevant purchase of computer, digital or new media work for a permanent collection; even the largest museums of contemporary art have nothing of the kind.
Vuk is a contemporary artist who enjoys success in his own time, even though he can’t provide bread for his daughter Luna and a bonus for his long-time partner Irena in the form of art. So he’s looking forward to revisiting New York, where the opening of a “real” sales exhibition of digital art will take place in early October at the Wolkowitz Gallery. Even though Vuk doesn’t expect much, he enjoys seeing the bizarre solutions employed to materialize the digital works of art: his work will be realised on hardware, consisting of a modified computer with an on/off switch and a monitor. International art and academic circles are constantly interested in his input, because he’s a terribly intelligent speaker and an even more amusing conversationalist. If you met him, he’d no doubt make you laugh too.

Note: ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, an encoding table with 128 characters which represent text in computers, communications equipment and other devices that work with text. Before computers with high graphic performance were available, we even had figurative posters comprised of printed ASCII characters.

This text is licensed under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. A copy of the licence is accessible at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/; or you may address your requests to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Author: Dunja Kukovec
Photo: Ivian; digi-work: Mina Zabnikar

Davor Bruketa and Nikola Žinić would like to collect football stickers, but are too busy producing award-winning design

The appearance of Bruketa&Žinić in the mid-90s marked, in some way, a generational shift in Croatian design. They themselves say they started to be recognized as strong individuals – at Greiner&Kropilak and studio Božesačuvaj – just at the right moment, when there was no one else out there other than a handful of older, well-established designers.
Today the situation has changed radically, the scene itself is charged and diverse, but the dynamic duo of Davor Bruketa and Nikola Žinić has stayed right up there at the top. In the meantime they’ve received hundreds of awards, and their studio B&Ž oblikovna manufaktura in Zagreb has expanded into a firm employing some fifty creative individuals.
A fresh visual approach, and clear, communicative concepts, often spiced up with a healthy dose of humour, has gained them a long list of clients in the widest variety of fields in communications. Some of the larger companies include Podravka, Ledo, TDR, and Privredna banka; but they’ve handled clubs (Škola, Gjuro II), bands (Cubismo), electronic media (Radio 101), even activist poster campaigns such as those for Autonomna ženska kuća Zagreb. “We’re just happy being able to work for clients that know what they want, that trust us, and for those in whom we can put our trust. The mere form of particular projects is not all that important” says Bruketa.
For their first retrospective show back in 2000, B&Ž were assisted by another design team, Numen. Here Numen employed graphic symbols from the game of X’s & O’s to visualize the structure of B&Ž’s creative interaction. “It’s a kind of game where no one wins at the end of the day”, says Žinić, “and Numen did quite well in analyzing us through that image”.

MG Do you entertain any romantic nostalgia for the old days when you were still working largely as a duo? Has the growth of the firm – and it’s expansion into an advertising agency proper a few years ago – significantly changed the way you work?
Žinić: I think we still work the same way we did from the very beginning. At some point we just felt the things we did within the narrow field of design were just too limited for our ambitions, so we looked to extend our work with other tools of communication. Today we’re a full service agency, and design is just one of the tools we’re using. Davor and I are still doing projects that are pure design, but there’s a difference in that we also have around fifty creative individuals who work as a team on most of them. So, in a way we’ve just transposed all that we’ve learned when we were small onto a larger system.
Bruketa: Actually, before that we were still working with big advertising agencies, and we got a bit tired of not having more control over the whole process. This way we can direct the projects all the way through and do things just the way we want. You know, one doesn’t feel like doing the same job all one’s life. Some people choose another job – and others, like us, start an advertising agency.
The problem with small firms is that they really can only handle smaller projects. On the other hand, the problem with big agencies is that they feel like working with a supermarket, without being able to look forward to any kind of personalised service. We tried to combine the advantages of both, to come up with a flexible business model encompassing all of their qualities.

