Doctoral Project
Performing the Archive: Skopje. From the Ruins of the City of the Future
Doctoral Project
Damjan Kokalevski
Prof. Philip Urpsrung, Prof. Felicity D. Scott
2012-2018
The main subject of this thesis is the archive of the Institute for Town Planning
and Architecture Skopje. The Institute and its archive have been foreclosed and neglected
in recent years. Finally, they were destroyed in a fire on 21 April 2017. The Institute
was established with help of the United Nations for the purpose of planning and
building a new city of Skopje after the devastating 1963 earthquake. During that time,
the UN commissioned more than 200 experts from both sides of the Iron Curtain to
plan the city with great urgency. Among others, famous architects like Constantinos
Doxiadis, Kenzo Tange and Van der Broek and Bakema prepared plans for the reconstruction
of the city. Heavily influenced by the Cold War narrative of the impending
nuclear war, Skopje became a hallmark of international cooperation and was proclaimed
‘The City of Solidarity’.
Most of the valuable materials from the rebuilding of Skopje—original drawings,
plans, models, photographs, records and proceedings—disappeared in the recent
fire. Since the 1990s, after the violent breakup of the socialist Yugoslavia, the Institute
has been a victim of the rampant privatisation and selling out of state-owned institutions.
The knowledge, as well as the Institute, had been abandoned for many years.
The neglect of this knowledge was coupled with the rise of ignorance, nationalism and
populism that has plagued the country. The final attempt to bury this history came in
2009, when the Government of Macedonia launched a grand populist project to violently
rebuild the city centre called ‘Skopje 2014’. It consisted of more than twenty,
mainly governmental buildings and hundreds of statues and monuments in a pseudoneoclassical
style. It aimed to connect the Macedonian people to their mythical roots,
trying, at the same time, to make the city look more ‘European’.
The methodological approach to perform the archive positions this research in
the middle of that historical context. It discusses the relationship between the research
and the archive, framed as a performative practice and embedded between theory and
practice. It explores various methods of work and activities, including exhibiting, discussing,
teaching, writing and building. The limits of the thesis, as a practice-based research,
are tested through a series of projects that stage this knowledge from a discursive,
disciplinary and activist point of view.
Damjan Kokalevski
Prof. Philip Urpsrung, Prof. Felicity D. Scott
2012-2018
The main subject of this thesis is the archive of the Institute for Town Planning
and Architecture Skopje. The Institute and its archive have been foreclosed and neglected
in recent years. Finally, they were destroyed in a fire on 21 April 2017. The Institute
was established with help of the United Nations for the purpose of planning and
building a new city of Skopje after the devastating 1963 earthquake. During that time,
the UN commissioned more than 200 experts from both sides of the Iron Curtain to
plan the city with great urgency. Among others, famous architects like Constantinos
Doxiadis, Kenzo Tange and Van der Broek and Bakema prepared plans for the reconstruction
of the city. Heavily influenced by the Cold War narrative of the impending
nuclear war, Skopje became a hallmark of international cooperation and was proclaimed
‘The City of Solidarity’.
Most of the valuable materials from the rebuilding of Skopje—original drawings,
plans, models, photographs, records and proceedings—disappeared in the recent
fire. Since the 1990s, after the violent breakup of the socialist Yugoslavia, the Institute
has been a victim of the rampant privatisation and selling out of state-owned institutions.
The knowledge, as well as the Institute, had been abandoned for many years.
The neglect of this knowledge was coupled with the rise of ignorance, nationalism and
populism that has plagued the country. The final attempt to bury this history came in
2009, when the Government of Macedonia launched a grand populist project to violently
rebuild the city centre called ‘Skopje 2014’. It consisted of more than twenty,
mainly governmental buildings and hundreds of statues and monuments in a pseudoneoclassical
style. It aimed to connect the Macedonian people to their mythical roots,
trying, at the same time, to make the city look more ‘European’.
The methodological approach to perform the archive positions this research in
the middle of that historical context. It discusses the relationship between the research
and the archive, framed as a performative practice and embedded between theory and
practice. It explores various methods of work and activities, including exhibiting, discussing,
teaching, writing and building. The limits of the thesis, as a practice-based research,
are tested through a series of projects that stage this knowledge from a discursive,
disciplinary and activist point of view.
