SARA SWAIN

FERAL HOSPITALITY
THINKING OUTSIDE THE HOUSE WITH KEDI

If you’re hesitant, not sure which way to go as you walk about, follow one of my cats.
They will lead you to places, introduce you to people, point out secrets they keep even
from me. They, more than anyone, are the longest continuing residents of the city.
—Gündüz Vassaf, The Voice of Istanbul

FROM CALVERT TO ISTANBUL

Every summer when I was a child growing up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I would spend a couple
of weeks visiting my grandmother at our family’s ancestral home in Calvert, a small outport on the
island’s southern shore. Calvert, much to my delight, hosted a small clowder of stray cats that
wandered freely in the community. As the story goes, an old bachelor who lived across the road had
kept cats for years. When he died in the 1980s his cats were orphaned but his derelict charges
remained, roaming the meadows of the north side of Calvert for nearly 20 years. They belonged to
no one; they belonged to the place (FIG. 1).
A few of these cats were stand-offish, and refused any and all of our advances. Most were friendly
and social, tame enough to greet us, welcome us, or even let us pet them. None, however, showed any
interest in coming inside the house. My cousins and I gave them names. We talked about their
personalities, their relationships, and their lives. My favourite was a tiny elfin tabby whom I christened
Blue-Eyed Beauty on account of her lone cerulean cataract. The community tended to the cats when
it was needed. Sometimes, my aunt would take in a queen who was about to give birth, and on more
macabre occasions, my uncle would bury the dead.
Each day, they were fed. I loved participating in the feedings. After every meal, any leftover
scraps—gristle and bones from pork chops, silvery codfish skins, green peas lodged in congealed
gravy, and the fatty ends of salt beef—were promptly taken outside and scraped off the plate and onto
the grass at the far edge of the garden. The cats, hearing the tell-tale creak of the opening door followed
by the singular sound of stainless-steel flatware sliding across porcelain, came running from every
direction. Their urgent and expectant mewling would quiet once they began eating. Sometimes there
were a dozen or more of them. Following a long winter, there would often be fewer. Afterwards, when
their hunger was quelled and my act of service completed, they would linger for a time, as I would,
clearing my mind as they cleaned their whiskers.
This memory of Calvert’s cats returned to me as I watched Kedi (2016), a lovingly made
documentary by Turkish-American director Ceyda Torun about Istanbul’s ubiquitous street cats. These
shrewd urban felines lead very different lives than the cats of my youth, but their dynamics with the

Delivered by Intellect to: ➦ FIG. 1 A calico cat sits in an empty bucket in Calvert, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
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 FIG. 2 A man carries bags of food for cats as he makes his daily rounds along the Bosphorus. Still from KEDI
(Ceyda Torun, 2016). Courtesy of oscilloscope Laboratories.
people who lived alongside them was familiar. It looked like a practice of hospitality, but one for which
I had no name. I have coined the term “feral hospitality” to articulate this kind of itinerant
accommodation, a welcoming of the other without welcoming them inside. It is a performative mutual
reception transpiring in a space of encounter that is not restricted to the interior of the house (FIG. 2).
“Feral hospitality” may initially seem like an oxymoron. Hospitality, after all, is associated with
home, welcoming, and belonging. Feral, by contrast, conjures all that is unhomely, unwelcomed, and
does not belong. From the Latin fera, meaning wild, it designates the “nature” that we have left behind
in order to become human. “Feral” is also related to the Latin feralis, which means belonging to the
dead. It signals a forfeiture of human holdings, a reversion to “primitive” origins. But in practice, to
be feral is actually to be lively, worldly, and connective. It only creates discomfort because it unsettles
the neat boundaries we have invented in order to separate nature from culture, animal from human,
wild from domestic, and outside from inside. Embracing the feral prompts us to abandon questions
of who and what belong where, and inquire instead about the world that is, the world that we make
out of strange meetings.
Kedi provides a glimpse of this improvised world. It is ostensibly a film about the interspecies
bonds between cats and the people who love them. However, I read it as a poetic meditation on
hospitality outside the house, in the city street and the cinematic frame (FIG. 3). Hospitality, in the
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FIG. 3 A cat takes a nap on an awning above a bustling city street. Still from KEDI (Ceyda Torun, 2016).
Courtesy of oscilloscope Laboratories.
Western imagination, is traditionally bound to the house and premised on the welcome inside. The
physical limitations of this interior, however, create a sense of scarcity and encourage competition in
ways that ultimately decrease the possibilities for accommodation. European philosophical thought
on hospitality is thus built on a supposition of spatial insufficiency, and this deficit framework
continues to restrict its imagination. Kedi, I argue, opens an aesthetic horizon that helps us envision
an alternative that is more capacious, creaturely, and cosmopolitan.
By taking it outside, the film affirms that hospitality is above all a non-proprietary and
permutating practice. It is a performance of welcoming without necessarily welcoming inside, of
giving without giving up, and giving without necessarily having. It is also a practice of receiving this
welcome without being beholden to, obliged, or subjugated by its offer. The film reveals an ethical
opening, allowing us to understand that the space of hospitality is not something consumed but rather
mutually created by the dynamics and choreographies of encounter. This expands our coordinates of
“home” to mean the shared, multispecies work of accommodating ourselves and others in an
increasingly inhospitable world.
What I am calling “feral hospitality” resonates with the land-based and multispecies relational
frameworks that characterize many Indigenous worldviews, commonly premised upon conceptions
of space that are far more nuanced, complex, and expansive than those found in the European
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tradition.1 As such, their insights would undoubtedly further this discussion. However, I cannot
include them here for I am still on the threshold of this epistemological journey. I can only write from
what I know now, and I welcome the conceptual shift this wisdom may offer as I venture deeper into
this work. Suffice it to say that it is not insignificant that as I am seeking an outside, a space beyond
the West’s limited and proprietary thinking about hospitality, I am guided towards what has been
here all along, albeit obscured by the walls of Western colonialism.
HOSPITALITY’S SPATIAL IMAGINARY
The world is becoming increasingly uninhabitable. Our earthly infrastructure is threatening to
collapse under the weight of disastrous political, economic, epidemiological, and environmental
forces, displacing humans and non-humans at escalating rates and scales. As we scramble for refuge,
we are in the throes of what Bruno Latour calls “monstrous time, the time of cohabitation,” in which,
he claims, “space has replaced time as the great ordering principle.”2 That is to say, our most pressing
concern is not historical. We no longer believe in our ability to steer the present from the past into
the future. Instead we focus on managing our current coexistence in a chaotic world. This is both a
question of space and of its allocation, which is ultimately a matter of hospitality.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines hospitality as: “The act or practice of being hospitable;
the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers, with liberality and goodwill.” In its
many forms and expressions, hospitality is a practice that takes place in time and space while,
significantly, giving time and making space. While hospitality’s temporal dimensions are important,
I am most interested in its spatial configurations. I am particularly curious about the way in which
the space for the potential performance of hospitality has been bound to the private human dwelling
of the house. I wish to unfix hospitality from this place. Using Kedi as my guide, I recast hospitality
as both a spatial practice that creates accommodations and a conceptual practice that creates their
conditions of possibility.
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that space is neither an inert object nor a setting
or container for action and experience. To understand space, he writes, we must address its “theoretical
concept and practical reality in indissoluble conjunction.”3 Space, Lefebvre contends, is actively
produced through the dialectical relationships between its perceived, conceived, and lived aspects.4
This spatial triad sets the foundation for his dynamic theory of space, wherein it is both product and
producer of our experiences, thoughts, and actions, and simultaneously their very precondition.
Space is thus central to our understanding of social life, and therefore of hospitality. Space not
only frames our social practices and performances of accommodation, but also makes them
possible and thinkable. And yet space remains underexplored in much of the discourse on
hospitality, which is significantly informed by Western European philosophers. Immanuel Kant,
Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida have certainly made considerable contributions to our
understanding of hospitality’s political and ethical stakes, exploring whether it is conditional or
unconditional, aspirational or outright impossible. Though they do not explicitly address the
question of space in their deliberations, they nevertheless make tacit assumptions about the place
from which hospitality begins.
Hospitality is premised upon and inseparable from the concept of home. Yet, while the meaning
of “home” is hardly self-evident, it is often treated as such. Feminist theorist Irina Aristarkhova
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argues that the Western concept of home has long been predicated on the notion of what she calls
the “matrix.”5 This generic space for dwelling and becoming, she claims, has been idealized,
dematerialized, and also gendered.6 It has been treated as a purely metaphorical, always available and
abstract receptacle modelled after the womb, that maternal ur-site from which life originates.
To rehabilitate its unthought foundation, Aristarkhova materializes this first, maternal hospitality,
and in doing so, illustrates that life begins not so much from a place as from the activities that produce
space and matter for the other. Aristarkhova reinvigorates hospitality’s performative aspects and her
work helps us think through the deficient spatial imaginary at hospitality’s core. Whether the matrix
takes the form of the womb, the nation-state, or the human house, the stubborn legacy of European
thought confines this space of possibility to a sited, owned, bound, and finite human dwelling place.
In order to appreciate Kedi’s creative wandering, it is necessary to revisit the philosophical locale from
which it strays.
HOSPITALITY IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT
Kant, in his influential essay “To Perpetual Peace,” takes a political approach to hospitality, defining
it as the encounter between citizen and visitor at the border of the nation-state.7 He presumes that,
since human beings are naturally antagonistic, an injunction to welcome visitors without hostility is
the only way to reduce conflict and assure mutual survival. This hospitality is preventive and must
be conditional. The other is welcomed, or rather tolerated, but only with certain stipulations: they
must be identified, behave well, and not stay too long. We do not offer hospitality because it is good
and righteous, Kant supposes, but because it is what we must do.
Levinas takes a more ethical approach, defining hospitality as the encounter between the Self and
the Other at the threshold of the home. In Totality and Infinity, he claims that radical openness to and
inclusion of the stranger is the very basis of subjectivity. As such, the individual’s encounter with the
world is founded on unconditional hospitality, and therefore is fundamentally ethical. For Levinas, the
Other has to be welcomed without asking for anything in return. This unconditional receptivity
provides the very foundation for ethics, from which political, social, and cultural life follow.8
Kant’s conditional and Levinas’s unconditional are often considered two distinct kinds of
hospitality. But Derrida posits that they are two inseparable and contradictory dimensions of
hospitality that cannot be resolved.9 Both are equally impossible. Conditional hospitality is too
calculating to be truly hospitable, while unconditional hospitality is far too dangerous to offer (or
receive). An absolute openness to the advent of the unknowable Other, who could be a friend or a
foe, leaves us vulnerable. We risk losing sovereignty over our home, which is what allows us to provide
hospitality in the first place. This is the paradox: we must own something in order to give it; but once
we give it, we no longer own it, and can therefore no longer give. Hospitality ceases to be possible in
the very act of offering it.
Thus, hospitality requires that a door be opened to the stranger, and a threshold crossed; and yet
the very presence of a door or threshold means that this welcome is not without condition,
anticipation, or calculation. Derrida calls this the pas d’hospitalité, playing on the double entendre,
as he is wont to do: both not hospitality and the step of hospitality, the step across the doorway which,
always yet to come, marks a transgression, a violation.10 Hospitality in Derrida’s estimation is
aspirational; like an asymptote, its arrival is always infinitely deferred.
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 Hospitality never takes place because of its internal contradiction: inside hospitality is an
irreducible kernel of hostility. Derrida coined the portmanteau “Hostipitality” to express their intimate
and inextricable entanglement—incidentally, while delivering a talk in Istanbul in 1997, nearly 20
years before Kedi’s making.11 The term emphasizes hospitality’s Latin root hostis, which means at once
host or guest, stranger or enemy. Written in hospitality’s very core is the tenuous difference between
host and visitor, between having, giving, and receiving, and the menacing mutability of a fond
welcome that can all too easily become a threat.
Derrida is not wrong; even the most welcome of guests can jeopardize the integrity of the home
and the host’s relationship to it. Unclarified and unreasonable expectations, differentials in needs and
desires, thwarted efforts, crossed boundaries, and insufficient gratitude can upset the delicate dance
between host and guest. It can lead to mounting anxieties, tensions, resentments, and conflict.
Unexpected or unwelcome guests create an even riskier predicament, as the devastating consequences
of European colonialism illustrate. Growing up in colonial Algeria and coming of age under Vichy
France’s anti-Semitic policies, Derrida was particularly sensitized to hospitality’s fickle foundations.12
The precarity of hospitality was undoubtedly even more pronounced for Levinas, who narrowly escaped
the Holocaust by being interned in a Nazi labour camp.13 Surely this informed his preoccupation with
hospitality, and his insistence that it is unwavering and offered without any limitations or conditions.
While continental theory on hospitality tends to focus on what it means to be a host, being a
guest is also at stake. Appearing in a space where one does not belong is just as fraught as opening up
one’s space to a stranger. It means venturing with uncertainty into an unfamiliar realm, where one
lacks the status, authority, or ability to predict whether a greeting may be extended. Refugees and
asylum seekers, for example, flee one danger but risk finding others. They are not, however, the visitors
that thinkers like Kant had in mind. His elaborations on hospitality are in the service of a global
cosmopolitanism. They advance not so much a right to refuge as a right to visitation, a right “to the
common possession of the surface of the earth.”14 In this light, his discussion reads more like a
safeguard against violent reactions to European expansion. He was seemingly critical of colonialism
and European conquest, as illustrated in his reference to the “inhuman behaviour of the civilized…
States of our continent.”15 However, his characterization of Europe as “civilized” implies that it is the
sole proprietary site of hospitality, while “uncivilized” non-European territories are relegated to
hospitality’s wild, ungoverned outside. Europeans imagine themselves as hosts, even when they are
uninvited and violent guests, and “To Perpetual Peace” intimates that Europeans have a right to feel
safe wherever they go, as safe as they do at home.
There is indeed a kernel of hostility inside hospitality, for both host and guest. However, this
hostility may not necessarily be intrinsic to hospitality itself. Instead, it may be thought as an outcome
of the Western imagination’s siting of hospitality’s blueprint in the human home—be it the house or
the nation—allowing it to be the unexamined foundation that gives form and structure to hospitality.
Even Derrida felt the insufficiency of “home” as the model for hospitality and considers whether
greater possibilities may lie outside it. In Of Hospitality, he ponders: “Is it rather only starting from
the dislocation of the shelterless, the homeless, that the authenticity of hospitality opens up?” He then
provocatively ponders, “Perhaps only the one who endures the experience of being deprived of a
home can offer hospitality.”16 In his attempt to think outside the traditional concept of “home,” Derrida
can only summon homelessness and deprivation.
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This all-or-nothing logic is built into the human dwelling place, at least in the European tradition.
As Luce Irigaray has remarked, houses are often built around bodily needs, rather than desires for
connection or disconnection. The contemporary architects of human houses, she writes, “have given
no thought as to how to articulate one’s own world and the closeness with the other. They have not
asked themselves how to harmonize subsistence, each one’s becoming, a relationship with the other
that respects everyone” (emphasis added).17 The house aims to exile us from the outside world or
seeks to dissolve our differences inside. The human house may have partitions, but unity is the logic
of its design. From the outside, this unity may offer a specious welcome, but once inside, its
accommodations are revealed to be restrictive, exclusive, and temporary. The interior’s perceived
spatial scarcity incites demand and competition, leading to questions and conflicts about who belongs,
why, and for how long. This cultivates a sacrificial and substitutive logic: you or me, us or them. There
can be no escape outside, because it is the inside that is designed to be the escape.
Spatial scarcity is therefore the unthought foundation upon which our understanding of
hospitality is built. This is not to say that hospitality is never beset by questions of scarcity: it is indeed
dependent on access to and distribution of often finite material and immaterial resources. But Irigaray
reminds us that hospitality is not limited to giving, receiving, and having; it is also performative and
creative. She argues that if hospitality is to be truly welcoming, self and other must remain mindful
of their own separate dwelling places. This is where they may be able to encounter one another as
different and to generate additional, bespoke space that supports mutual co-existence.18 This mutual
hospitality is a non-hierarchical welcoming based neither on the ceding of space nor on assimilation
into it. This hospitality finds an auspicious articulation in Kedi.
HOMELESS CATS VS. HOMELESS PEOPLE
As she set out to film Kedi, Torun admits she worried about how she would defend making a
documentary about Istanbul’s famous street cats at a time when the city, on the front lines of the
Syrian refugee crisis, was beset by political turmoil and economic instability.19 “Every day we
questioned the fact that we were making a cat movie,” she confesses, “but also it would highlight the
reason why we were making it.”20 She describes the film as a personal response to her country’s
troubles, expressed in the form of a love letter to Istanbul and its cats.21 The film premiered in February
2016, just five months before Turkey’s failed coup d’état attempt. After a limited theatrical release, it
was distributed on YouTube Red, the site’s premium streaming service—a fitting home for the film,
given the predilection of YouTube (and the Internet writ large) for cat videos.22
But this is no ordinary cat video. Though it may be called Kedi (“cat” in Turkish), it is a “street
film.” It locates the city’s heart in its teeming thoroughfares, inhabited, enlivened, and enriched by
loitering feline flâneurs. These are no generic cats, but singular wanderers, named Sari, Duman,
Bengü, Aslan Parçasi, Gamsiz, Psikopat, and Deniz. Like Istanbul itself, once called Byzantium and
then Constantinople, these cats go by many names. As nomads, they have cultivated meaningful
dynamics with their surroundings. The film carefully tends to the relationships between the cats and
the city itself, its people, neighbourhoods, architectures, histories, and cultures. It is not just about
cats, but about the significance of their presence and inclusion.
The film opens with an aerial shot, giving a God’s-eye view of the urban sprawl bisected by the
Bosphorus. The camera descends into the city and offers a series of rooftop views and sidewalk scenes
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FIG. 4 A cat idles in front of anti-Erdoğan street graffiti. Still from Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2016).
Courtesy of oscilloscope Laboratories.
that find cats comfortably in situ, often surrounded by humans. Cats and humans share the city streets,
Kedi suggests, and so they share the space of the frame. Together, held by the camera and the city’s
architecture, they appear like symbiotic species, familiars, and sometimes friends with kindred
experiences and entwined fates. The film stands as an affirmation of what persists in the face of
precarity, which is to say, the mutually distributed work of relating to one another, welcoming others
as belonging but different, and keeping space open for the performance and mutual enjoyment (or
annoyance) of that difference.
In the end, no one openly admonished Torun for her choice of subject. But if the preponderance
of cat puns is any indication, few critics took Kedi seriously. Vanessa Larson for The Washington Post
concluded that Kedi “isn’t for everyone’s taste. But for cat lovers who can’t get enough of on-screen
felines, you could say it’s purr-fectly charming.”23 The reviews were mostly positive, but tended to
emphasize the film’s emotional beats, glossing over its deeper ethical and political stakes. The
Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described the film as “sweet-natured,” if “a little bit twee.”24 Torun does
not offer up these cats as some sort of therapeutic Jordan Peterson–like “antidote for chaos.”25 Kedi
affirms that the world is indeed chaotic, often painfully so; it confronts poverty, gentrification,
displacement, mental illness, theft, violence, disease, suffering, and death, and cats are bound up with
this chaos.
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As a case in point, the publicly funded 1453 Istanbul Culture and Arts magazine was shut down
by the city’s municipal government after it published a review of Kedi. In the aftermath of the 15 July
2016 coup attempt, the Turkish government, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been increasingly
intolerant of any perceived or actual expression of political dissent in the country. The magazine
garnered attention when it published a still showing anti-Erdoğan street graffiti behind one of the
cats (FIG. 4). Deeming the image treasonous, Istanbul officials ordered the closure of the publication,
removed all copies from circulation, shut down its website, fired its editorial staff, and promised to
file criminal charges against them.26 It is a powerful image that emphasizes the cats’ inseparability
from the city street, suggesting that the political tensions are changing the livability of Istanbul for
them just as much as for the city’s human inhabitants.
And yet, Torun’s initial misgivings about making the film are not surprising. Turning towards
animals is often equated with turning away from humans. This is vividly illustrated by the commotion
that accompanied the Canadian Federation of Humane Society’s inaugural fundraiser “Just for Cats:
Internet Cat Video Festival” at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2014. Sporting a pair of cat ears, Loreen
Harper—the wife of Canada’s then–prime minister—was delivering her opening remarks when she
was heckled by Hayley King. The angry activist accused Harper of diverting the public’s precious
attention away from the government’s inaction in regard to missing and murdered Indigenous women
in Canada. Security guards promptly escorted King out of the theatre. In the meantime, Harper
quickly recovered with an acknowledgement that while these women are important, “Tonight we’re
here for homeless cats.”27
At first glance, King and Harper may appear to be on opposing sides of a debate about the
significance of animals. King seems to represent the position that animals do not matter as much as
humans, and are therefore a frivolous and dangerous distraction from more important issues. Her
criticism resonates with Kedi’s more patronizing reviews, articulating a popular skepticism and
suspicion towards animals—pets in particular—and the people who care about them. Nowhere is this
better illustrated than in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s indelible summation, “Anyone who likes
cats or dogs is a fool.” They argue in A Thousand Plateaus that cats and dogs are individuated and
sentimentalized animals that can only ever “draw us into a narcissistic contemplation.”28 Hannah
Arendt equates affection for cats (and dogs) as part of the “modern enchantment with ‘small things,’”
and a sure sign of the erosion of public life in the postwar era.29
Harper, meanwhile, ostensibly stands for the position that animals do matter as much as humans.
However, her position still presupposes that animals and humans cannot be considered together and
at the same time, which suggests they are categorically different. Harper’s failure to justify a focus on
animals in the face of human suffering only serves to affirm the notion that cats are indeed taking up
valuable real estate in the finite vista of human attention. She provides no legitimate excuse for such
a squandering, blaming it on scheduling, and framing it simply as a temporary and circumstantial
allocation of time and place: “Tonight we’re here for homeless cats.”
Though they seem at odds, both positions isolate animals from humans and share the same
either/or logic. This view is enabled and bolstered by the perceived scarcity at the heart of our
understanding of accommodation. Animals and the attention they garner can indeed drift into
shallow, solipsistic reflection. But this has little to do with the animals themselves, and everything to
do with the amount of space we believe is available for them. Animals are deemed a trivial matter, an
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inane and even pernicious distraction, because they have to be seen this way. The resources for
attention and care are perceived to be so limited that they simply cannot accommodate both animals
and humans in the same sphere of significance. If we give attention to cats, the logic goes, we take
something away from humans. It is the supposition of scarcity that makes this exclusion both possible
and necessary.
The deeply troubling question of who matters more or less, cats or humans, finds no good answer.
It inevitably leads to protocols of inclusion or exclusion. While human exceptionalism appears to
grant intrinsic value to human life, it is contingent on a hierarchy that often functions instrumentally
to affirm and favour certain humans and not others. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, Homo sapiens,
our species designation, has no essential meaning. The human is given no unique feature other than
the ability to recognize itself as human. It is “neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is,
rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human.”30 Our species reproduces
itself through what he calls, “the anthropological machine of humanism.”31 It is an instrument that
defines a living being’s worth according to its elusive degree of “humanness.” The criteria for this
worthiness are not constant; they can shift on a whim, as we have seen in the humanization of animals
and the animalization of humans throughout history.32
But that is not all. This calculating question also distracts us from the more pressing one: does it
really have to be one or the other? I wager that it does not. For the human does not exist without the
animal. Since we cannot address one without addressing the other, we need to make equal space for
them, both and together. This involves confronting the unthought scarcity underpinning hospitality,
and imagining space as something that is not consumed by its occupants, but created by them. As
Lefebvre has so adeptly argued, space is produced; it is, above all, a perceptual, practical, and
conceptual production.33 In order to address the space of hospitality, we must tend to the resources
that ensure its reproduction.
Kedi presents an intervention that enables us to see “home” as more than a house. It also shows
that animals and humans are co-participants in its making: collaborators who mobilize their
differences to create together hospitable places for mutual co-existence. Availing herself of cinema’s
specificity as both a medium and a space for aesthetic expression and ethical contemplation, Torun
renders this alternative practice of hospitality among cats and people in Istanbul and, at the same
time, embodies and extends it. As such, Kedi illustrates the salutary dimension of a cinematic mode
of attention, which can produce space for selves and others.
THE HOSPITALITY OF THE CINEMATIC FRAME
Our gaze is inhospitable towards animals. According to Agamben’s anthropological machine, we only
look at animals to learn more about ourselves. Thus, we can never see them. They appear only as
mirror-like images that affirm similarity to us or difference from us. In this way, the anthropological
machine is also a computing machine, one that sorts living beings into those who belong to the human
community and those who do not.34 Our perspective is unable to genuinely welcome animals—and
therefore humans too—but Agamben’s concept leaves no room for the possibility of seeing otherwise.
In acknowledging the unwavering power of the anthropological machine, he ends up abiding it.
Animals are denied a capacity for self-presentation or resistance, while humans are granted a gaze so
powerful that it unequivocally subsumes all beings under its own species logic.
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Such overstatement of human domination is rampant in the discourse around animals in the
visual field. “In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared,” John Berger laments in
“Why Look at Animals?,” arguably the most influential text in the study of animals in visual culture.
“Today we live without them,” he declares.35 As animals began to disappear in modernity as a result
of the destructive processes of industrialization and urbanization, they reappeared in images and
spectacle. Berger defines all animals in the contemporary world as simulacra: not just those found
on screens or in books, but those living in city streets, parks, zoos, and human homes. In Berger’s
estimation, these are not living, breathing animals; they are spectral approximations of real animals.
A number of scholars have taken up this position. In Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of
Wildlife Akira Lippit remarks that, given the omnipresence of animals in film, cinema constitutes
nothing more than “a vast mausoleum for animal being.”36 As Jonathan Burt notes, such morbid
attitudes manifest a strong distrust of images and their capacity to articulate life.37 In this way, they
perpetuate the iconophobia that Martin Jay identified in twentieth-century continental theory.38
Overall, there is a disavowal and denigration of the visual animal, and a favouring of what Burt calls
“the textual animal,” a symbolic animal that operates as a linguistic sign that carries whatever meaning
it is assigned.39 The textual animal is welcomed because it stays in its place; unlike the visual animal,
it does not disturb the human conceptual architecture.
Certainly, many animals are physically disappearing, but many others continue to appear, often
in unexpected places, such as cats in the streets of Istanbul. As much as these cats can be understood
as symbols of the city, this symbolism is deeply rooted in a material reality. We lack both aesthetic
and theoretical approaches to properly deal with such a relationship, as animal imagery is rarely
treated as a legitimate expression of real animal presence. Cinema is well equipped to address this
presence. Because of its inclination towards realism, it can affirm the life and ontological integrity of
animals in animal appearances.
Though cinema takes many different forms, I recognize realism as its native logic, in the tradition
of André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Jean Epstein.40 And this realism, contingent upon the
automatism of the camera, allows cinema to produce a non-anthropocentric view of the world. This
is cinema’s fortuitous way of respecting the anatomy of the real: “On the screen man [sic] is no longer
the focus of the drama,” Bazin writes, “because man [sic] in the world enjoys no a priori privilege
over animals and things.”41 He is not the only one to take notice. Anat Pick identifies this displacement
as cinema’s “zoomorphism,” while James L. Cahill refers to it as cinema’s “Copernican vocation.”42
Realism does not mean that cinema offers a “realistic” rendering of the world, an indexical
reproduction that merely confirms the existence of all that we have already seen. Cinema at its best,
Bazin contends, is revelatory not repetitive: the camera discloses the world to us in a way that “our
eyes alone could not have taught us to love.”43 As Daniel Morgan surmises in his rearticulation of
Bazin, realism is the meaningful way a film acknowledges the real world through its style. Realism,
he asserts, serves as “an analytical tool, one that can get at the way a film works.”44 It creates an
opportunity to discuss both film and reality at the same time, each elevating the other in the process.
This is how realism creates space, and fosters a point of intersection between aesthetics and ethics.
For Bazin, style should work in the service of the real. This is why he appreciated directorial
restraint. He saw the director as reality’s steward. Style is less about authorial flair and more about
what transpires between the disinterested automatism of the camera and the capricious world it aspires
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to represent. Long takes and deep focus are some of Bazin’s favourite techniques. They are invitational,
not coercive, and allow worldly details to flourish in the frame. These techniques grant cinematic
representation a fidelity to reality as it is, rather than as the filmmaker wants us to see it. It is this
loyalty to reality that allows cinema to reveal the ontological weight and existential equality of all
beings and things.
Through realism, cinema affirms the co-existence of things and the relations among them. In
this way, cinema can be particularly hospitable because it provisions invitational spaces: a livable
space for whatever finds itself on screen and an observational space for spectators in front of the
screen. These two spaces are inherently connected: onscreen and offscreen worlds cannot exist
without each other. Industrialized modernity may have initiated a crisis in our experience of reality,
Kracauer maintains, but cinema brings back to us the “texture of everyday life,” and in so doing
“virtually makes the world our home.”45 To give something our attention is to attend to it, to give it
practical help and care, to apply one’s mind and energies to it. Attention thus becomes concomitant
with the practice of hospitality and home-making. Originating from the Latin verb attendere, which
means “to stretch,” attention suggests that the available surface area may be far greater than what we
readily perceive and admit.