MG You’ve managed to preserve a personal image in which you still identify yourselves as two kids playing games with design. Like the ads for positions at the agency, with headlines like “Bruketa&Žinić would like to collect football stickers but unfortunately they have little time for that”, or “Bruketa&Žinić writing a letter to Santa Claus…”.
Žinić: Yeah, but that’s really us! We’re trying to challenge some taboos and stereotypes in advertising and communication. And we’re also in a position to be able to do things like that.
Bruketa: It also has to do with the culture of a community. I think our (company) culture is still the same as when there were five of us working at the agency. Formally we’re a firm, but actually, we’re a community of people who share not only a particular field of work but other things, as well as points of view. It’s important for us that we can still go out for a drink after work. It’s easier and truly satisfying to work in that kind of environment, knowing that the people around you are not only your colleagues, but also your friends. The best results come from a synergy in a group of people. It’s like football – a great player on a bad team is worthless.

GB Is there any identifiable visual element or quality that is immediately recognizable as the work of Bruketa&Žinić?
Bruketa: The way in which we deal with things is recognizable, but not the result itself. It’s never the same doing graphic design for a shoe manufacturer or say, foodstuffs. Similarly, 50 people can never think in the same way. Even the two of us don’t have the same visual style – and that talks only about graphic design – while at an agency design is only one of the tools you employ. Actually, being able to offer diversity in personal approaches is a huge advantage for us.
Žinić: Very often people come to us and say they saw a poster in the street and immediately knew it was our work. But we’re the last ones who could actually say what this identifiable element is. If there is something like that, then it’s probably reflected in our way of dealing with certain situations – it’s often unexpected, unusual, or different from the stereotypes we see every day.

MG You’re just back from New York. Can we assume you went there to receive yet another award?
Žinić: Yes, we received a Gold and also a Grand Award at the international ARC Awards, which specialises exclusively in annual reports. There were around 2000 entries from around the world, which means all the mega corporations like Coca-Cola and IBM were there; and we were awarded again for our annual report for Podravka.
Bruketa: While we were there, we were also notified via e-mail that we’ll also be receiving an award at the New York Festival; and about the same time we managed to find out about another award at another event. It was a crazy week.
Author: Marko Golub, with Davor Bruketa and Nikola Žinić
Portrait: Marko Golub

Seductive imagery as integral element in the work-process of architect Aleš Prinčič

Ever since photography became widely used, architects have paid close attention to the photographic representations of their buildings. Richard Neutra, for instance, was known for bringing an entire truck-load of select furniture to the photographed site in order to make his architecture appear “as it should be”. Udine-based architect Aleš Prinčič is no less attentive to this process than was his famous American colleague. He not only sets the scene to be photographed but also stands behind the camera to make sure that the scene is captured from precisely the right angle, in precisely the right way. So it’s no surprise that in published photographs his buildings often appear highly seductive. However, in opposition to most other photogenic architecture, they often appear even more seductive on the actual site. Continuing the tradition of his fellow modernists Prinčič still draws by hand, or – more precisely – he thinks through fine pencil drawings in 1:1 scale, huge drawings that often cover his entire studio. In his design he pays particular attention to detailing, to the ways light enters the rooms, and – this is his speciality – to the treatment of the surfaces of his architecture. In renovations he dresses the existing interiors and exteriors in new layers of paint, sheets of glass or steel, thin plates of veneer, plastic, plexi glass or leather, and in new constructions he composes them out of these layers. It seems that for him architecture is first of all a cladding; only secondly is it a bearing structure – that scaffolding for the fine, sensuous surfaces which outline and define his spaces.
In this sense his architecture calls to mind the work of modernist architects like Alvar Aalto, that were constructed out of various textures and materials as three dimensional collages. But there is a significant difference between the two: While the rough textures of Aalto’s buildings invite our touch, while we feel compelled to caress them, as if this would only add to their strong material presence, Prinčič’s smooth and shiny surfaces seem to discourage any physical interaction – as if the traces of our fingers would sully their oily perfection. Little surprise then that one of his most successful projects is the facade renovation of the Union Brewery in Ljubljana, a project meant to be enjoyed on an exclusively visual. Surrounded by a high fence, the fine, pure-white skin of the building remains safely guarded from our dirty fingers.
Nor should it come as any surprise that Prinčič has succeeded particularly well in the recent design of a new hotel building. A hotel is, by definition, a place to which you cannot belong; no matter how long you stay there, you are always just a guest in it. This the place in which you needn’t be your usual self, where you can maintain a distance from anything connected with home, and herein lies one of its very special merits. As George Bernard Shaw so succinctly put it, “the great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life”. Prinčič’s recently completed hotel Clocchiati in Udine subscribes to this position exceedingly well. Not only because it is a peaceful refuge from the everyday reality, or because every room exudes a different, individual atmosphere so that we can choose it according to our mood or who we want to be that night – but because of the architecture at work here.

