Rozita Dimova (Universiteit Gent)
My talk addresses the “baroque effect” and the material changes in central Skopje since 2008, where aesthetics, affect and politics converge to produce altered temporalities incorporating antiquity, erasing traces of socialism, or producing a future vision of shared European cultural legacy. Triggered by the political conflict with Greece over the name Macedonia, the style of the new buildings, monuments and rearrangements of public space have arguably effaced the earlier modernist outlook of Skopje’s city center designed after the 1963 earthquake. These changes have also initiated conflicting reactions among intellectuals, regular people, politicians and artists resulting in a civil social movement most strongly embodied in the so-called Archi-brigade, a self-organized group of architecture students who protested against the recent material changes in Skopje. By disentangling the theoretical complexity in this project, I analyze how affect, aesthetics and materiality turn into a powerful site of politics. I especially focus on the “baroque mechanism” conveyed through the size and grandeur of the buildings or monuments. This sublime effect in the contemporary aesthetic project in Skopje aims to evoke “subjective apprehension” where the subject lapses into a “state of dependence” signified by the affect of wonder and astonishment.