KEDI’S PRACTICES AND AESTHETICS OF HOSPITALITY

In the spirit of cinematic realism, Kedi faithfully renders the nuances of the multi-species
entanglements that characterize Istanbul. It provides an occasion for us to contemplate how we might
dwell with others in our own worlds. It opens up space for thought because it both represents the
dynamics of feral hospitality and embodies them in its production process.
Kedi is a multi-species social documentary that is both about cats and partially directed by them.
The cats helped Torun chart the route of the film. Originally, for example, she received stories about
35 different cats. She followed up on dozens of leads but was only able to film 19 of them, seven of
which made it into the final cut. Cat appearances are unpredictable and ultimately she could only
film the cats who wanted to be followed. She explains how she got something like their consent: “if
we approached the cat and she didn’t want to be filmed, we left; if she stuck around that meant she
was giving us permission to shoot.”46
In order to film the cats on their own terms, Torun and Charlie Wuppermann, her partner and
director of photography, made the camera cat-like and attuned to their movements. They customized
their rigs to film the cats at their level, just over their shoulders. They adjusted what was happening
in the frame, remotely.47 Alternating between shallow and deep focus, the film gives ample view of
the cats navigating their environments, which they in turn create with each step. The city unfolds
around their peripatetic paws. The camera too pussyfoots around, tracking the cats horizontally and
vertically through the city streets and alleys, into open-air markets, under and up to rooftops, over
fences and balconies, and along gutters. The film takes great care to render with rich detail the
expansive territory that lies beyond the confines of the house. It suggests the abundant space for
possible hospitality through its subjects’ many interactions as they move through the city.
The film presents the cats’ forms, textures, colours, and movements in all their indexical
singularity. Their distinctive personalities are underscored by the film’s soundtrack with each cat
getting its own musical theme. The original score is playful and percussive. Marimbas and
FIG. 5 Duman, a regular at a local delicatessen, signals that he is ready for his daily feed from outside the window.
Still from Kedi (Ceyda Torun, 2016). Courtesy of oscilloscope Laboratories.
glockenspiels create sounds redolent of the pitter-patter of padded cat feet, while buoyant Turkish
pop music suggests the dovetailing of cats with the country’s popular culture. We also learn about
the cats and their idiosyncrasies from the humans Torun interviews—who are significantly never
named. They are knowledgeable about particular cats, their family histories, their illnesses and
injuries, their encounters and relationships with other cats. These people are familiar with the cats’
dispositions, their activities, the places they frequent, the foods they like, when they are hungry, and
how they like to be touched—or not. However, humans do not speak for the cats. These cats
communicate on their own behalf.
Wittgenstein famously insisted that, “if a lion could speak, we would not understand him,” but
Kedi suggests that actually, we might.48 The cats here speak through their postures, gestures,
comportments, and vocalizations. And there is understanding with the humans with whom they
share interests, affects, and experiences—if only something cobbled together and provisional. One
woman in the film remarks, that “even though we don’t speak one another’s language,” through the
tactile encounter, “we immediately form a shared language.”
Take Duman, “The Gentleman,” for example, who visits an upscale delicatessen every day. He
never enters the deli, even if the door is left open. Outside, he makes a swimming motion with his
front paws on the windows to signal that he is hungry (FIG. 5). The staff get the message; they

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promptly prepare and send out his usual Emmental cheese and smoked turkey. Gamsiz, meanwhile,
regularly appears at the door of a woman’s second-floor balcony. Sitting at an angle, he calmly places
one paw on the window to indicate his wish to come inside. Charmed, she always lets him in for a
feed, and out again when he is ready to go.
These cats remain autonomous to varying degrees while also accepting hospitality from their
neighbours: food, water, shelter, health care, and affection. One man visits a litter of abandoned kittens
every day, feeding them milk with a dropper. When a kitten becomes a casualty of an offscreen fight
with a larger male cat, another man delicately shelters its unconscious body during a taxi ride to the
vet. People have running tabs at veterinary clinics, paying for services themselves, or using
contributions from neighbours. These accommodations are distributed across the community rather
than falling on a sole host, and offered by those who have the money, the time, and the energy to share.
No one expects the cats to repay their “debt,” but the animals do sometimes offer affection and
attention in return. They also provide many with a sense of purpose and worldly connection, as well
as opportunities to create art and philosophize about God, love, and the meaning of life. One
fisherman claims that, when he was destitute, a cat led him to a lost wallet with the exact amount of
money he needed. A woman cooks 20 pounds of chicken a day to feed over 60 cats. “I heal my wounds
by healing theirs,” she says. Another man confesses that he was suicidal when he started caring for
the cats, and that this has since given him a sense of purpose and a renewed commitment to living.
“When I play with my cat,” Michel de Montaigne long ago wondered, “who knows whether I do not
make her more sport than she makes me?”49 It is an important point, especially when we consider
the mutuality of affection. Outside the house, host and guest are impossible to identify; it is harder
to grasp who is offering hospitality to whom. This interaction is not a transaction in the economy of
hospitality, but a different currency with unpredictable flows.

