[spectre] Fwd: Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT presents The Pilgrimage / Pionirsko hodočašće at the European Cultural Center

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Betreff: 	Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT presents The Pilgrimage / 
Pionirsko hodočašće at the European Cultural Center
Datum: 	Sun, 14 May 2023 19:01:17 +0000
Von: 	e-flux Architecture <architecture at mailer.e-flux.com>


Critical Broadcasting Lab

The Pilgrimage / Pionirsko hodočašće
May 18–November 26, 2023

Palazzo Mora
Strada Nova, 3659
30121 Venice
Italy

https://criticalbroadcast.net

Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT announces its participation in /Time 
Space Existence/ at the European Cultural Center in conjunction with the 
2023 Biennale Architecttura in Venice. CBL is presenting a multi-channel 
video and sound installation /The Pilgrimage / Pionirsko hodočašće /on 
the second floor of Palazzo Mora. Please join us for the two days of 
openings at Palazzo Mora, on Thursday, May 18 and Friday, May 19 from 
6–9pm on both days.

In Yugoslavia’s historical laboratory of the future, socialism, 
self-management, tolerance, and inclusion intersected in various ways 
with architectural imagination. Today, the artifacts that constitute 
Yugoslavia’s socialist architectural heritage, and especially those that 
were instrumental in the ideological wiring of several post-war 
generations for anti-fascism and inclusive living, have been swallowed 
by the entropic appetite of aging collective memory, exacerbated by 
various forms of local and global political investment in forgetting 
their meaning. But, for those who choose to claim citizenship to the 
idea of Yugoslavia, now thirty years after its destruction (and do so 
precisely in opposition to crude transitional capitalism and its related 
nationalisms), memorials like the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar 
(vandalized in the summer of 2022) serve as navigational devices, both 
backward into history and forward into the future. Private memories of 
pilgrimages to the memorial sites they mark are as anachronistic in 
contemporary society as these objects themselves. And yet, if this 
anachronism is a way to anchor anti-fascist and transnational 
collectivity, they must be protected. Or, at the very least, remembered.

/The Pilgrimage/ synthesizes “memories” from Yugoslavian elementary and 
high-school visits to these memorial monuments. It offers them in a 
shifting and spatial multi-channel video presentation accompanied by a 
non-linear documentary soundscape. Our A.I. “Stane” (StyleGAN3) has been 
trained on archival and individual photo documentation of the monuments 
to output a series of video interpolations based on them. The six 
monuments currently included are but a sampling, chosen for their 
likelihood to have been visited by Yugoslavia’s youth up until 1991, and 
thus most prone to resonate with the messages of anti-fascism and 
national brotherhood. In offering its synthesized memories of the 
lessons for the future that the original memorials were meant to carry, 
/The Pilgrimage /also presents anti-fascism and unity as political and 
activist positions available (and necessary) today, for the sake of the 
future.

/The Pilgrimage/ is both historical and impossible.

Critical Broadcasting Lab team: Ana Miljački, Professor of Architecture, 
and Director of Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT / Ous Abou Ras, MArch 
Candidate, MIT / Julian Geltman, MArch, MIT / Recording and Design, 
Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade / Calvin Zhong, MArch Candidate, MIT.

Sound design and production: Pavle Dinulović, Assistant Professor, 
Department of Sound.

Collaborators on the project: Melika Konjičanin, Researcher, Faculty of 
Architecture, Sarajevo / Ana Martina Bakić, Assistant Professor, Head of 
Department of Drawing and Visual Design, Faculty of Architecture, Zagreb 
/ Jelica Jovanović, Grupa Arhitekata, Belgrade / Andrew Lawler, Belgrade 
/ Sandro Đukić, CCN Images, Zagreb / Other Tomorrows, Boston.

Supported by: MIT Center for Art Science and Technology (CAST) Mellon 
Faculty Grant.

Critical Broadcasting Lab (CBL) is a space and a platform for the 
production of discursive interventions in architecture culture. It was 
established in 2018 at MIT by Ana Miljački. Its key medium is the 
architectural exhibition expanded to include experiments with the entire 
contemporary ecology of broadcasting media. Its aim is to critique the 
contemporary, expose its deep histories and mount forms of strategic 
preparation for the possibility of imagining better and more just 
futures for and through architecture. CBL's work /Sharing Trainers /was 
included in the São Paulo Architecture Biennale in the fall of 2019, the 
Lab’s /Play Room/ exhibition took place in the Keller Gallery at MIT in 
February of 2020, its /Supertall Tetris/ launched online in December 
2021, and its /See Us See Saw/ collaboration with Pneuhaus, supported by 
Fay Chandler grant at MIT, was presented in April 2022. Since January 
2022 Critical Broadcasting Lab has been collaborating with the 
Architectural League of New York on an ongoing oral history project 
titled: /I Would Prefer Not To/.