2YARDS
memorial park
2YARDS is a conceptual research on architectural interventions on spaces layered with many meanings. The space in question is Staro sajmište /Old fairground/, an urban neighbourhood in Belgrade that went through many different uses over time: it served as fairground for international Belgrade fair in 1938; it was turned into concentration camp by Gestapo in 1941 and bombed by the Allies in 1944; after the Second world war it became a headquarter of public work volunteering; in the 70s fair buildings were awarded to artists as their ateliers and in 1987. it was proclaimed a cultural site, remaining however, in very bad shape to these days.Following the different “appropriations” of this space in Lefebvrian sense and its heavily accented political uses, the timeline of the site is aligned with four philosophical categories regarding the use of space in order to direct the project research. The categories are: theme park, tabula rasa (socialist, post-historical space), abstract (political) space and experimental city and these are being combined to describe the particular uses of Staro sajmište over time. Each of these categories are then allotted with their physical describers from the site and these then form the physical language of approaching the space as memorial ground. By keeping in mind the highly saturated layering of the location, the project aims to face the past using the physical tools from it, but in a vivid, dynamic way, avoiding the traps of politicizing the memory like it is often the case in contemporary memorial centers.
The new concept of the space are two wall-encircled yards – devoted to recognizing the past by using its physical representatives, but also injected with new, strongly provocative features, open for new uses, memorial and predictive at the same time. Therefore, the program of the project varies – it goes from panoptical hi-tech theme park to ever-changing garden that carries a seed of transcultural space for alternative currents and is a ground for temporary structures such as circuses and summer theaters.
The new concept of the space are two wall-encircled yards – devoted to recognizing the past by using its physical representatives, but also injected with new, strongly provocative features, open for new uses, memorial and predictive at the same time. Therefore, the program of the project varies – it goes from panoptical hi-tech theme park to ever-changing garden that carries a seed of transcultural space for alternative currents and is a ground for temporary structures such as circuses and summer theaters.