ISTANBUL AS CAT’S CRADLE

Cats are ubiquitous in Istanbul. They are always on the scene; even when they are not, they are always
on the verge of appearing. In March 2018, a stray cat sauntered onto the field at the city’s Vodafone
Park, holding up a televised UEFA Champions League football match between Turkey and Germany.50
That October, another cat showed up to groom itself on the runway at Istanbul’s Esmod International
Fashion Show, before casually strolling down the catwalk, playfully batting at a model along the way.51
Cats are everywhere outside the house; they are not homeless but very clearly at home in Istanbul.
In drawing our attention to the proficiency and ease with which the cats get around, the film
makes it clear that the city’s landscape, design, history, and culture make it particularly hospitable to
cats. We see cats ambling next to the Bosphorus, on and alongside boats. We see them slinking
through the city’s cobblestone streets in the thick of pedestrians, and hustling customers at café tables.
They sleep on sun-dappled awnings, tuck into alleys, and slip into sewers. They feast among
scavenging gulls on freshly caught fish, rummage through plastic bags and garbage cans, and lurk
under market stalls. Expert climbers, we see them roam rooftops, balancing on ledges, bounding over
dilapidated piers, and nestling in cardboard boxes. They steal strokes and pats from passers-by, jump
up on the laps of people they like, and implore humans to open doors for them.
One of the world’s oldest port cities, Istanbul has welcomed many human and feline visitors over
the years. Travelling down the Bosphorus on European ships during the Ottoman Empire, cats would
FIG. 6 Sailors surround the ship’s cat Convoy, asleep in a miniature hammock on board HMS Hermione,
Gibraltar, 26 November 1941. Photo: Lt S.J. Beadell. © Imperial War Museum, London. Catalogue number A 6410.
sometimes wander off upon landing and settle in the city. Cats were routinely taken aboard boats on
long journeys. Ship’s cats were not only mascots and companions, they also hunted mice and rats,
protecting cargo and food rations, as well as essential textiles like life preservers, ropes, and sails (FIG.
6). Their acute sense of sight, sound, and smell allowed them to detect environmental changes
affecting the ship, while their agility and excellent balance made them natural seafarers.52
On land, cats were also welcomed for keeping Istanbul’s rodent population under control,
particularly as the Ottomans built the city’s first sewer system. This continues to this day. One cat
seen in Kedi lives harbourside, hunting. A member of the neighbouring restaurant’s staff explains,
“We don’t tell him to hunt mice. He’s assumed it as his duty.” This added benefit of cats certainly
explains why they may have been free to roam in the city, even inside holy places. Gli the cat, the
Internet celebrity who currently loiters at Hagia Sophia, is certainly a testament to this.53 Though
officially a secular country since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey has been significantly
influenced by Islam. Cats are considered ritually clean animals in the Islamic tradition.54 It is said

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that Muhammad was a “cat person,” though cats were likely valued for their help in protecting sacred
books, textiles, and spaces for prayer. New archaeological evidence also suggests that the Turkish
fondness for cats predates the Ottomans. During the Middle Ages, while cats were being persecuted
by other Christians across Western Europe, Byzantine rule treated them quite well.55
The living but unspoken agreement between cats and humans in Istanbul has made for cats that
are neither wild nor fully tamed, not exactly stray nor accurately feral. They might best be described
as “liminal denizens.” Sue Donaldson and Will Kimlicka coined this expression to refer to adaptive
generalists who live “flexibly and [are] non-specifically dependent on humans.”56 Even this term,
however, fails to capture the heterogeneity of cats and their unique, individual relationships with their
surroundings. Of course, cats, as a species—felis silvestris catus—have long troubled their “domestic”
classification, refusing to stay where humans insist on putting them.
Cats, unlike other domesticated species, have diverged little from their wild counterparts.
Domestic cats retain many “wild” traits, including their ability to hunt and their notorious resistance
to human training. “While dogs think people are God, cats don’t,” one man remarks in the film.
“They’re not ungrateful, they just know better.” Their refusal to submit to human will grants cats a
certain allure. It has also led to the assumption that cats were never really domesticated in the first
place, just opportunistic creatures appearing at the right place and time. However, this shortchanges
what domestication actually means. The commonly held assumption is that domestication is a process
initiated by humans to bring a species under our control. Stephen Budiansky argues, by contrast, that
it is more akin to a mutual arrangement carried out by humans and animals together, inspired by the
need of both species to adapt to their changing environments.57 Wild cats likely loitered around the
granaries of the first agricultural settlements nearly 10,000 years ago, chasing rodents, living in “free”
and “cooperative” association with humans.58 And domestic cats continue to loiter to this day.
But cats are equally hospitable to Istanbul and serve as enduring conduits of its culture. “Cats
have lived in what is now Istanbul for thousands of years,” reads the film’s introductory title card.
“They have seen empires rise and fall and the city shrink and grow.” While Istanbul exists in constant
flux, cats are its one constant. They have come to represent independence, vulnerability, adaptability,
and resilience in the face of instability, but as Kedi illustrates, they also embody these qualities.
Likewise they render and enact the country’s own lasting autonomy through shifting sovereignties,
allegiances, and dependencies.
Kedi reveals Istanbul as a matrix of accommodation, illustrating that its architecture and terrain
allow the unique feline form of cat-being to impress itself into the shape and surface of the city. The
film ends under the pall of unprecedented urban development that threatens to make the city both
unrecognizable and inhospitable to its denizens and citizens. By locating “home” in the performative
acts of hospitality that are negotiated between cats and people outside the house, Kedi is hopeful that
the Istanbul they know and love will survive. Through their actions and attentions, they may
reinvigorate the knowledge that we need each other now more than ever. When urban design and
physical architecture fail to support us, we can only rely on our own efforts to mend the gaps and
sustain our continued co-existence.
In doing so, Kedi shows how cinema too is a process, an action that extends attention to welcome
others. It creates space to entertain even the most liminal beings by affirming their difference, their
autonomy, and their relationships to and implications in the worlds to which they belong. This
106 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
capacious aesthetic and ethic offers both a counterpoint to and a critique of the scarcity that underpins
our current notions of hospitality, which feeds into the growing inhospitality of urban design.
CONCLUSION
Hospitality, as it has been conceptualized in the Western tradition, bears within it a competitive, and
therefore deathly logic of scarcity. Conditional or unconditional, our only options appear to be
Kantian tolerance for the sake of self-preservation or Levinasian self-sacrificing altruism. For Derrida,
neither is desirable, or achievable. This is the aporia he recognizes at the heart of hospitality, which
keeps it perpetually out of reach. Such a conclusion, however, is a consequence of the way hospitality
has been tethered to the human dwelling place, and trapped by its spatial scarcity. Within this
architecture, hospitality can only take up space, but cannot make it. Confined to the house, we busy
ourselves with calculating and evaluating who deserves to take up space and why. We forget there is
an outside.
Near the end of his life, Derrida also confronted this trap. In a series of lectures that have since
been collected and published under the title The Animal That Therefore I Am, he relates a telling
anecdote about his cat. He has just woken up at home and gotten out of bed. Still in a state of undress,
he stumbles towards the bathroom and meets his cat midway. They lock eyes for a moment, long
enough for Derrida to see the cat seeing him, naked. This otherwise banal domestic encounter is
rendered significant by the fact that Derrida admits to feeling vulnerable and self-conscious before
her gaze.59 By being temporarily subjugated in the comfort of his own home, he is forced to reckon
not only with the cat’s presence but also with the presence of the cat as a point of view. The cat
suddenly becomes a subject who takes up space in the house and infringes upon Derrida’s experience
of it. The encounter pushes him to re-examine his own assumptions about his human right of way as
host and the animal as automatic guest. He spends the rest of the lectures wrestling with how to
reconcile species difference, its meaning, its stakes, and most importantly, its validity. Unable to find
a way out, he ends with a promise of more to follow.
Derrida died before he could continue this work, but Kedi takes up where he left off. By offering
a glimpse of feral hospitality, the film shows a way beyond this predicament of host or guest, human
or animal. Differences do not need to be reconciled, the film suggests, but they can be entertained.
In another way, the film also works as a rejoinder to Derrida’s pas d’hospitalité. Instead of the
impossibility of hospitality inside, the film extends a possibility in the shape of a cat’s paw at the door,
beckoning us outside the house. Home, the film suggests, is not so much a place as it is an activity of
place-making that we can neither stop nor do alone. We must design strategies to live together, making
and remaking hospitable places, as they continue to be unmade.
NOTES
1 See, for example, Robin Roth, “The Challenges of Mapping Complex Indigenous Spatiality: From Abstract Space to
Dwelling Space,” Cultural Geographies Special Issue: Indigenous Cartographies 16.2 (April 2009): 207–227. For more
general considerations of Indigenous epistemologies, see Cindy Blackstock, “The Breath of Life versus the Embodiment
of Life: Indigenous Knowledges and Western Research,” World Indigenous Nation’s Higher Education Consortium
Journal (2007): 67–79; Michael Anthony Hart, “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development
of an Indigenous Research Paradigm,” Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work 1.1 (2010): 1–16; Margaret Kovach,
Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009);
Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds., What is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy (New York:
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 Routledge, 1999); Leanne Betasamoske Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical 38 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of
Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). California Press, 1993).
2 Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres 39 Jonathan Burt, “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading,” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and
of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 30. Ecology 9.2 (2005): 214.
3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 67. 40 See, for example, André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (1967) (Berkeley: University of California Press,
4 Ibid., 39. 2005); Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960) (Princeton: Princeton University
5 See Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Jean Epstein, “Esprit de cinéma,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and
Press, 2012). Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 330–380; Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections
6 Ibid., 27. on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
7 Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795), in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, 41 Bazin, “Theater and Cinema: Part Two,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (1967) (Berkeley: University of
History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 107. California Press, 2005), 106.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1961), trans. Alfonso Lingis (Boston: Kluwer, 1991). 42 Anat Pick, “Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt,” in Animal Life and the Moving Image, eds. Michael Lawrence and
Laura McMahon (London: BFI / Palgrave, 2015), 221; James Leo Cahill, “Introduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation,”
9 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
in Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 1.
2000).
43 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, 16.
10 Ibid., 75.
44 Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32.3 (Spring 2006): 481.
11 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality.” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities 5.3 (December 2000): 4. 45 Kracauer, 304.
12 Leonard Lawlor, “Jacques Derrida,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition) ed. Edward N. Zalta, 46 Ceyda Torun, interview by Kathryn Bromwich.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/derrida/. 47 Larson.
13 Bettina, Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, 48 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Inner and Outer,” in The Wittgenstein Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/levinas/. Blackwell, 2005), 205.
14 Kant, 22. 49 Michel de Montaigne, “Book II, Chapter XII. Apology for Raimond Sebond,” in The Essays of Montaigne, trans. Charles
15 Ibid., 23. Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt (London: Reeves and Turner, 1877), 156.
16 Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 56. 50 Shikhar Jiwrajka, “Cat Interrupts Football Match Video: Referee Halts Bayern Munich and Besiktas Game in UEFA
Champion League,” LatestLY, 15 March 2018, https://www.latestly.com/sports/football/cat-interrupts-football-match-
17 Luce Irigaray, “How Can We Live Together in a Lasting Way?,” in Key Writings, ed. Luce Irigaray (New York:
video-referee-halts-bayern-munich-and-besiktas-game-in-uefa-champions-league-65960.html.
Continuum, 2004), 124.
51 Megan McCluskey, “Uninvited Cat Nonchalantly Struts Stuff on the Catwalk as Fashion Show Goes On,” Time, 31
18 Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World (New York: Continuum, 2008), 93.
October 2018, https://time.com/5440248/runway-cat/.
19 Ceyda Torun, interview by Kathryn Bromwich, “‘I Made a Love Letter to the City and the Cats,’” The Guardian, 18 June
52 Philippa Sandall, Seafurrers: The Ship’s Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World, an Incidental Story (New York: The
2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/18/kedi-film-istanbul-street-cats.
Experiment, 2018).
20 Ceyda Torun, interview by Rebecca Ford, “How Cats’ Lives Were Captured on Camera in ‘Kedi’ Doc,” Hollywood
53 Ali Kucukgocmen and Bulent Usta, “Gli the Cat Can Stay Even as Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia Changes,” Reuters, 23 July
Reporter, 11 October 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-cats-lives-were-captured-camera-kedi-doc-
2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-hagiasophia-cat-idUSKCN24O2W4.
1056238.
54 Donald Engels, Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat (New York: Routledge, 1999), 150.
21 Torun, interview by Kathryn Bromwich.
55 Yasemin Nicola Sakay, “Storytime: Istanbul and Cats – Bound Together since Byzantine Times,” Daily Sabah, 18 June
22 See, for example, Will Oremus, “Google Computers Teach Themselves to Spot Cats on YouTube,” Slate, 27 June 2012.
2020, https://www.dailysabah.com/life/history/storytime-istanbul-and-cats-bound-together-since-byzantine-times.
23 Vanessa Larson, “‘Kedi’: Documentary Profiles Istanbul’s Famed Street Cats,” Washington Post, 23 February 2017.
56 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, “Liminal Animal Denizens,” in Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
24 Peter Bradshaw, “Kedi Review—Slinking Around with the Street Cats of Istanbul,” The Guardian, 29 June 2017.
(London: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225.
25 “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street” is the last rule in Jordan B. Peterson’s now bestselling self-help
57 See Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New Haven: Yale University
book. See Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House, 2018), 335.
Press, 1999).
26 “Istanbul Municipality Shuts Down Magazine for Publishing Graffiti Reading ‘Erdo-Gone,’” Turkey Purge, 16 May 2017,
58 Ibid., 16.
https://turkeypurge.com/istanbul-municipality-shuts-down-magazine-for-publishing-graffiti-reading-erdo-gone.
59 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham
27 “Loreen Harper Interrupted by Toronto Activist at Cat Video Festival,” CBC.ca, 18 April 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/
University Press, 2008), 3–4.
news/canada/toronto/laureen-harper-interrupted-by-toronto-activist-at-cat-video-festival-1.2614936.
28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 240.
29 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 52.
30 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26.
31 Ibid., 29.
32 Ibid., 77.
33 Lefebvre, 11.
34 Agamben, 37.
35 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 24.
36 Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 187.
37 Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002), 26; and Jonathan Burt, “Morbidity and Vitalism: Derrida,
Bergson, Deleuze, and Animal Film Imagery,” Configurations 14 (2006): 157.

