At the Court of the Transition King

Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here?
And he said: Well just take a right where
they're going to build that new shopping mall,
go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway,
take a left at what's going to be the new sports center,
and keep going until you hit the place where
they're thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can't miss it.
Laurie Anderson, Big Science

The starting points of the latest project by Renata Poljak - entitled “The View” - are only seemingly incompatible. Part of the project refers to an incident that happened on the night of 6 December 2003 in Dugopolje when a group of Hajduk fans ambushed a car with Zagreb licence plates setting fire to it together with the people inside. The second part was inspired by the “magnificent view” of the rooftop of the neighbouring building that has recently become part of the scenery from the artist’s family home terrace. Reflecting on people’s inconsiderateness and about the birth of a hybrid pseudourban context, the artist has found connections and interlacing of family relations, the architectural urbicide that is taking place in Split and its surroundings, and the violence at football stadiums which finally led to the incident reported in the “crime section” of the daily newspaper. These reflections are brought to life through a 17-minute film entitled “Great Expectations”, which was made according to the artist’s own screenplay, and based on a series of photographs gathered together under the mutual title “Croatia, Summer 2004”. A part of the photographs from this series shows newly built multi-storey buildings whose white, endless rows of serially produced balustrades and monstrously multiplied arches slice through the Mediterranean landscape of Split. There are no people in these photos, only phantom-like housing developments made of concrete cubes. Human presence is imposed indirectly on one of the photos by way of graffiti that warns that the concrete blocks are the property of Croatians, a memento of the recently ended war. One of the most compositionally impressive photographs is the one depicting the artist on the terrace of her family home. The body’s gesture and position of the head indicate a person enjoying the view, but instead of a view over an open sea what appears in front of Renata Poljak’s eyes is the roof of her uncle’s newly built house. However, the mainstay of the work in the film story and in the series of photographs is not just the offensive architecture, even though it was the inspiration for the entire project, but above all the research of the causes that resulted in the urbicide of the coast, and which led the author to explore family relations and to analyse the transformation of war brutality into a new form of socially acceptable violence. The author notes ten years of observing architectural arrogance: “I noticed how following the war violence, a new type of mentality was born. Violence, once ‘justified’ during the war, took on a new form in architecture. Enormous houses shielded smaller ones, and became all the more larger and unsightly. A mentality saturated with tourism, greed, unscrupulousness and denial of all tradition is the continuation of the violence and reflection of the new taste that has appeared in post-war Croatia, and which is directly mirrored in the houses of the newly rich.” Through the prism of her own family’s story, Renata Poljak warns of the creation of a new morality that is becoming collectively accepted. Furthermore, the artist narrates a story about three male generations of “kings” - heirs. They were brought up to “always take more” and who learned to impose themselves on society. One of their characteristic streaks is resourcefulness in each of the systems; socialist, where they become directors of factories, or transitional, where they become successful entrepreneurs. Using the private experience through a social context is also a continuation of the author’s artistic work to date, during which time she has analysed the emergence of generally acceptable social norms through her video works, articulating personal experience on a background of a wider social context.

The photographs “Croatia, Summer 2004” show the most varied examples of new, “transitional” architecture, a phenomenon affecting not only Split and its surroundings, but one which has spread along the entire Dalmatian and Istrian coast. But this occurrence is not solely the product of the globalisation processes of the 90s or transitional misunderstandings as a consequence of, for example, the lack of legal regulations regarding location permits and town-planning. The extensive research that was carried out by two journalists from “Jutarnji list”, Ante Tomic and Paun Paunovic, points to the fact that the roots of the authentic anti-style, e.g. the architecture of Split, in some cases should be searched for in an earlier time, in the golden era of self-government. In the article “Proletarians from Sirobuja”, Tomic explains how Sirobuja, a district in Split, sprung up during the 1980s when construction workers, instead of receiving state-subsidized flats or housing loans, were given worker credits in building materials. Consequently, these unplanned houses suddenly sprang up overnight: “The landowner would pace out a rectangle in the mud, while neighbours and relatives were already standing by in T-shirts and kerchiefs knotted on their heads next to the concrete mixer with shovels in their hands.” At eleven o’clock in the morning the cement slab would be poured, at two the windows were fitted in, and at night the family was already sleeping in the house or at least keeping guard to prevent authorities from knocking the house down. The entire settlement, about 1000 houses stretching out on both sides of the main highway from Split to Omiš, was built illegally. This example primarily describes the “resourcefulness” of the masses that could not or would not wait for authorities to provide a roof over their heads. Such cases were once accepted as a type of social venting, a socialist-self-governing version of the South American favela, but thanks to the great expectations of the “Croatian state-building project” of the 90s, “the resourcefulness of the masses” has taken on completely new dimensions, as Renata Poljak has recorded with her camera and lens.

