Non–aligned gendered subjects in Jasmina Cibic’s Tear Down and Rebuild

Abstract

This article offers a treatment of the work “Tear Down and Rebuild” (2015) by Slovenian-born artist Jasmina Cibic. Set in the Modernist building of the former Palace of the Confederation in Belgrade, the film incorporates the monologues of four female protagonists, who voice out their respective positions as “Nation Builder,” “Pragmatist,” “Conservationist,” and “Artist/Architect.” Their discourses, as much as these personas, are built from fragments of texts from various political, artistic and journalistic writing, either by known authors or circulating on Internet blogs and other platforms.

The aim of this article is to understand how the imagination of a geopolitical network of Non-Alignment was historically constructed and how it was enacted in racialised and gendered forms. In the contemporary context, what can such an investigation offer for the building and sustaining of decolonial projects? With contemporary Eastern Europe currently being yet again a space witnessing the rise of right wing, fascist agendas, as much as increasingly dominated by the rule of heteronormatively imagined futures continuous with a shared socialist history of gender inequalities, where would a feminist and decolonial project that produces a critique of these networked histories need to start from?

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