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 IRINA ARISTARKHOVA

WELCOMING ARCHITECTURE OF BUROMOSCOW

This text explores the architecture of hospitality through the notion of welcoming space—its meaning,
feeling, existence, politics, possibility, and power—as developed in the architecture and design of
Buromoscow, a Moscow-based studio founded in 2004 by Julia Burdova and Olga Aleksakova. Since
2016, I have visited Buromoscow several times to conduct interviews with Burdova, Aleksakova, and
their employees. I have studied their architectural and design work, processes, studio environment,
vision, and thinking, as well as their projects, many of which have been realized as buildings, objects,
and spaces, or as creative concepts and installations in exhibitions and competitions across Russia
and abroad. I will argue that Buromoscow’s work, more specifically their reconstruction of
Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow, manifests the vision of welcoming architecture and design, defined
as the spatial production and enactment of individual and communal experiences of hospitality. Those
experiences are subjective, embodied, and materialized in the transformation of specific places.
There is no universal welcoming architecture or design; rather, spatial hospitality is informed
by specific contexts, histories, and subjectivities. The historical context for my analysis of
Buromoscow’s architecture of hospitality is the still-unresolved debate around the creation of publicly
funded spaces in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia for citizens who are welcomed and engaged, and not
merely docile. A key tenet of Gorbachev’s Perestroika in its early years was the desire to endow Soviet
socialism with “a human face.” Following the grand impersonal ideal of “top-down” communism,
the state tried to refocus on creating society from the bottom up, for and by the actual human beings
then living in the USSR. Buromoscow’s welcoming architecture significantly contributes to this wider
debate about the relationship between political and creative power, identity, and the body as it
experiences the lived environment.

IMPETUS: THE FORCE OR ENERGY WITH WHICH A BODY MOVES;

THE FORCE THAT MAKES SOMETHING HAPPEN, OR HAPPEN MORE QUICKLY1
One day in the fall of 2015, I was rushing along Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street, preparing to cross
“Mayakovka” Square. Though its official name is Triumfalnaya Square, most residents call the area
Mayakovskaya or Mayakovka, after the nearest metro station. Named Mayakovskaya in Soviet times,
the square one again became Triumfalnaya in 1992. A large statue of Vladimir Mayakovsky, a poet of
the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution and the early years of the USSR, has dominated the space since
1958. For my entire life, crossing the square was an unpleasant experience. It meant dodging parked
and moving cars that were clearly given priority, and bracing for the wind that blows from every open
corner during the cold months. This time, however, as I walked briskly, my body sensed something
different. I did not need to stop. In fact, there were no cars, no parking, and no traffic lights.

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 Walking right through the now pedestrian-friendly space first surprised me. Then, as I passed
by the familiar, unfriendly Mayakovsky, whose feet remain firmly grounded above human eye level—
one more stone plinth for yet another man to bypass on my way across the city—I encountered
something even more astonishing. A group of men were queuing up, most of them young. Not a big
deal, I told myself, there are a few hot dog–type kiosks next to the concert hall. Then I realized, to my
amazement, that they were waiting to sit on a swing, or rather, on one of several large swings arranged
in two rows. While not as gigantic as Mayakovsky’s dark statue, these bright-white swings could each
accommodate at least two sitters. Happy people were swinging, taking selfies of themselves flying in
public.
In the last four years, passing by the square many times, I have often seen people waiting to swing.
There were young girls and boys using these swings, young people of all ages, genders, ethnicities,
and visible wealth. Many seemed to be local tourists, as surprised as I was that they could swing
together in the city centre. The swings were used day and night. Obsessive, non-stop swinging had
taken over Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square. In no other major city have I seen people queue up for a
giant swing. Some happy participants looked as if the experience had just made their day. Some
preferred gentle swinging; others—like this girl with her high-flying hair and this father-and-son pair
presumably propelled by someone else—just wanted to fly away.
I always enjoyed swinging when I was a child. I could swing for hours, going up and down
tirelessly. I also loved to jump off the swing from up high. Some kids could even go all the way around
the bar, making a full circle. Swinging is an enveloping experience. It makes air tangible. It creates a
breeze even when there is none, allowing us to “remember air,” as feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray
has brilliantly theorized.2 On a swing, we defy gravity, and thus experience lightness and freedom. I
could empathize with those who queued to fly high. I could feel for them and with them. Flying on
a swing is an incredible sensation. There was laughter and lightness on those swings.
I left the square feeling that I had witnessed a miracle: the swings had transformed a huge busy
city and more importantly, its inhabitants, who were now looking at each other and smiling in a place
where this is uncommon. While popular cultural outlets have published articles about the swings, as
I discuss below, the full appreciation of their impact on the contemporary Russian body is yet to come,
as is the study of the impact of Buromoscow on the post-Soviet body’s inhabiting of its environment.
If I sound romantic and over the top in my appreciation of the swings, it is deliberate.3 This Moscow
miracle is so fragile, aesthetically and politically, that I want to give it space and thought before sliding
into my usual habits of criticism and cynicism. Let me meditate on this experience before I return to
my senses.
But why? What made me feel that the simple act of swinging, so commonplace in any playground
in Moscow or anywhere else in the country, was suddenly a blueprint for welcoming architecture?
Am I not exaggerating, blinded by my rather conscious biases about a swing’s power? And what is so
“wrong” with Russians that several large swings would trigger such obsessive use? What kind of body,
what kind of subjectivity, would so intensely need to fly in a public square in central Moscow? Why
is this important? How is it related to the politics of spatial hospitality?
First, I will show that the swings invite locals and visitors to “soften” their view of Moscow, as
Buromoscow intended. In line with my interest in new cultural forms of hospitality, I theorize that
this softening produces a new Russian body. Welcomed in public spaces like never before, this body

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is a manifestation of the politics of welcoming spaces of Buromoscow. I show that the power of these
swings lies in the contrast between the “hard” revolutionary politics and the violent Russian history
represented by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s monument on the one hand, and the pleasurable, romantic,
mindless, and seemingly apolitical act of flying when swinging on the other. The swings contribute
to the way people’s bodies are activated in that square—how they move, who is higher or lower, what
is allowed or forbidden. Buromoscow’s well-articulated and strategic impetus to cast architecture as
a “service provider”4—of hospitality, in this case—also serves as resistance to the Russian cultural
“fortress mentality” centred on the walled-off Kremlin.5
THE HARD CITY
It is not easy to soften Moscow. To understand the invitation that Buromoscow extended and the
public response they received, it is important to grasp the huge contrast between the swings and what
Mayakovsky represents, as both poet and statue in that square, in historical, political, and aesthetic
terms.
The project was commissioned by the Moscow city government after repeated protests
demanding the reconstruction of public spaces, including this square. One of the key supporters of
open-call design competitions was Sergei Kuznetsov, the head architect of the Moscow city
government since 2012. Much like Buromoscow’s goal of softening the city, he sought to support
welcoming architecture. At the Moscow Urban Forum in 2015, he said that, even if in terms of the
climate, “it is impossible for us to become a warmer city… we can become more attractive and
hospitable.”6
Architects like Kuznetsov, Budrova, and Aleksakova have their work cut out for them. They
understand that new architectural and spatial interventions are needed to improve people’s lives in
an ever-challenging economic, political, and aesthetic context. The square has been reconstructed
many times, mostly to accommodate car traffic. In 2013, pedestrians gained a bit more space and a
114 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
Triumfalnaya Square, Moscow, after reconstruction by Buromoscow. Photos by Rachel London, 2019.
kebab restaurant next to Mayakovsky’s statue. However, Moscow citizens and the professional
community of architects, critics, and urban planners protested the reconstruction, which was plagued
by poor-quality materials and a lack of transparency in the choice of contractors. After the protests,
Kuznetsov launched an international architectural competition with the support of the then-new
mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.
The design competition for the reconstruction of the square received 127 entries. The three
finalists included Wowhaus, an American “trans-disciplinary art and design team whose work spans
public art, strategic planning, design and architecture,”7 which has realized projects in a few other
locations in Moscow; St Raum A, a German landscape architecture office that has participated in
other projects in Moscow, also made the shortlist. Buromoscow won, with final project costs estimated
at US$5 million.8
The aesthetic intentions of the other two design finalists—Wowhaus’s place for parades and
celebrations and St Raum A’s red place of Soviet constructivism and Mayakovsky’s poetry—were
strikingly different from Buromoscow’s “place for feeling young and romantic.” On “The Active
Citizen,” the online portal set up by the city government for citizens to vote and provide feedback on
the various iterations of Buromoscow’s proposal, people also commented on the other finalists.9 The
sombre formalism of the American and German proposals reminded them too much of Soviet times.
The public wanted “plants, greens,” and places to sit under a roof or some type of cover. One person
remarked in relation to the two other finalists: “Perhaps, the ‘Soviet’ theme needs to be retired? Its
time has long passed.” References to Constructivism, represented by the angular red-lit staircase of
St Raum A, were characterized by another commenter as a “staircase to Lenin’s Mausoleum.” These
comments show how the other two finalists, as well as some members of the selection committee,
continued to view the square as a tribute to Russian revolutionary history and to Mayakovsky
specifically—that is, to the hard Moscow of radical and often-violent politics and the corresponding
aesthetic austerity of stone and monuments.
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 Buromoscow, much like Moscow inhabitants themselves, chose a radically different approach.
While Buromoscow’s “romanticism” pays homage to the post-Stalinist Soviet atmosphere of the 1960s,
with its hope for political and cultural change as well as greater civil liberties, their design concept
seemed more closely aligned with my own and Kuznetsov’s interests in an architecture of hospitality.
Buromoscow’s project of converting the “revolutionary” square, with its monument and stone
pavement, into an urban neighbourhood’s courtyard with swings and a playground, yielded intimacy
and face-to-face interaction. Burdova and Aleksakova mentioned to me that the swings, each
accommodating at least two participants, enable people to face each other.10 Sitting together on a
swing requires them to collaborate in coordinating their movement as they face others, swinging,
walking, or sitting on the nearby benches. In addition, when Buromoscow was developing this project
in December 2013, the series called The Thaw was broadcast on Russian television: a foray into the
1960s post-Stalinist moment of hope fuelled by aspiration, which led to greater freedom of expression.
In the 1960s, shortly after the appearance of Mayakovsky’s statue, the Moscovite intelligentsia began
to gather around it for regular poetry readings, establishing a tradition that continues to this day.
These brief moments of political freedom in public space are contrasted with long-standing practices
of political inhospitality and violence. Buromoscow’s swings underscore the potential political-
personal dimension of their architectural hospitality.
I have written elsewhere about another aspect of welcoming architecture, which consists in
converting historically public spaces such as museums into welcoming “living rooms,” mimicking
the feeling of “being at home.”11 Buromoscow’s reconstruction of the square achieved something
similar, argues Kuznetsov, especially in relation to the adjacent Tverskaya Street, along which I was
walking when I first encountered the swings: Triumfalnaya Square, Moscow, after reconstruction by Buromoscow. Photo by Rachel London, 2019.

We think that among other things, this reconstruction of Triumfalnaya [Square] greatly
benefits Tverskaya Street, which is potentially very pedestrianized but lacks places to
simply rest while one strolls along. Yes, there are problems with some elements, such as
the quality of certain materials and details used in the reconstruction, but with this new
square Moscow has got a real “city living room,” and in a city that does not have many
such public squares, this element becomes the most important.12
This reference to the living room testifies once again to the way welcoming architecture problematizes
the rigid division between the private as the domain of the individual and the public as the realm of
the state. Soviet and post-Soviet citizens could only let their guard down “at home,” in their actual
homes; in public, they were always wary, mindful that their “trustworthiness” to the party and the
communist system was constantly being surveilled and assessed. These were hard times because
citizens did not feel that public spaces were designed for their personal enjoyment: they were not
“theirs.” Their bodies had no right to these spaces, nor did they belong in them. And the poet
Mayakovsky emblematized this particularly harsh outlook.
Before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the square was called Triumfalnaya Square. Its titular
“Triumph” then referred to a triumphal arch erected to honour Russia’s victory over Napoleon in the
1812 War. This arch was later moved elsewhere in the city, and replaced by the statue of Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky did more than embrace the revolution wholeheartedly as an individual: in his poetry,
he is renowned for having devised formal elements that expressed the revolution’s sense of urgency,
its war on the opposition, and its harshness. His staircase-like short lines of staccato, bullet-like words,
often heralded the need to crush enemies and use all means necessary to win the revolution. In the
poem “Conversation with Comrade Lenin” (1929)—accessible on the marxists.org online portal along
with selected other works of “The Bolshevik Poet”—Mayakovsky writes:
There’s scum
in plenty
hounding our land,
outside the borders
and also
within.13
His message challenged everyone to live to the fullest, without compromises in politics or in life,
guided by a relentless sense of Bolshevik ideological righteousness.
In both form and content, Mayakovsky’s poetry contrasts starkly with the romanticism of
Buromoscow’s swings and courtyard. This juxtaposition was noted by many critics, especially in the
political opposition, who regarded the new aesthetic as a betrayal of Mayakovsky’s message and his
revolutionary disallowance of such mindless pastimes as swinging and enjoying one’s surroundings.

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These criticisms follow a narrow logic that firmly places Mayakovsky within a genealogy of dissent
and decries the swings’ distancing from the political revolutionary history of the square, casting them
as apolitical, if not oppositional to the revolutionary spirit. Thus, in an article titled succinctly and
ironically “Mayakovsky’s Legs,” Anna Shevchenko argues that Mayakosvky and his message of
rebellion have disappeared in this new reconstruction.12 Many other critical commentaries online
and in the press (and also expressed to me privately) have ventriloquized this received interpretation,
casting the welcoming architecture of the swings as apolitical or anti-rebellion. By contrast, I would
argue that this criticism is tellingly blind to the politics of hospitality. Surprisingly, in this view,
hardliners such as Mayakovsky, who openly supported the violent suppression of political opponents,
are now seen as more revolutionary, and therefore formally more fitting to the needs of the political
opposition, than Buromoscow’s welcoming strategies of design and architecture. Ironically, as if
echoing this kind of critical scorn, this image taken during my work on this article shows Mayakovsky
looking down upon the swings, pondering disapprovingly over the new generation of swinging
Russians.
Moscow is not an easy city, and for visitors and citizens who are not white or do not speak
Russian, the experience of it is even more challenging. I have written elsewhere about the development
of Moscow as “Fortress City,” symbolically associated with a cultural mentality that combines
isolationism with imperial expansionism, annexing spaces, and assimilating diverse populations.13
For centuries, Moscow, the geographical and spatial symbol of Russia, defined itself by its anxiety
around cultural and geographical borders, always monitoring what is and what is not “ours.”
Mayakovsky’s poem quoted above, echoes this deep anxiety, calling for the violent removal of anti-
Bolshevik “scum” on either side of the border, instead of advocating for change in Russia’s own cultural
identity. In this sense, Buromoscow is experimenting with a spatial transformation that reveals a
different kind of Moscow, a possibility beyond a fortress-like identity, through the enactment of a
new kind of Russian body. But other voices in my head resist what could be perceived as “naïve”
hopes. Especially since governmental programs also fund the transformation of public spaces to make
them more comfortable through the policy and urban planning process of blagoustroistvo.