Entrance to the rooms is effected via an entirely black, narrow corridor, beautifully lit from above, to the large, heavy doors standing side by side in one long row. We enter and ascend a narrow staircase and finally enter an open space – the room proper – composed of reds and whites, golds and browns, or oranges and blues. This space is not defined by an enclosure of walls but by the folds, twists and turns in ornamental surface. The ornament is material. The views from the rooms are filtered through layers of greenery growing in front of the large windows, which too becomes part of the interior.
Here every detail is considered, every colour and texture meticulously selected, every piece of furniture custom-designed. So carefully composed these rooms appear as compact unified wholes to which nothing can be added or removed. They work as beautiful sets or scenes in which we, however, are invited to take part only as observers. And yet we know that they are hotel rooms, meant to be inhabited. This is where some of the seductiveness of Prinčič’s architecture stems; we know that his rooms are to be inhabited but there is something forbidding about them, something that stops us from really entering them, as if they exude and explicit warning: look, don’t touch!
Knowing that these rooms are meant to be inhabited – while at the same time believing that one cannot live in them – we presuppose that somewhere else there is such a place that can really be inhabited, that there exists something called ‘true home’. Prinčič’s hotel is thus a hotel example par excellence; as it is not home, it can serve as the perfect refuge for living the unfamiliar, for realising our fantasies.

Prinčič, of course, doesn’t need to spend any time in this hotel. He doesn’t need this hotel to realise his fantasies; he needs to photograph it.
It’s no coincidence that, like Neutra, Prinčič pays such close attention to photographing his architecture. Neutra once explicitly stated that the process of making architecture is not concluded when the building is built but when it is photographed. It seems the same holds true also for Prinčič: he is closely engaged in taking photographs of his architecture not simply to get them published and to enter architectural history, but to finally capture his architecture “as it should be”, to finally realise that perfect composition of sensuous surfaces that he initially imagined – to finally materialise that initial image, to possess it. Sitting in the hotel’s garden a few months after completion, Prinčič lays the photographs out on the table and offers – “not all of them are good, but for some, I can say ‘this is it’.

Author: Petra Čeferin
Portrait: Manca Juvan
Project images: courtesy Aleš Prinčič

The controversial Serbian TV Pink continues to gain ground – and airspace – filling what is, in many respects, an irregularly regulated transitional post-war media void. Now showing (everything) on a screen near you.

In 1993, building on the success of a small recording studio business, Zeljko Mitrovic, who’s been shrewdly building a media empire since the late 1980s, established Pink International with the launch of his privately-owned commercial radio station Radio Pink. The following year saw the launch of TV Pink, a commercial television station.
The station fed – and fed on – a steady diet of cheaply produced programming that offered manufactured drama, titillation, and sensational news; this winning formula brought the viewers and made the venture rich. Today, top-rated Pink’s philosophy not only stands directly opposed to the public service approach, but is actually driving the evolution of the media in Serbia and forcing everyone else to either adapt or die.
Not long ago, in an era of war, hyperinflation, and public sacrifice, TV Pink’s mindless entertainment proved a welcome and highly popular distraction. Even if Pink was not an overtly “political station,” it became the centre of a highly influential – and politically-charged – phenomenon: Turbofolk music, a new sound that blended electronic dance rhythms with Serbian and Gypsy melodies and lyrics that ran from saccharine to nationalistic.