In the film “Great Expectations”, the panning of the camera shows how houses built in keeping with the spirit of the time and with the building tradition of the area began to metastasize in the mid-90s. The author is at the same time the narrator of the family story, explaining to whom the largest houses belonged. The panoramic panning of the camera captures the new and transitionally “largest houses in the village”, the protruding armoured fittings, the concrete blocks decorated with rows of turrets and serially produced balustrades defining the contours of future 4-storey buildings, the new apartment floors. This is why a photograph entitled “Zimmer” from the “Croatia, Summer 2004” series is paradigmatic: on top of a tall cypress that rises above the apartment unit there hangs a sign offering apartments to let. The housing conglomerates seen in the film, only half-plastered, with untidy house lots which most often lean against the one-time authentic “home hearth”, with the “Apartments” sign have become the trademark of Croatian tourism, or the local variant of the global phenomenon of cementing the Mediterranean. Even in the domestic qualm between profit and preservation of the land, money prevailed. This is why the series of photographs “Croatia, Summer 2004” is a projection of local “civilization” that reflects the present system of values, a view on the post-war mentality of the resourceful kings who rose above all laws.

Of course, it would be cynical not to mention the laws created in order to protect the land and the people from the phenomenon of “apartmania”. Bozo Kovacevic, the Minister of Environmental Protection, Physical Planning and Construction in Ivica Racan’s Cabinet , became the hero of the day when he decided to tear down the illegally built houses along the coast by bringing in bulldozers. But, as Globus columnist Boris Dezulovic wrote, “Kovacevic’s bulldozers steered clear of the illegal mammoth concrete edifices around Zlatni rat, but tore down a small house an owner had built on his grandfather’s land”. Dežulovic’s sarcasm, which pointed to the corruption of the government, was not too exaggerated. Namely, soon after the incident of knocking down the small house that had been illegally built in Bol, a decision which had the whole town up on its feet, the public was informed about a “project” by a certain Žoni Maksan, who built a fish-farm on the islet of Vrgadi near Zadar, covered the coastline in concrete, built a business complex and introduced neoliberal capitalism on the small island with a sign “Private property – access prohibited!” The observant Dežulovic, referring to Maksan’s “project”, concluded that this businessman would not be punished by the visit of the Ministry’s bulldozers since he is not an unemployed subtenant, but an entrepreneur who earns money, and, last but not least and equally important, a friend of General Ante Gotovina.

According to recent research by some media, the aforementioned General has become, after Tito, the most renowned citizen of Croatia, a phenomenon that has divided Croatia into those who support the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague and those who strongly oppose the extradition of the General. In the second part of the film the camera glides along the walls of the old Split core and stops on a facade bearing a large-scale picture of the General. It seems that the author uses the characters of generals as a metaphor for all those who have put their private interests above public ones, so-called patriots who used the war exclusively for material gain. A group of photographs entitled “Invalid” warns of such a situation. They show a proud owner of a sports car with a handicapped sticker, and a four-storey apartment building “Villa Carmen” with a poster of General Norac on its facade, beneath which the caption “Guilty of defending Croatia” can be seen.

It seems that guilt is the key concept revealed by the film as the artist points to the root of the problem through the use of numerous female voices that justify violent behaviour and support the distorted system of family values. Moreover, in interweaving the private and public, the author observes how the roots of architectural violence reach deep into the labyrinths of the Croatian legal system which cannot solve the problems of town planning or stadium violence, nor the extradition of the General to the Hague Tribunal. (It seems that hanging his portraits on “zimmer-frei” apartments is a kind of talisman that keeps the houses safe from the law, bulldozers or town plans.) The blame lies in the newly arisen system of values and in the great expectations of numerous “kings”, (“good, but naive people”, as a female voice says in one of the scenes, justifying both a multi-storey building that obstructs one’s view and violence at the stadium), who have waited long for a Croatian state, and when they finally had one, it brought, among other things, corruption and inequality in the eyes of the law, encouraging their greed and avarice. The kings are to blame because in the transitional euphoria of gaining profit they forgot that the hatred stemmed from the war was bringing up their children who can only direct their anger at fans of the opposing football team. Or more precisely, “Great Expectations” is a film which, through an intimate family story, narrates a “Croatian state-building project” infected by capitalism and finally swallowed by the flame of post-war injustices and the avarice of “the giants of our generation”, and on whose ashes the transition kings have built their concrete courts.

Leila Topic

text from the cat. Pogled / The View, Renata Poljak, 2005