BLAGOUSTROISTVO
Funded by the city government, the reconstruction of Triumfalnaya Square is part of the urban Area of Malaya Bronnaya Street, Moscow. Photos by Rachel London, 2019.

renewal program called blagoustroistvo. Moscow and many other Russian cities have been changing
recently under its mandate. This word, loosely translated as building well or urban improvement and
first used in Soviet urban planning manuals and programs, has come to include every kind of renewal
of public spaces to make them more livable, pleasant, and comfortable. Most of the time, it means
placing an emphasis on the pedestrian and social life of a city, with shared playgrounds, benches,
trees, flower beds and other “green” patches, walking paths, and sidewalks. In the Soviet era, this
process did not involve commerce such as cafes and restaurants, but now it does. Would this not
mean, then, that blagoustroistvo is gentrification? One big difference is that blagoustroistvo does not
usually lead to the removal of existing communities. It is meant to improve the lives of those who
already live in a specific part of the city.
There are exceptions, however. Though gentrification is a very specific manifestation of Western
capitalism that does not apply well to its Soviet and post-Soviet counterparts, there are overlaps
between gentrification and blagoustroistvo, especially in the capitalist overtaking of post-Soviet life.
For example, one area of central Moscow along Malaya Bronnaya Street, which used to be the home
to privileged inhabitants of the USSR, has been remade by capital to such an extent that the notion
of gentrification does apply. It is a stone’s throw away from the Mayakovsky statue.
Funding is another significant difference between Western gentrification and blagoustroistvo.
In Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, renovations and reconstructions are spearheaded by city
governments rather than by private capital. Even the wealthy are reminded that their
neighbourhood’s improvement is lavishly funded by the public, rather than by private investment.
In this way they are reminded that they should show loyalty to the government, be demonstratively
appreciative and patriotic, and vote accordingly. The poster created for the September 2019

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 to stop protests for fair municipal government elections.
In the summer of 2019, as I conducted my research for
this article, many protesters were arrested before they
could even make it to Tverskaya Street to demonstrate. In
late 2019 and early 2020, some of them were sentenced to
jail for “subversive activities,” such as organizing and
participating in an “unsanctioned public demonstration
and resisting authorities.”
The next day, it looked as if nothing had happened.
The wide new walking paths, the boutiques, and the
pleasant cafes were open as usual. Only the metal fences
remained, neatly nestled to the side. The key weapon of
the totalitarian state is the ever-present spectrum of
physical violence—from threat to incarceration and
Tverskaya Street, Moscow. death—as many dissidents and political opponents of
Tverskaya Street, Moscow. Photos by the author, 2019.
Photo by the author, 2019. President Putin and his party have discovered. My
reading of the work of Buromoscow as welcoming
municipal elections expresses this expectation, along with other large nationalistic messages along architecture is developed here through an understanding of the contemporary political and economic
the gentrified Malaya Bronnaya Street. reality that enacts censorship and oppression. It is this context that makes the work of Buromoscow
Many architectural offices, such as Buromoscow, work mostly with private clients. The new and even more important.
large municipal government funding poured into blagoustroistvo changes this dynamic and creates a The politics of an architectural gesture is different from both party politics and individual
situation that pits architects, urban planners, designers, and artists between the totalitarian regime experiences of the city. It is relatively easy for a society with “soft” politics or for a privileged individual
and private money, differently suspect and often intertwined. This convergence of government and who already feels equally welcomed in public and private spaces to strive towards a “soft city.” In this
capital is certainly not unique to Moscow: New York City offers another shining example, with the case, gentrification—whether funded by private wealth or by the state—may be the only obstacle to
election of its real estate developer Donald Trump as US president and the recent presidential run of the alignment of the progressive architect’s vision with that of the public they seek to serve.20 In Russia,
its former mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg.14 however, as the country becomes more politically totalitarian, the population is again reminded that
It is not surprising, then, that one of the flagships of blagoustroistvo was designed by the very it should not get too comfortable in public space. This is why the aesthetics of hospitality of
architects who created New York’s High Line, the ultimate symbol of gentrification. Opened in 2017, Buromoscow is so powerful. Their quest to soften the experience of Russian citizens, allowing them
Zaryadye, a new park replacing an old Soviet government hotel, has become one of the most visible to feel more at home in their city and less like aliens and strangers, speaks to the power of welcoming
and widely-discussed manifestations of this intersection of post-Soviet blagoustroisvto and Western architecture in its specific context. When a critic of the swings project said that “alcoholics will sit on
gentrification. The park was “gifted” to the people of Russia, and especially to Muscovites, by none your swings,” Buromoscow replied: “Alcoholics are also people.”21 So are local tourists, young people
other than Putin himself.17 Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro Studio18 following their win of a loitering at night, and municipal workers, who often happen to be Muslim immigrants from the
public tender, the park transforms Moscow, or so it seems, into yet another global city. “We want to former Soviet republics that are now independent countries, such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
empower people to enjoy their city and to take it over,” asserts Diller.19 But this invocation of personal Everyone is swinging.
freedom in public clashes with the ways in which power, identity, and the body are still defined in To paraphrase the title of the 2000 Venice Biennale of Architecture, Less Aesthetics, More Ethics,22
contemporary Russia by those who inhabit the fortress visible from Zaryadye—the Kremlin. here we have hospitality through aesthetics, or New Ethics, New Aesthetics. And it is an aesthetic of
Who is allowed to take over the city with its new parks and squares—who has a right to the city— welcome. This welcome, however, cannot be understood without considering the other forces shaping
is not a settled question in post-Soviet Russia. This drive to make Moscow friendlier is not going architectural hospitality—without recognizing this specific space and its history. Abstracted from the
smoothly. It is tenuous; the city could at any time, it seems, be stripped of its new identity as a pleasant, political and economic context where the welcoming gesture takes place, hospitality becomes a
open, and comfortable space for a Russian body that is free to walk, rest, enjoy architecture or a welcome of all and none.
moment outdoors as it wishes. If one day I could walk along Tverskaya Street with its swings and The swings on Triumfalnaya Square are a miracle in contemporary Moscow because they enable
dream of a soft, welcomed, Russian body, the next day the space was occupied by huge police buses and produce a new Russian body in public space, one that is welcomed. In its projects, Buromoscow

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creates a new vision of hospitality in architecture. Buromoscow’s welcoming architecture produces
neighbours in the middle of a city square, making it possible for citizens to congregate and take over
the space through swinging, fun, smiles, laughter, and relaxation. This gesture, illegible to the old
revolutionary language, impacts the body politic: it changes the citizen’s body in new ways. Flying
high in the air, the old body—frozen, stiff, hardened, and suspicious—begins to feel increasingly
confident about its right to occupy this public space with as much freedom as if it were at home.
Burdova and Aleksakova certainly do not see their work as a contradiction of democratic resistance
or an erasure of the square’s legacy of political protest and poetry readings, past and present. Their
work does not adhere to a substitutive logic: one does not replace another. Nor is it an either/or
situation requiring a choice between enjoyment and social change: why would smiling-while-swinging
be antithetical to social change? Does the policy of blagoustroistvo mean that Russians need to refuse
to enjoy these new places in the city? Pleasure is the change agent here. Enjoyment is also the new
face of refusal. Buromoscow’s website features a quote from Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-born Brazilian
architect and designer who defines “architectural freedom” as a “social issue.” At a time when no one
would blame a contemporary Russian architect for adopting a position of “Keep your head down and
13 Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Conversation with Comrade Lenin,” translation from https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/
literature/mayakovsky/1929/conversation-comrade-lenin.htm.
14 Anna Shevchenko, “Mayakovsky’s Legs,” Colta, 30 September 2015, https://www.colta.ru/articles/art/8712-nogi-
mayakovskogo. Translated by the author.
15 Aristarkhova, “Moscow: The Fortress City.”
16 Stephen Zacks made a similar point in his writing about Zaryadye and other new projects in Moscow. See “Designing
a Russian Public,” Art in America (May 2018): 27–30, and “Soft Power in Moscow,” Landscape Architecture Magazine,
April 2018, https://landscapearchitecturemagazine.org/2018/04/05/soft-power-in-moscow/.
17 This decision by Putin and Sobyanin is mentioned on Zaradye’s official website,
https://www.zaryadyepark.ru/en/about/.
18 See Diller, Scofidio and Renfro Studio’s project presentation at https://dsrny.com/project/zaryadye-park.
19 Diller, quoted in Alex Ulam, “In Putin’s Moscow, an Urban Wilderness Emerges,” CityLab, 17 May 2017,
https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/05/in-putins-moscow-an-urban-wilderness-emerges/526872/.
20 I thank anonymous reviewers for suggesting a future engagement with the works of Ash Amin on collective culture
and Jonathan Raban’s ideal of the “soft city,” from his 1974 book of the same title.
21 Author’s interview with Buromoscow, July 2019.
22 Massimiliano Fuksas, ed., Less Aesthetics, More Ethics (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001).
23 Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012).

claim architecture has nothing to do with politics,” Buromoscow creates their own vision, unfamiliar
to many, of the meaning of the political. Politics, here, is welcoming architecture.
As I argued in my previous work, hospitality is labour; it is not a natural trait of those who are
defined as women, poor, of a particular ethnicity, or from some specific cultural background.
Hospitality is not an automatic result of architecture.23 Since 2004, Burdova and Aleksakova have
been using their vision and skills to realize a possibility of welcoming architecture, specifically as
joyful resistance to Soviet history. And the public, especially those who are tired of parading frozen
and hardened bodies in public spaces, has responded. Day and night, in the cold and the heat, people
have been queuing and swinging as if this were their right and pleasure—their right to pleasure.
Buromoscow’s work embodies what welcoming architecture can be and do.

NOTES
1 Lexico.com, https://www.lexico.com/, s.v. “impetus.”
2 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
3 See Buromoscow’s short official video about the project at https://vimeo.com/243287055.
4 Quoted from Alexander Ostrogorsky, “We Have Always Been Captivated by Reality: Interview with Olga Aleksakova
and Yulia Burdova,” Tatlin Mono 52.166 (2017): 13. Translated by the author.
5 Irina Aristarkhova, “Moscow: The Fortress City,” in Sarai Reader 7: Frontiers, ed. Monica Narula et al. (Delhi: Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies, 2007), 490–498.
6 Sergei Kuznetsov, quoted in “From Moscow to São Paulo: The Results of PwC Research,” Archcouncil of Moscow
(website), 22 November 2015, http://archsovet.msk.ru/en/article/archcouncil/from-moscow-to-sao-paulo-the-results-
of-pwc-research.
7 Wowhaus website, http://thewowhaus.com/about-us/.
8 Quoted from Yuri Bolotov, “Not a Place for Discussions: Triumfalnaya Square after Reconstruction,” The Village,
9 September 2015, https://www.the-village.ru/village/city/city/221427-buromoscow. Translated by the author.
9 Quoted from “The Active Citizen” portal, https://www.mskagency.ru/materials/2486397. Translated by the author.
10 Author’s interview with Buromoscow, August 2018.
11 Irina Aristarkhova, Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2020).
12 Sergei Kuznetsov, “In Step with People,” Archplatforma, 12 October 2015, http://www.archplatforma.ru/?act=2&tgid
=3117&stchng=2. Translated by the author.