Today, TV Pink reaches over 90 percent of Serbian homes and has subsidiaries in neighbouring countries. Its domestic advertising revenue accounts for about a third of Serbia’s overall advertising spending, which reached $85 million already back in 2003. The station is dedicated to high ratings, which it achieves through a mix of American movies, Serbian pop music, and (impossibly) scantily clad women. Its journalism is generally sensational and widely seen as thin, particularly in comparison to the big public broadcaster B92’s typically probing coverage.
And TV Pink continues to grow. Under Milosevic, the station was prohibited from broadcasting news or any other type of “information program”. When it started its own news show after Milosevic’s fall, the program was frequently seen as a vehicle for partisan attacks, a fact that did not really distinguish it from most other news programs.
Pink’s “information programming” continues to range from the evening news to talk shows to more recent additions such as Split Images, a popular satirical show in which Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s current prime minister, is portrayed as a female opera star.
All this has helped put Pink in a curious market position. Srdjan Bogosavljevic, who runs SMMRI, Belgrade’s dominant polling outfit, has said that people may watch Pink, but it embarrasses them. In surveys, people often claim, for example, that during the Milosevic years they got their news from opposition sources. “But when you interview them carefully,” he says, “you can see by the answers they give that they were watching Pink.”
Actually, the paradox of Pink goes well beyond embarrassment. For media reformers, Pink’s continued success in the post-Milosevic era stands as a symbol of their failure. But dislike of Pink cuts across class and education lines: people may talk about the company’s questionable deals and political connections – but just as often they’re also avid viewers.
More broadly, there’s the simple fact that the ongoing poor standard of living in which the majority of Serbians live tends to push overall programming quality – not to mention media reform – off the list of priorities. With an unemployment rate of around 30 percent and the average monthly wage only a few hundred euros, the attitude of many is that TV Pink now – as then – offers refuge from reality.
Mitrovic once suggested that his programming, given its broad appeal, could be seen as something of a unifying force. But that’s not really how he pitches TV Pink. Rather, he claims to represent an entirely different sort of reformist agenda: “For us, commercial programming is most important,” he says. “We tore down monopolies, we were pioneers. It should not happen that Serbia gets only public service stations.”
While Pink has clearly been forcing its competitors to try to match its commercial success, it’s also done more than any other station to professionalize Serbian broadcasting. The station pioneered the use of ratings and people meters for making programming decisions, and although most large stations in Serbia now use these tools, Pink has been the most aggressive in responding to the information they provide. From very early on, Mitrovic concentrated on building solid advertising revenue – not necessarily a self-evident strategy in a media world that was emerging from socialist management. Bogosavljevic, whose firm has done polling for Pink, once said that Mitrovic is “the only one in Serbia with true media understanding.”
Pink has been pushing hard into foreign markets: with recent stations launches in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, and now broadcasting in Macedonia and Bulgaria, it’s become the only pan-regional station originating in the region.
Only last April, Pink International’s TV Pink was awarded a national television license in the Republic of Serbia by the Republic Broadcasting Agency, Serbia’s regulatory body responsible for broadcast media. (A company can buy up local and regional licensees, achieving regional or national coverage, and in so doing, avoid the need for hard-fought national licenses – this was how TV Pink BiH achieved coverage of large parts of the country back when it was first established in 2003.) A month later, Pink Media Group founder Mitrovic received the “Manager of the Year” award from the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce.
Now the group (PMG) is going into the movie business: they began filming work on their first feature film last autumn, and are constructing a huge studio complex scheduled for completion this year. With diversified operations including filmed entertainment production, radio and television broadcasting, satellite television production, music recording, optical media replication (CDs and DVDs), even executive/VIP aviation services, Mitrovic and the group look set to stay very much in the pink.
Author: Jeff Bickert

Whether you’re local or just in on a one day visit, meeting people in Sarajevo is obligatory. Regardless of whether it’s about drinking espresso or thick black Turkish coffee, or choosing a good local bourek over a well-made Italian pasta, it’s all about being out, amongst people, and satisfying the moment. The range on offer leaps from traditionally-furnished restaurants in the old quarter, replete with all manner of authentic ornament and decoration to small fast-food places with colourful carpeting draped over the floors, walls and the waiters; then there are the lounge bars, whose concept is (loosely) based on a (con)fusion of Milan furniture fair trends and liberally interpreted oriental influences. Maybe it’s laid-back smoking of shisha, sitting among a sea of cushions and pillows or simply enjoying the scent of old Austro-Hungarian varnished oak. At the end of the night you find yourself in a bar accidentally spilling your finest Slovenian wine on a hard, epoxy floor, looking for an apology from your own image reflected in the curved stainless steel wall plate.

Author: Emir Jelkič
Photos: Simon Plestenjak