Belgrade on the shores of the Pannonian Basin

About

Exhibition Text

Somewhere between forgetting and becoming, a city grows sideways. Block 18 does not belong to memory, nor to prophecy. It belongs to the pause. The breath between two sentences. The last soft print of the vanished Pannonian Sea before it was overwritten by asphalt, scaffolding, and silence.

In this soft geography, where water once made the rules, Block 18 remains resistant –  not as a relic, but as a tension. Here, the soil still remembers being seabed, and the air still carries the rhythm of waves long gone. The blocks of New Belgrade press in with their orthogonal dreams, while across the river, the old city rises in dense nostalgia. Between them: a wide, unsettled front.

The in-between.

Not quite old, not quite new.

Not quite Belgrade.

Not quite not.

This is where the project begins -> not in the act of building, but in the act of staying. Of listening.

The strategy is decomposition, not erasure.

Fragments are not abandoned but held up like fossils, speaking of previous lives.

The new does not arrive with a bang, but in phases –  seasonal, slow, like water reclaiming forgotten ground.

Here, transformation is not spectacle but sediment.

Residents are not displaced, but invited to root deeper, to grow with the soil, not away from it.

This is not urbanism in the modern sense.  It is a refusal to be either whole or finished. The plan imagines a porous city –  one that leaks, that breathes, that remembers its liquid past.

Credits

Group Show

“Aquatectorium – Habitats of the future” Curated by Miloš Stojković. 

Autors of the exhibition work

Davor Ereš, Ljubica Arsić

Authors of the project

Davor Ereš, Ljubica Arsić, Daniel Fuchs i Tatjana Ivanović (Urban-Architectural Open Competition | Third Prize | 2016)

Location

KC Silosi, Belgrade, Serbia

Year

15. Aug-1. Sep 2023