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 Delivered by Intellect to:
Nicolás Elías Adasme Corvalán (33340268)
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 Delivered by Intellect to:
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The international jury deliberating, sixteenth Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1985. International Centre of
Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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BOJANA VIDEKANIć
A BRIDGE BETWEEN WORLDS
The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts and Curatorial Hospitality
The ancient Greek term theoxenia is exemplified in stories of disguised gods visiting humans in order
to test their moral and ethical code. Deriving from the word xenia, or “guest-friendship,” the term
was central to religious and ritual practices. While theoxeny was an important part of Greek social,
religious, and cultural life, the love of a guest, or hospitality, was widespread; it also had deep roots
in Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian cultures, and the classic 1926 edition of James Hastings’s
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics highlights examples of Arab, Indian, Japanese, Semitic, and Slavic
hospitality.1 The early twentieth-century Serbian classicist and ethnographer Veselin Čajkanović
contended that Balkan peoples upheld some of the more extreme forms of ancient hospitality well
into the twentieth century, which he attributed to strong communal and familial bonds and a deeply
ingrained theoxeny.2 The accounts of Čajkanović and Hastings reveal that traditional forms of
hospitality were based on a sense of ethical and moral duty (if not also a fear of god) and rooted in
community and reciprocity. The practices described by Čajkanović and Hastings differ greatly from
the hospitality practices of individualistic and atomized liberal societies, especially in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. In this text, I mobilize the older idea of hospitality, as reciprocal and
communal, to examine how curating was once, in the not-so-distant past, an opportunity for world
making, community building, solidarity, and sociability, rather than a profession concerned solely
with the advancement of one’s career as measured by international success. In other words, I would
like to think about curating as not only a cultural activity but also a political and social endeavour
with transformational potential.
In focusing on the history of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts during the socialist period,3
from its foundation in 1955 until the demise of Yugoslavia in the mid-1980s, I aim to uncover how
the former socialist Yugoslavia, a small country on the margins of European centres of artistic power,
strove to become a cultural meeting point for a world increasingly polarized by the Cold War. For
over 30 years, the Ljubljana Biennial was a multivalent space: a showcase for contemporary directions
in the medium of print, a political arena (as many diplomatic and political deals were made during
the event), and a convivial space where artists and the local community came together to socialize,
collaborate, and debate. From its very beginning, the Ljubljana Biennial saw itself as a space hosting
not just the West but the entire world. This meant pushing the standards of modernist
contemporaneity; sharing, if not relinquishing curatorial control; and forgoing practices of
institutional gatekeeping in order to welcome those who were otherwise sidelined or simply not
invited to the international art world. Yugoslavia’s crucial contribution to the development of the
Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) coincided with post-WWII decolonizing struggles around the world.
Post-independence idealism and the significant material needs of the newly independent nations
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FIG. 1 Installing a section of the first Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1955. International Centre of Graphic Arts
photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
fuelled massive infrastructure and urbanization projects and unprecedent cultural development. The
belief that culture could unite the world and that independent nations and coalitions could finally
compete with the West guided their cultural workers in the design of institutions and events. NAM
provided the political and ideological context for the articulation of the Biennial’s artistic goals and
its practice of curatorial hospitality, which were both utopian and pragmatic (FIG. 1).
What do I mean by curatorial hospitality? Curating is often defined as a practice of preservation and
display—and more recently, of exhibition making. However, I would like to extend our understanding
of curatorial practice to include more than what is considered to be contemporary, meaningful, and
representable in art, and to recast curating as a series of thoughts and actions that welcome artworks,
artists, and sociality into the relationship known as an art exhibition. In exploring the Ljubljana
Biennial’s relationship with the philosophical concept of hospitality, I also consider its pragmatism
and its connections with similar events around the world. Now somewhat forgotten, these exhibitions
intervened in the hegemonic artistic and curatorial discourses that defined the canon of modern art.
Contrary to the orthodox belief in the unidirectional dissemination of artistic influences from the
centres of the international art world, there were various artistic networks connecting the non-
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Western world throughout the twentieth century. These networks, which sustained a diversity of
alternative artistic and curatorial work, were based on flexible and pragmatic notions of artistic quality
and merit, and relied on tactics of articulation,4 informal relationships or personal connections, and
friendship. The curatorial hospitality performed in these networks was not conditioned by a sense of
duty, the fulfilment of an obligation, or a guarantee of reciprocity; instead, it sought to create a space
for others, unconditionally, whoever they may be. Underscoring these forms is the recognition that
curating and art making were entangled with various economic and political forces beyond the strictly
artistic sphere. Hospitality thus emerges as one of the key curatorial strategies employed by
international exhibitions, festivals, and biennials lying outside the Western centres of art.
I began this text by introducing a few examples of ancient hospitality based on communal life
and ritual from around the world rather than starting from its narrower, now dominant contemporary
Western formulation, which, as Turkish sociologist Meyda Yegenogly argues, casts hospitality as a
juridical matter.5 In its modern form, hospitality became explicitly transactional and conditional, a
matter of compliance with rules. In light of this modern transformation of the meaning of hospitality,
we can distinguish two approaches to curating: the increasingly professionalized practices deployed
on ever-expanding platforms provided by large museum and arts institutions with hefty budgets,
sustained by an extractive and proprietary approach to art, wielding far-reaching influence from Paris
and New York to Venice and Kassel; and the pragmatic and inclusive methodologies of late-modern,
outlying biennials, festivals, and exhibitions with limited resources, such as those in Ljubljana,
Alexandria, and later Havana. As Reesa Greenberg pointed out, curating is much more than exhibition
making, for exhibitions are discursive events combining multiple social, political, and economic
narratives.6 These include both the accrual of power and the informal everyday practices of hospitality.
Referencing the work of Pierre Bourdieu, sociologist Ming-Cheng Lo defines informal everyday
practices as “unrecognized cultural currencies” which refer to “knowledge, informal know-hows, or
cultural styles that are not recognized as valuable by the gatekeepers of a given field.”7 While Lo uses
this definition to talk about specific forms of cultural resistance, the term signals the usefulness of
less formal cultural activities in dealing with hegemonic structures.
Several reports of visits by artists and critics to Yugoslavia emphasized a range of leisure activities
including travelling, drinking coffee and rye with locals, late-night discussions in artists’ studios, and
sightseeing in the countryside. In a report on his visit to Yugoslavia in 1955, Jerome Mellquist
lamented his lost luggage, noting that, “unlike more snail-like functionaries elsewhere, the Jugoslav
officials energized themselves. Mustering a car the Director of the National Museum, K. Dobida,
accompanied by the etcher and teacher Božidar Jakac, drove me to Cezana.”8 In a personal letter to
the Ljubljana Biennial’s founder and long-time director Zoran Kržišnik in 1971, Edy de Wilde, then
director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, thanked him for personally resolving problems with
his return ticket; he also mentions how touched he was by the hospitality encountered in Ljubljana
and the climate of discussion he experienced as a member of the Biennial jury.9 Local artists, Yugoslav
and Slovene, were encouraged to befriend visiting artists, to show them around Yugoslavia, and to
actively socialize. Reminiscing on his time at the Biennial, Slovene painter and printmaker Bogdan
Borčić noted: “Artists were always coming, particularly those who were receiving prizes. The gallery
organized it so that each one of us [local artists] received an artist, made him [sic] feel welcomed and
took him [sic] around Slovenia.… And so friendships formed.”10
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FIG. 2 The organizing committee planning one of the Ljubljana Biennials in the 1980s. International Centre of
Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
To be sure, the organizers of the Ljubljana Biennial and other non-Western exhibitions were
well versed in both the highly professionalized Western style of cultural management and in social
and non-extractive practices, using either as deemed necessary. Inviting renowned Western artists
and curators was a strategy to push back against what Seneca artist and curator Tom Hill has called
the “universal standards” of Western art, as “art near the end of the modernist era, pretending to
emphasize excellence and universality, became a force for divisiveness.”11 Of course, it is precisely
because of supposedly universal standards that outlying exhibitions had to invite famous artists to
bring visibility to all the others. Curatorial hospitality thus involved a measure of shrewdness and the
design of occasions for artists, curators, and organizers to make friends rather than merely expand
their professional networks. Exhibitions were developed as invitations to learn about other people
and other cultures rather than simply an additional line on a resume, a new idea to claim, or a way to
advance a curatorial career or be discovered as an artist. In other words, outlying or regional
approaches to curating were developed to give visibility to practices and cultures that were usually
ignored by the West; they mobilized formal and informal ties, and a shared understanding that
welcoming, sharing, and socializing were important activities in and of themselves.
Did the regionalism of the Ljubljana Biennial and similar events disrupt the hegemony of modern
art as constructed in the Euro-American tradition? Can the art historical or curatorial study of these
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regional specificities and alternative modernities12 radically rewrite our understanding of the recent
past? How can alternative approaches to practices of art making, organizing, collecting, and exhibiting
offer a different view of modern art? Are the dominant forms of curating and art making the only
valid practices, or can the art history of marginalized places provide valuable alternatives? I propose
that by studying regional art histories, in their complex relationships with the histories of other regions
as well as powerful artistic centres we can develop new understandings of what modern art was and
what contemporary art could be. The history of the Ljubljana Biennial provides one example of
alternative modernities. In this, it is one of many possible examples, one part of the large network of
international exhibitions that originated during the post-WWII era around the world, including the
Alexandria Biennale, Triennale-India, the Bienal de São Paulo, the Tokyo International Print Biennale,
the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres / First World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN 1966) in Dakar,
the Festival panafricain d’Algiers, the Second World Festival of Black Arts (FESTAC ’77) in Lagos,
the Havana Biennial, the Biennale of Contemporary Bantu Art, and the Dakar Biennale. While they
were influenced by Western modernist tropes, which they indeed replicated, these exhibitions were
by no means standard in their operations. As their smaller hosting countries were struggling to
establish their space on the international art scene, these exhibitions developed pragmatic approaches
to curating, and redefined the modalities of inclusion and hospitality (FIG. 2).
The Ljubljana Biennial is one of the oldest post-WWII international biennials. It started in 1955
as an initiative of a group of Slovene cultural workers led by Kržišnik, who was then a young curator,
and Božidar Jakac, one of Yugoslavia’s and Slovenia’s most respected artists. Their idea was to create
in the Slovene city of Ljubljana an international exhibition that would serve as a bridge connecting
the divided postwar world. Its mandate included the promotion of Yugoslavia’s role in the
internationalization of modern art, cultural cooperation, and peaceful coexistence. In the catalogue
of the 1957 Biennial, Josip Vidmar, the president of the organizing committee, expressed some of
these goals: “Our main purpose is to serve our human community. As sincere supporters of
international alliances, communication, and peaceful coexistence, it is from art that we expect the
kind of mediation that will allow us to realize our ideals.”13 In the decades following its first edition,
the Biennial grew steadily, investing considerable effort in attracting artists from around the world,
especially from non-Western countries. While the first two editions were organized in an ad hoc
fashion and had limited visibility, the Biennial reached a critical turning point in 1959, when it gained
national recognition by earning the patronage of President Josip Broz Tito,14 and reached international
audiences through reviews published in Italian and French newspapers and art magazines. The federal
Ministry of Education and Culture,15 the Yugoslav Artist Union, various provincial artist unions,
galleries, and the broader Yugoslav public finally took note of what was taking place in Ljubljana, and
realized the potential impact of the Biennial on contemporary art and Yugoslavia’s image in the world.
Visitors also increased from around 17,000 in 1957, to over 40,000 in 1975, finally topping 70,000
throughout the 1980s.
As the Biennial grew in reputation and size, its coverage in the domestic and international press
increased, with critics often praising its organizational structure and inclusive view of contemporary
printmaking. Openness and eclecticism—the Biennial’s unofficial motto16—were repeatedly invoked.
Kržišnik was adamant that the exhibition would both bring artists who “represented quality
contemporary art” and “encompass all possible styles and trajectories in contemporary art in its
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programming and still retain one key principle—quality in its widest sense.”17 This intention was
already recognized in 1957, as Yugoslav art critic Josip Depolo noted that the exhibition’s early success
could be attributed to three elements: quality, tolerance, and equity.18 He remarked: “It is obvious that
in its work, the jury was not under the influence of various intrigues and calculations, which are
nothing more than business transactions of art brokers and their influential galleries through which
they favour their protégés.”19 Others, such as the French critic Jean Bouret, praised the Ljubljana
Biennial for giving space to artists from different countries, “especially those that have come to the
international art scene late.”20 At times, however, the curation of the Ljubljana Biennial was criticized
for being too inclusive; one harsh critic even called it a “worthless fair.”21
The Ljubljana Biennial’s commitment to diversity, to the creation of an open forum for what
Kržišnik called the “clash of ideas about print,”22 was successfully implemented at the outset and
continued to evolve over the decades. While the Biennial’s eclecticism was certainly upheld by its
founders, who believed the art of their time to have an international scope, the organization’s
continued success was the result of collective effort. The exhibition was organized through committee
and jury work—with the organizing committee coordinating and hosting the exhibitions, and an
international jury convened each Biennial year to select the awards (see figure on p. 128). While
Kržišnik as director had a great deal of influence on curation and organization, his influence was
mediated by the organizing committee made up of influential Yugoslav curators, critics, cultural
workers, and artists. The organizing committee was pan-Yugoslav: Kržišnik wanted cultural workers
from all parts of the country to be invested in the Biennial and collaborate towards its success.23 This
secured buy-in to the Biennial from the rest of the country. This collaborative approach to
organization, curation, and jurying produced the conceptual and formal openness for which Ljubljana
became known, and loosely reflected the Yugoslav political theory of self-management.24 It also FIG. 3 Members of the jury and public socializing during the opening of the eighteenth Ljubljana Biennial
safeguarded the Ljubljana Biennial’s political (or cultural-diplomatic) and social role as a bridge of Graphic Arts, 1989. International Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
between cultures. The Biennial’s enactment of hospitality was premised on this collective and open
approach to presenting art, seeking to transform the hegemonies of international art.
Hospitality offers a productive framework for the analysis of both the Ljubljana Biennial and the ways both to build their artistic cultures and to seize the fickle attention of the international artistic
curatorial and artistic work in countries outside of the Western centres of artistic power. In fact, powerhouses to make them take note of the art they produced. The organizers of the Ljubljana
hospitality was a preeminent ideal of the Biennial: bringing the world together in Ljubljana was a Biennial operated in this creative and strategic manner, akin to what Maura Reilly has recently called
guiding principle of the organizers’ decision-making. While the idea of the international exhibition “curatorial activism,” in order to achieve their artistic goals.26 Concretely, this meant that the Biennial
as meeting place was not new, its enactment in non-Western countries yielded new terms. Small organizers strategically selected the members of its organizing committee and awards jury, measuring
countries on the edges of the international art world were struggling for political recognition and for both the world view that the choice of these members reflected and their ability to contribute to the
space in global art. As Chika Okeke-Agulu writes in Postcolonial Modernism, citizens of non-Western, Biennial’s goal of intervening in the international art world (FIG. 3).
marginalized, and developing nations had to imagine their modern subjectivities, cultures, and art Several important principles adopted by the Biennial organizers structurally enabled its curatorial
primarily through the prism of their need for self-assertion and cultural and political autonomy.25 hospitality. While these principles were interconnected, each one helped shape the Ljubljana Biennial’s
Following the deliberate erosion of cultural production under colonial rule, artists from these heterogeneous character. As already mentioned, the first principle was collaboration: the exhibition
countries also had to build their artistic and institutional infrastructure, since it was often was to be developed by committee rather than a single curator. The second principle combined
underdeveloped or non-existent. Consequently, our histories of the mid-twentieth-century national representation and the invitation of artists from around the world. While the first edition of
international art world and its networks need to be rewritten to account for the immense the Biennial featured a number of Western artists, predominantly from the École de Paris, it also
infrastructural investments made by the nations of the Global South in order to establish art schools, included, as Kržišnik envisioned, representatives from China, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Korea, and
museums, and galleries, in addition to competing with their former colonial masters to create the Japan. The organizers had hoped for greater inclusion of artists from non-Western countries, having
next avant-garde movement. In such an unequal art world, developing nations had to devise creative sent official letters of invitation to representatives in India, Egypt, and Mexico; for various reasons,

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FIG. 4 View of the Bangladesh, Puerto Rico, and Iraq exhibits at the twelfth Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1977.
International Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
however, these countries did not participate. In the following years, artists from Africa, Asia, and the
Americas started to exhibit work regularly in Ljubljana. Participation by artists from non-Western,
developing, and non-aligned countries steadily increased from around 30 percent in 1955 to around
70 percent in the 1970s, resulting in a diversity of aesthetic and stylistic approaches to contemporary
printmaking, and even more importantly, a diversity of political and social views (FIG. 4).
The third principle was a hybrid, pragmatic approach to curatorial selection. While the organizing
committee often invited specific artists, they would, when necessary, relinquish curatorial authority
and delegate the selection to national organizing bodies. In interviews given throughout his tenure
as head of the Ljubljana Biennial, Kržišnik repeatedly stated that he had to carefully consider curatorial
decisions in order to fulfill the Biennial’s mission as a mediating cultural body in a delicate Cold War
political context. While artists from Europe, the Americas, and Africa were usually invited directly
by the Biennial’s organizing committee, artists from the Eastern Bloc countries and China were chosen
by their own national bodies, since censorship still prevailed in these nations and artists could not
participate otherwise. “Their art was sent to us by the state,” Kržišnik explained, which was one of
the main reasons why the organizers could not abandon the principle of national representation in
both selection and presentation.27 In other words, they privileged full participation over strict adhesion
to aesthetic criteria, which meant maintaining a traditional national structure and balancing aesthetic
principles with political suitability when required.
The fourth principle was the inclusion of all aesthetic and formal directions in art. In an interview
in 1969, Kržišnik made one of his clearest statements on this issue:
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FIG. 5 View of the École de Paris exhibition at the fourth Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1961. International
Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
We are a biennial… and we therefore have an opportunity that we cannot and will not
relinquish, and that is to follow the complicated processes of contemporary art, to capture
and measure the entire atmosphere of contemporary art, which is created not only in the
mainstream trends of large art centres, but also in important and less pronounced
movements parallel to them.… By no means do we want to follow the other extreme,
chosen by documenta, Kassel, for example, which limited itself… to presenting only major
art movements, thereby leaving everything else on the outside.28
The resulting aesthetic polyvalence became the Biennial’s strength, as this approach signaled an
alternative way of assigning aesthetic quality and a levelling of hierarchy. In Kržišnik’s understanding,
modern art’s contemporaneity—its relevance—was defined not only by the arbiters of mainstream
international art, but also by the welcoming of diverse and even opposing aesthetic and formal
practices. In other words, it is precisely in this resolute embrace of all forms of artistic production
that we see curatorial hospitality at work, and glimpse its political potential.
Nonetheless, international modernist art of the era was also included in the Biennial. This was no
accident. Kržišnik and his associates were aware that Yugoslavia was at best a marginal cultural space
of little interest to Western artists and curators, and in order to attract international attention, they
first had to attract renowned European and American artists (FIG. 5). In a 2004 interview Kržišnik
reminisced: “[we] set up the biennial in order to make our way into the world.… It was a way of opening
doors… and thankfully, I managed to garner important graphic arts experts for the jury.”29 This strategy
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FIG. 6 Menhat Alla Helmy, Old Cairo (1957). Print. Image taken from the catalogue of the second Ljubljana Biennial
of Graphic Arts, 1957. International Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
allowed them to get more support, establish the Biennial’s reputation, and create an opening for less
well-known artists. Thus, while Western art, modernism in particular, was front and centre and often
received high praise, the Biennial’s curatorial principles meant that numerous prints that did not
conform to this dominant aesthetic regime were also present, reflecting a broader picture of the art
world. The work of artists from newly decolonized countries like the United Arab Republic, India, and
Indonesia point to international modernism’s hybrid and idiosyncratic proliferation, often in oblique
and political styles, outside of Western power centres. These works reflect a synthesis of high modernist
styles, thick with experimentation and extrapolation across various formal models, together with a
commitment to local artistic traditions and social, cultural, and political contexts. For example, the
works of Egyptian painter and printmaker Menhat Alla Helmy, Mexican-American artist Elizabeth
Catlett, Mexican Sarah Jiménez, Uruguayan Miguel Bresciano, Iraqi Rafa Nasiri, and others merge
elements of dominant modernism while foregrounding overt political messages and specific social
contexts—gender and the social status of Black women with Catlett, the everyday life of ordinary
Egyptians under Nasser’s rule with Helmy, or more pointedly national concerns related to the pan-
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Arab political movement with Nasiri. A comparison of Helmy’s etching shown at the 1961 Biennial,
Catlett’s woodcut exhibited at the 1963 Biennial, and Nasiri’s etching presented at the 1977 Biennial
illustrates both the range of approaches to print and the diversity of sociopolitical concerns. The
consistent presence of such practices reminded the Western artists and critics in attendance of other
largely marginalized voices in international art. As artists raised their particular concerns, the dialogue
among them over the decades was a sustained testimony to “a confrontation of ideas and ways of
making,” fulfilling the curatorial goal of the Biennial.30
Helmy’s prints were exhibited in several editions of the Biennial (1961, 1967, and 1977), and she
received the Organizing Committee’s Honorary Prize in 1961. Her early representational etching Old
Cairo (1957) illustrates her formal and social interests (FIG. 6). The tightly constructed composition
shows a busy Cairo street, with rows of buildings in the background, and several groups of people on
the sidewalk and in the street at the front. Adults milling about, children playing or helping, vendors,
workers, and people talking fill much of the surface of the work, lending it an atmosphere of life and
conviviality. Bursting with energy, with its attentive treatment of textures, rich patterns, and strong
graphic details, the print is also a documentary slice of life. While it references everyday life in mid-
century Egypt, it also reflects some of the more complex social and political dimensions of Gamal
Abdel Nasser’s populist presidency, which embraced revolutionary socialist ideas while brutally
suppressing workers’ movements demanding economic and political reforms. Helmy’s keen eye
notices and exalts the ordinary, creating a warm and humanistic representation of the Egyptian people.
Other works shown at the 1961 Biennial could not have been further from Helmy’s in aesthetic and
political terms. For example, the prints of Joan Miró, Zoran Music, and Ossip Zadkine reflected high
modernist formal experimentation and the existentialist concerns of Art Informel, Abstract
Expressionism, and late Cubism. In their reviews of the Biennial, Western art critics paid little
attention to a young female artist from North Africa. But the fact remains that she not only exhibited
her work at Ljubljana Biennial regularly but also won an award. This is a testament to the importance
of representation in curating.
If we consider Helmy’s work in relationship to later work by Catlett and Nasiri, we see an
ongoing curatorial commitment to the heterogeneity of formal approaches and to the inclusion of
political and social themes. At first glance, Nasiri’s Composition no. 37 (1976) may not have much
in common with either Catlett’s or Helmy’s works (FIG. 7.). But further scrutiny reveals a multiplicity
of parallel interests. While Nasiri’s etching is an abstract colour-field composition translating his
interest and training in the Chinese and Arabic traditions of calligraphy,31 it is also invested in the
exploration of Arab cultural heritage, nascent political pan-Arabism, and the failure of the 1967 Six-
Day War.32 Nasiri’s participation in the founding of the New Vision Group in Baghdad in 1969 is a
testament to the humanist dimensions of his practice. In their manifesto, the New Vision Group
embraced an activist approach to art making, stating that art strives to challenge and break imposed
boundaries and binaries, both ideological and identitarian.33 For the members of New Vision, the
artist was “a fighter who refuses to put his weapon down as he speaks in the name of the world, and
in the name of the human.”34 The group also rejected “the military and intellectual defeat” of their
nation, “glorifying the popular war of liberation in the chests of the martyrs.”35 While the works
produced by Nasiri and the other members of the group may have ranged formally, and while some
of their production resembled international modernism, the conceptual premises of their art, its
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 spiritual and social drivers, were rooted in a political and social activism that enlisted art in the
transformation of social relationships.
Like Nasiri, Catlett was deeply committed to the humanist agency of art. But unlike Nasiri’s work,
Catlett’s woodcut American Women Unite (1963) is representational (FIG. 8). Her Black-centric
feminist take on representation, exhibited in the fifth edition of the Biennial, is unapologetically
political as it monumentalizes three women of colour in powerful portraits. The tight and closely
cropped composition presents women whose interconnecting facial features and skin tones, built up
through bold woodcut lines, evoke the deep entanglements and shared power of women across the
Americas. Catlett’s work drew equally from African American history and culture, African art, and
Mexican art and politics. (The American-born artist spent most of her life in Mexico after being
blacklisted for her involvement with the Communist Party USA.) Like much of her practice, this work
expresses her commitment to depicting and uplifting the experience of marginalized women. As
Freida Tesfagiorgis points out in her analysis of Catlett’s work, the artist always identified herself as
“black, female and creative,” reflecting her political commitment to the Black experience first and
foremost, then to feminism, and finally to artistic production.36 In American Women, Catlett celebrates
the strong women who were often at the forefront of political struggles in the Americas, and were
also the most impacted by economic and social inequality.
Separated by a few years, these three works are but a small sample of a much wider commitment
to politically and socially engaged work, which was sustained since the beginning of the Ljubljana
Biennial. While furthering the formal and aesthetic interests of modernism, the work of artists from
non-Western nations also conveyed the political views and yearnings that were front and centre in
their lives. These three works bring to the fore the need to reexamine modern art with a new urgency
and in a new light, which is to say, to enact hospitality in our redefinition of modernism, including
the influence of political events and social transactions on the aesthetic decisions that artists made.
The works of Helmy, Nasiri, Catlett, and many others show that aesthetic and politics were intrinsically
linked as each artist advanced the struggle underway in their national and geopolitical sphere.
To be sure, the Ljubljana Biennial and counterparts such as the Alexandria Biennale and
Triennale-India were not immune to Western modernist hegemony, as exhibited works by Anglo-
American and European artists often accrued the most notoriety. However, the overall trajectory of
the Ljubljana Biennial reveals that something else was smouldering under the surface: something
akin to “the aesthetics of a new region of the world” advanced by Édouard Glissant,37 the struggle to
uncover African cultural histories “of the Ancient World, the Old World, and the New World”
described by Cedric Robinson,38 and the dissemination of Black diasporic culture explored by Fred
Moten.39 While the work of Helmy, Nasiri, and Catlett might not have garnered the same hype as the
work of international art stars such as Miró or Rauschenberg, their presence at the Biennial
announced a rising wave of non-Western artists who were part of an emerging global art.
This global art world came into visibility decades later, in the 1980s and 1990s, with the work of
several curators, including Okwui Enwezor,40 who described this shift in contemporary art as a
“postcolonial constellation.”41 In contrast to Western attempts to grasp the relationship between non-
Western and Western contemporary art, such as Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition Magiciens de la Terre
(1989), the efforts of non-Western curators and cultural workers were focused on creating
international ties as well as broad curatorial and organizational structures. Building on the work of

FIG. 7 Rafa Nasiri, Composition no. 37 (1976). Etching. Image courtesy of Rafa Nasiri Studio and May Muzaffar.
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FIG. 8 Elizabeth Catlett, American Women Unite (Unidad de la Mujer Americana) (1960). Linoleum cut printed in
colour on off-white wove paper. © Estate of Elizabeth Catlett / VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
SoCAN (2020). Image courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase, Elizabeth P. Kirby Fund, Associates of
the American Wing Special Projects Fund, et al., 2006.91.
142 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
Kržišnik, Hana Simika (the commissaire of the first Alexandria Biennale in 1955), Alioune Diop,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire (co-organizers of FESMAN 1966), Nelson Herrera Ysla
and Gerardo Mosquera (the founders of the Havana Biennale in 1984), and others, these efforts
marked the next step towards decentring hegemonic visions of modern art. These curators, artists,
and organizers ushered in the global art that we know today.
The different approaches to the inclusion of artists on the part of the Ljubljana Biennial on the
one hand, and Western counterparts such as the Venice Biennale and documenta on the other, is
telling. Most of these Western international exhibitions attempted to represent and propagate their
own particular image of the world—a newly minted postwar terrain where art was a symbol of the
nation-state as much as it was endowed with a transformational ethos and the power to unite.
Reflecting the realities of the locations where each exhibition took place, their ambitions also inflected
the changing twentieth-century geopolitical landscape. The curation of documenta and the Venice
Biennale served to assert their role as arbiters of taste and as cultural forces of postwar liberalism by
focusing mainly on postwar Western art, thereby bolstering a specific modernist ethos. In her study
of curatorial work and cultural representation, Mari Carmen Ramírez discusses the dominant Western
understanding of curation as the practice of curators who are bestowed the authority to define what
constitutes taste and quality, thereby establishing a canon. And conversely, curatorial authority,
according to Ramírez,
derives from an absolute—ultimately ideological—set of criteria grounded in the
restrictive parameters of the canon of Western (i.e. First World) Modernism/Post-
Modernism.… The results [of this arbitration], as we know, often resembled a league
championship of winners and losers. The winners usually being artists who readily fit
into this tradition; the losers being the art producers of cultures and civilizations
outside, or marginal, to it.42
Ramírez’s indictment of the notions of quality and taste as established by the Western canon echoes
why the Ljubljana Biennial included Western art without ever yielding to its hegemony. Ljubljana’s
curation had different ambitions, which required the inclusion of work by artists from emerging
nations in Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. Consequently, as I have already discussed,
the Ljubljana Biennial engaged in strategic curating that sought to avoid limiting their work to
accepted curatorial practices of mediation of taste and gatekeeping, and instead to represent the
successes, hopes, and dreams of artists in the Global South who were emerging from colonial and
imperial domination.
This fostering of sociality casts curating as not just the arbitration of taste and artistic trends, but
as a practice including human connections and hospitality, or simply the sharing of food and time.43
Mainstream international exhibitions are usually assessed and historicized in terms of their
contribution to artistic or political advancement. But on the margins of those international
movements, art is often more than an aesthetic pursuit; it is also a model for structuring a new social
system and new forms of community, or an opportunity to make friends. The Ljubljana Biennial’s
approach thus provided a more polyvalent image of the art world in the mid-twentieth century. By
deliberately fostering practices that were not usually seen as part of artistic production or curatorial
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 FIG. 9 Visitors socializing at the opening of the first Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts,
3 June 1955. International Centre of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
profession—such as diplomacy, hospitality, socializing, sightseeing, networking, and friendship—the
Biennial broadened the parameters of art and its perception, and most importantly expanded art’s
contribution to the humanizing efforts of the mid- and late-twentieth century (FIGS. 9 and 10).
Echoes of these unorthodox approaches to art and curatorial work can be found much later in the
relational practices that came to the fore in the late 1990s, as the art world embraced socializing,
cooking, making friends, and networking as forms of making and thinking, as aesthetic practices.
When reminiscing on the importance of the Ljubljana Biennial and Kržišnik’s role in it, curator Walter
Koscharzky noted:
My dear friend Zoran Kržišnik, the role you played in the prime of that splendid period of
art will never be forgotten. During this period it was actually possible to believe that we were
heading towards a happier, more humane future, if we only followed the path before us…
to show in one biennial of international scope whatever unites nations across all existing
contradictions and frontiers, for your endeavour to make the world more colourful, happier
and more beautiful.44
Koscharzky’s description clearly reflects the utopian aspirations of global art.
This model, however, was not without tension. How does such a model reconfigure the larger
study of twentieth-century exhibition practices? Anthony Gardner and Charles Green discuss the
increase in studies of biennials since the 1990s,45 reflecting what is often referred to as the rise of the
biennial industry.46 Their analysis posits two distinct frameworks. One asserts a direct correlation
144 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
FIG. 10 Visitors socializing at the opening of the tenth Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts, 1975. International Centre
of Graphic Arts photo archives, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
between the late twentieth-century rise of biennial exhibitions and the global spread of neoliberal
capitalism, making the biennial industry complicit in economic and political exploitation. The second
considers biennials as examples of temporary utopian spaces wherein art brings together people from
various cultures and nations to a specific place and time, creating a democratic, transformed world
that may in the process enact change in the society at large47—in other words, a multicultural and
cosmopolitan utopia arising from the ruins of Western modernism. But both of these frameworks
are Western-centric, as they study the biennial primarily from a Western cultural and economic
perspective. Gardner and Green therefore propose a third framework by tracing a parallel history of
biennials of the Global South. This history reveals a network of exhibitions across the globe that
shared similar cultural and political concerns, but did not directly conform to Western modes of
exhibition making. As with the Ljubljana Biennial, the organizers of these events were open to
collaboration with the West: they understood that their nascent cultural agency still had to be
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negotiated, in part, within the old Western colonial cultural system. As a result, they developed links
between Western and emerging cultural systems, which were reflected in Southern biennials’ modes
of operation and exhibition forms. The hegemony of the Western modernist project was therefore
negotiated, partially checked, worked around, and syncretized in their attempts to create a new world
of “culture and coexistence” as Marko Ristić, a Yugoslav diplomat and poet, and head of the Yugoslav
Committee for International Cultural Relations, advocated in his 1952 text on cultural diplomacy.48
Other studies argue that the Western model of global biennials has hijacked the idea of
cosmopolitanism from the Global South. Jeannine Tang,49 Julian Stallabrass,50 Jane Chin Davidson
and Sandra Esslinger,51 and Hito Steyerl52 have called attention to the ways in which the cosmopolitan
biennial has been leveraged into opportunities for tourism development, bringing large Western
audiences to the geographical “edges” of the Western world, from Havana to Guangzhou, Sharjah,
Dakar, and Johannesburg, as well as a means of integration of these outposts into the already-existing
networks of the global art world and its markets. As each author shows, these attempts have been
steeped in controversy. Many either have failed to fulfill their goals or have simply repeated existing
dominant narratives. In short, as Tang offers:
The model of international identity championed by biennalization parallels what Saskia
Sassen refers to in her work on global cities, as a transnationalization of capital that requires
a simultaneous transnationalization of subjectivity, denationalization of space and state—
which in fact produces new forms of centralization and control, rather than an actual
dispersion of power.53
While these exhibitions nominally seek to expand and diversify the geographies of contemporary art
by moving beyond Western metropolises, the results parallel the post-1989 neoliberalization of the
entire world. The new transnational global centres reproduce forms of marginalization and exclusion
along the existing lines of power distribution, reaffirming and deepening Western economic
supremacy by replicating it in more global centres.54
However, events such as the Ljubljana Biennial, Triennale-India, the Alexandria Biennale started
well before the current forms of neoliberalism arose at the end of the Cold War. They developed in
very different geopolitical contexts, reflecting the goals of countries that were either newly established
(such as Egypt and Yugoslavia) or struggling to break from Western cultural domination (such as
Mozambique and Angola). Consequently, these events are more than nominally different, but differ
from the more recent exhibitions qualitatively insofar as most of these countries enjoyed greater
political and economic agency when they gained their political independence than they do today.55
The Ljubljana Biennial sits within this history of parallel twentieth-century international exhibitions,
as it sought to exercise cultural and sociopolitical agency by representing the world beyond Western
borders. The Biennial’s cultural kinship lay with exhibitions such as the Alexandria Biennale or
Triennale-India, and broader cultural festivals such as FESMAN 196656 and FESTAC ’77,57 or any
number of similar events that took place throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in Asia, Africa, and
South and Central America.
All these cultural undertakings represent forms of what came to be broadly termed alternative
modernities, each with its specific regional characteristics. The Ljubljana Biennial’s own sociopolitical
146 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
context was shaped by the positions and aspirations of the Non-Aligned Movement. Of course, these
alternative modernities and the cultural events that emerged from alliances among newly formed
nation-states after the Second World War were not without ambiguity, as Dominique Malaquais and
Cédric Vincent have recently argued.58 While the stated goals of decolonial cultural events were to
counter cultural imperialism and to represent the cultural accomplishments and future aspirations
of the so-called developing world, thereby showcasing politics by other means, these events were not
free of oppression and violence. Malaquais and Vincent point out that most official events—in their
example, Pan-Africanist cultural festivals—were platforms for promoting a particular national project
and its proponents, and normalized the dominant discourse of each state.
Certainly, official culture in the Global South and NAM was a contested terrain in which multiple
narratives and politics played a role. The Ljubljana and Alexandria biennials were no exception, as
each reflected the struggles and tensions shaping the international geopolitical order. In her study of
the interconnectedness of art and politics in the Alexandria Biennale, Dina Ramadan notes the
tensions between Egypt’s national and international aspirations, and the political and aesthetic
limitations of organizing an international biennial in a culturally marginalized space and in a country
with a complex political situation.59 In fact, many of the cultural events, exhibitions, and festivals that
took place in NAM countries reflected the complexities of negotiating diverse forms of political
sovereignty, including monarchy, socialism, and dictatorship. Yugoslavia’s position, shared by other
NAM members and which made its way into NAM charters and declarations, was that member
countries should abide by and respect the principles of coexistence and acceptance,60 even though
some member nations were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and sometimes even in open
confrontation.61 As the theorist and historian of NAM Leo Mates writes: “To the Yugoslavs, peaceful
coexistence meant a parallel coexistence of states regardless of their social and political systems.”62
Nevertheless, the narratives of national official art, while embroiled in contested political
meanings, were invested in a shared project of decolonization and a struggle for agency. These
contested and ambiguous issues certainly need to be included in the histories of cultural projects in
the non-Western world. However, this complexity is no excuse for the ongoing discounting of
alternative modernisms. It is high time that their important contribution be acknowledged. The
struggle of these modernist projects to emerge from under the yoke of old and new colonialisms
needs to be recognized and taken into account. The fluid hybridity of formal elements, the negotiation
of ambiguous social and political contexts, and the pragmatic assimilation of Western and local
cultural forms should be read not as inefficacy, or a lack of aesthetic development or direction, as
they usually have been, but rather as a survival strategy, or what Stuart Hall has called a “practice of
articulation.”63 In political and representational terms, articulation is “a form of the connection that
can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions,” without being “necessarily
determined, absolute, and essential for all times.”64
Seen in this way, the exhibitions in the Global South and Eastern Europe during the mid- and
late twentieth-century were platforms for solidarity building and internationalism. Curatorial
hospitality and eclecticism were therefore ways to create a new artistic infrastructure based on the
informal ties of friendship, sociability, and hospitality rather than strictly professional or official forms
of interaction. This combination of formal and informal means of networking should not be mistaken
for a lack of understanding of the high-stakes international art world. It was simply one of the many
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strategies of making do with what one has at one’s disposal. To further extend Hall’s notion of
articulation, the Ljubljana Biennial can be read as a space that kept on creating the “certain conditions”
which made possible a unity of different elements. These conditions resided in a curatorial approach
that valued inclusion over the hierarchical and hegemonic strictures of quality and welcomed artists
from around the world in order to present a multiplicity of voices that were then absent from large
Western exhibitions.
I began this text by considering how we might think of curating differently—not as an extractive
practice, mining artists and artworks as if they were natural resources, but as an opportunity to build
communities, solidarity, understanding, and dialogue. The Ljubljana Biennial and other similar
institutions around the world teach us how curatorial hospitality was enacted at international art
events in the postwar era. Defined in this way, curatorial hospitality requires us to reclaim the
transformative potential of what Glissant calls a reversal of poetics, or a poetics that builds itself from
the chaos of signs into a force of meaning.65 In order words, the history of alternative modernities
teaches us that there is richness and strength in hosting the world in order to create not just an
exhibition, but a community.
NOTES
1 James Hastings, “Hospitality,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1926), 797–820. Like Hastings, Mircea Eliade notes in his multivolume History of Religious Ideas the importance
of hospitality in nomadic cultures and its role in social mores and the organization of communal relationships. See
Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusian Mysteries, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 184, 204.
2 Veselin Čajkanović, “Gostoprimstvo i teofanija,” [Hospitality and Theophany] in Mit i religija u srba: Izabrane studije,
ed. Vojislav Djurić (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1973), 64–77.
3 My text examines only the first three decades of the Biennial in socialist Yugoslavia because much is to be learnt by
unearthing this particular international and collaborative period of the Biennial. The end of Yugoslavia and the period
of the Yugoslav wars between 1990 and 1999 challenged the Biennial’s identity, eroded its power, and led to its
reconfiguration.
4 See Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
131–150.
5 Meyda Yegenoglu argues that the current Western, cosmopolitan understanding of hospitality developed during the
Enlightenment, when the term was wedded to the “law, citizenship and the relations of state with its subjects.”
Hospitality became “a question of rights, justice and obligation that is to be regulated by law,” which is to say, a
transactional and conditional practice. See Meyda Yegenoglu, “Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Hospitality
in the Age of Globalization,” Postmodern Culture 13.2 (2003), doi:10.1353/pmc.2003.0012.
6 Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibition as Discursive Event,” in Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby (Santa Fe:
SITE, 1995), 118–125.
7 Ming-Cheng Lo, “Conceptualizing ‘Unrecognized Cultural Currency’: Bourdieu and Everyday Resistance among the
Dominated,” Theory and Society 44.2 (2015): 125–152.
8 Jerome Mellquist, unpublished text recounting his visit to Ljubljana in 1955, Arhiv grafički biennale, Mednarodni
grafični bienale (MGB): Vabila umetnikov, Arhivska škatla F2, 1955. Translated by the author.
9 Edy de Wilde, letter to Zoran Kržišnik, [9 October] 1971, Arhiv grafički biennale, MGB: Vabila umetnikov, vračila
grafik, Arhivska škatla F5, 1971. Translated by the author.
10 Mojca Zlokarnik, “Interview with Bogdan Borčić,” in Mnemosyne: The Time of Ljubljana’s Biennial of Graphic Arts,
ed. Vesna Teržan (Ljubljana: Mednarodni grafični likovni center, 2010), 66.
11 Tom Hill, “Local Knowledge/New Internationalism,” in Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future, ed. Peter
White (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 1996), 29.
12 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 1–23.
148 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
13 Josip Vidmar, “Uvod,” in II. Mednarodna grafična razstava / IIe exposition internationale de gravure (Ljubljana: Moderna
galerija, 1957), 3. Translated by the author.
14 There was a specific fund dedicated to events benefiting from the president’s patronage, which was reserved for a
few selected cultural events that usually had international status and were deemed important for the cultural and
political life of the country. This presidential support thus confirmed the Ljubljana Biennial’s status as a nationally
important event.
15 The Yugoslav Ministry of Education and Culture, was especially important, as it was the largest funding body. The
Biennial had previously been supported most significantly by the Slovene Ministry of Culture. In 1963, it gained
access to the Moša Pijade Fund—a key federal source of cultural grants—and continued to receive steady
sponsorship and funding from the federal, republican/provincial, and municipal levels of government until 1990
and the breakup of Yugoslavia. The biennial’s yearly operating budget in 1959 was approximately three million
dinars (US$10,000) (excluding awards and the acquisition budget), and it steadily grew to approximately six million
dinars (US$70,000) in 1983. (Note that exchange rates are difficult to assess, as the Yugoslav dinar had an official
rate and an export-import rate, as well as an unofficial black market exchange rate, and they were all different;
Yugoslavia also devalued its currency in 1966, which further complicates conversion.) See the letter to the Ljubljana
Biennial informing the organizing committee that the Biennial has officially been granted monies from the Moša
Pijade Fund, [6 July] 1962, Arhiv grafički biennale, MGB 3: Pregled izdatkov iz dotacije (Sklad Moše Pijade),
Arhivska škatla F1, Denarne zadeve, 1963.
16 Starting with the first edition of the Biennial, the organizing committee and the director Zoran Kržišnik were more
interested in presenting all possible modes of contemporary printmaking than in selecting specific works based on
popular aesthetic currents. This meant that exhibitions often featured diametrically opposed views on printmaking,
including work that was considered too passé—as was often the case with Soviet entries resembling nineteenth-century
academic works. Debates about materials and media also raged; for example, some critics and artists considered screen
printing too commercial and therefore not worthy of inclusion in an international art biennial.
17 Zoran Kržišnik, comments in the notes from the meeting of the organizing committee of the first biennial, 28 October
1955, Arhiv grafički biennale, MGB: Vabila umetnikov, vračila grafik, Arhivska škatla F2, 1955. Translated by the
author.
18 Josip Depolo, “Biennale Grafike,” Vijesnik, 7 July 1957.
19 Ibid. Translated by the author.
20 Jean Bouret, “A la 3è Biennale Internationale de la Gravure: Grand Prix à la France,” Les Lettres Françaises, 18 June 1959.
Translated by the author.
21 Tit Vidmar, “Jedan, dva, tri, trikolora,” [One, Two, Three Colours] Vijesnik u srijedu, 18 July 1973. Translated by the
author.
22 Zoran Kržišnik, “Spremljamo zapleteno procedure sodobnega ustvaranja,” [We are following complex practices of
modern creativity], Naši razgledi, 3 October 1969. Translated by the author.
23 In several interviews and in archival documentation, Kržišnik expounded on the need for collaborative curation in a
multiethnic country such as Yugoslavia. In order to secure funding and support from federal committees and ministries
and to get buy-in from all levels of government and other artistic organizations, he invited representatives from various
institutions; among these were Ivo Frol, a member of the federal Committee for Education and Culture; Zdenka Munk,
Director of the Museum of Arts and Craft in Zagreb; the Croatian artist Marijan Detoni, president of the printmaking
subcommittee of the Yugoslav Union of Fine Artists; and the Serbian art critic and artist Marko Čelebonović. In this
way, the organizing committee of the Biennial included a variety of perspectives and provided an important networking
pool for attracting artists, critics, curators, and politicians to the exhibition. See Zoran Kržišnik’s memo to Marko
Čelebonović, 7 June 1955, Arhiv grafički biennale, MGB: Arhivska škatla F1, 1955.
24 The theory of Yugoslav self-management was developed in the early 1950s by Edvard Kardelj, who wanted to develop
a uniquely Yugoslav way to organize the economy under socialism. His novel reading of Marx led to the worker-led
organization of workplaces, in which employees were owners and made all decisions collectively. For more on the
theory of self-management, see Edvard Kardelj, Pravci razvoja političkog sistema socijalističkog samoupravljanja
[Directions in the development of the political system of socialist self-management] (Belgrade: Komunist, 1977), and
Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2016).
25 Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2015), 3.
26 Maura Reilly, “What Is Curatorial Activism?,” in Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (London: Thames
& Hudson, 2018), 16–33.
27 Beti Žerovc, “An Interview with Zoran Kržišnik,” in Mnemosyne: The Time of Ljubljana’s Biennial of Graphic Arts, 41.
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28 Kržišnik, “Spremljamo zapleteno procedure sodobnega ustvaranja.” 52 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (New York: Verso Books, 2017).
29 Tanja Lesničar-Pučko, “Od pevca do rudarja umetnosti: Razgovor z dr. Zoranom Kržišnikom, direktorjem 53 Tang, 81.
Mednarodnega grafičnega bijenala” [From a singer to a miner of art: A conversation with Dr. Zoran Kržišnik, director 54 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1998), xxi.
of the International Biennial of Graphic Arts], Dnevnik Ljubljana 28 (30 January 2004): 13. 55 What I mean by having more agency is that in the mid- to late-twentieth century most newly decolonized countries
30 Kržišnik, “Spremljamo zapleteno procedure sodobnega ustvaranja.” were able to navigate global politics by creating international political and economic ties, to use international fora such
31 Rafa Nasiri, “My Visual Resources: Place and Time between East and West,” in Rafa Nasiri: 50 Years of Printmaking as the United Nations more effectively, and to navigate the Cold War entanglements in a way that was beneficial to
(Milan: Skira, 2013), 25–28; Siba Aldabbagh, “Poetics of Resistance: Object, Word and Image in the Literatures and them. With the economic uncertainty that followed the 1973 oil crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union and most other
Visual Arts of Iraq and Palestine” (PhD thesis, SOAS University of London, 2017), 196–202. socialist and communist powers, and the rise of neoliberal international policies that heavily employ neo-colonial
32 Aldabbagh, 202. tactics to exploit and control countries of the Global South, the political and economic power of these countries has
33 Dia al-Azzawi et al., “Towards a New Vision (1969),” in Why Are We “Artists”?: 100 World Art Manifestos, ed. Jessica greatly diminished.
Lack (London: Penguin, 2017), 146–152. 56 See Dominique Malaquais and Cédric Vincent, “PANAFEST: A Festival Complex Revisited,” in The First World Festival
34 Ibid., 147. of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 204–212.
35 Ibid., 152. 57 See Joseph Southern, “FESTAC ’77,” The Black Perspective in Music 5.1 (Spring 1977): 104–117.
36 Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, “Afrocentrism and Its Fruition in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold,” in 58 See Malaquais and Vincent.
The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York and London: 59 See Dina A. Ramadan, “The Alexandria Biennale and Egypt’s Shifting Mediterranean,” in Mediterranean Modernism
Routledge, 1992), 475. Intercultural Exchange and Aesthetic Development, ed. Adam J. Goldwyn and Renée M. Silverman (London: Palgrave
37 Édouard Glissant, Esthétique I: Une nouvelle région du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Macmillan, 2016), 348–349.
38 See Cedric Robinson, “Notes towards a ‘Native’ Theory of History,” in On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism 60 See Leo Mates, Koegzistencija [Coexistence] (Zagreb: Školska knjiga, 1974).
and Cultures of Resistance, ed. H.L.T. Quan (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 21–44. 61 For example, one of the rifts between NAM members came during Pakistan’s war with Bangladesh over independence.
39 Fred Moten, “Not In Between,” in Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–27. 62 Mates, 12.
40 Enwezor’s hiring in 1998 as artistic director of documenta 11 (2002) signalled this trend towards world art. 63 Grossberg, 141.
Interestingly, from its first edition in 1955 to the beginning of Enwezor’s tenure, documenta had included almost no 64 Ibid.
artists from outside the West. While Enwezor’s appointment as director of documenta was a historic move, it did not 65 Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
come in a vacuum: as I have tried to show in this text, parallel networks of art exhibition and promotion existed 1997), 189–194.
throughout the twentieth century, but these became visible to most Western observers only at the very end of the
century with Enwezor’s nomination.
41 Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research
in African Literatures 34.4 (Winter 2003): 57–82.
42 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” in Thinking
about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London and New York: Routledge,
1996), 15.
43 Socializing at the Ljubljana Biennial was often mixed with diplomacy. Unofficial get-togethers, dinners, and excursions
were used as opportunities to further political and cultural initiatives with visiting international politicians,
ambassadors, and cultural attachés. For more, see Z̃erovc, 36–53.
44 Walter Koschatzky, “Graphic Art – The Art of Our Time,” in Mnemosyne: The Time of Ljubljana’s Biennial of Graphic
Arts, 155.
45 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 27.4 (2013):
442–455.
46 See Paul O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn,” in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, ed. Judith Rugg and
Michèle Sedgwick (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2007), 13–43; Jeannine Tang, “Biennalization and Its Discontents,”
in Negotiating Value in Creative Industries, ed. Brian Moeran and Jesper Strandgaard Pedersen (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 73–93.
47 Gardner and Green, 450.
48 Marko Ristić, Politička književnost: Za ovu Jugoslaviju 1948–1958 [Political literature: For this Yugoslavia 1948–1958],
ed. Čedo Kisić (Sarajevo: Oslobodjenje, 1977), 285–301. Marko Ristić was a twentieth-century Yugoslav Surrealist poet,
journalist, diplomat, and cultural manager. Before the Second World War he was involved with the artistic wing of the
Communist Party. In the postwar period he served as Yugoslav ambassador in France, and later headed the Yugoslav
Committee for International Cultural Relations and was instrumental in supporting the development of the Ljubljana
Biennial and helping it obtain funding.
49 Tang, 81.
50 Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
51 Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger, eds., Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum
(London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

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 BEHZAD KHOSRAVI NOORI

A MONUMENT TO THE INVISIBLE CITIZEN

CONFUSED MISSILES
I was born in Tehran—very much at the centre of it—three years before the 1979 Revolution and I
grew up during the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted almost eight years. We were in the capital, far from
the actual war zone, which mainly followed Iran’s western borders from Azerbaijan to Kurdistan, and
most of Khuzestan—the oil-rich land in the southwest. But Iraq succeeded in striking Tehran as well,
first with Tupolev Tu-16 and Tupolev Tu-22 jets, and later with modified Mig-25 fighters built by the
Soviet Union. During the war, Iraq managed to build a high-altitude rocket that could reach Tehran.
Iran’s defence system and capabilities were limited, but somehow the country acquired a French radar
system that could just barely detect rockets soon after they entered Iranian territory.
A rocket had crossed the border. It was nearing the capital. Many people had already fled the
city to the relative safety of smaller towns, though some had no choice but to remain, holed up in
underground shelters. The Iraqi invention was a modified version of the Scud-B missile developed
by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was called al-Hussein, perhaps alluding to Saddam
Hussein. Iran tried to return fire using a Hwasong-5, a North Korean version of another Soviet missile,
the R-17, but its capabilities were nowhere near those of the Iraqi weapon.
Tehran was al-Hussein’s primary target—Tehran generally rather than any specific location. But
al-Hussein lacked the precision to hit an exact mark. Four minutes after the alarm, the Iraqi missile
would make impact. Four minutes were all we had to escape to the underground shelter. However,
we kids always ran in the opposite direction—to the rooftops, to see the missile. As it approached the
city, we would closely observe the detaching of the liquid fuel tank from the warhead before impact.
This would cause a slight lurch and an abrupt deviation in the missile’s final course—a random
redirection, in fact. To watch the missile’s confusion was an amusing part of growing up during the
war, and we placed bets on its new trajectory. Each time, a different neighbourhood was hit, sometimes
far away, sometimes nearby.
This explosive story may be an unorthodox way to approach the history of a war during the Cold
War. But how should such a history be told and disseminated? How should it be represented and
remembered? How do I remember the Cold War after the political divisions that prevailed during
the 1980s?

THE STORY OF A LITTLE MAN AT THE TURN OF THE WORLDS1

In Professor Balthazar’s town, Balthazargrad, there lived a man named Martin. He could have been
ordinary, were it not for a big problem: nobody—absolutely no one, not even the town dog—ever
noticed him. Martin was miserable. He tried everything to get their attention. He impersonated a
clown, and even laboured to play a gigantic saxophone, to no avail. Martin was invisible: an invisible

Delivered by Intellect to: ➦ Exhibition

Behzad Khosravi Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (2020).
at HDLU, Zagreb. Photo: Juraj Vuglač. 153
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Still from A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2018), featuring a still from How to Climb
the Ladder of Success (Zlatko Grgić, 1967).
citizen. He shared his problem with Professor Balthazar. With his crazy machine and three drops of
magic potion, the professor produced a book called How to Climb the Ladder of Success and gave it to
Martin, who left town to fill its blank pages.
As soon as Martin left, people began to remark on the absence of a man they’d never noticed
before. Suddenly, everybody missed him. The entire town went looking for Martin, who had
disappeared. Feeling a bit guilty, people went to see Professor Balthazar. But even he didn’t know
Martin’s whereabouts. In a special session, the city council decided to erect a monument in Martin’s
memory, but no one remembered what he looked like. And so Balthazargrad erected an empty
podium dedicated to Martin: a monument to the invisible citizen.
ONCE UPON A TIME, A PINKO MONUMENT
This text hovers around an exhibition entitled A Monument to the Invisible Citizen, which amplifies
and mobilizes fragments of Cold War histories that inhabit our contemporary lives but are unevenly
detected or deemed relevant. To consider the Cold War—or any war, be it hot or cold—is often to
recall agonism and dichotomy, to remember fear and anxieties, and to invoke winners and losers. For
me, however, writing about the Cold War hinges on hospitality: the hospitality extended by Professor
Balthazar, a colourful cartoon character who would regularly visit our home by way of our television
set. The Professor, who unconditionally helped members of his society, embodied the unconditional
hospitality described by Jacques Derrida.2 While war raged, fuelled by confused leaders dropping
154 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
confused missiles, a short animation reliably welcomed us into the realm of calm and strangeness
shared by the animated character and his community.
A Monument to the Invisible Citizen’s centrepiece is flashy—a hot pink playground. It’s an
interpretation of the monument to the invisible citizen erected by the municipality of Balthazargrad
in the “Martin” episode of Professor Balthazar: an empty pedestal. Made of simple building materials
such as metal pipes, the monument also imitates the Cold War–era playgrounds found in both
hemispheres. The exhibition is designed as a cross-generational podium where the audience can
engage with the intricacies of the recent past, and perhaps also revisit their own memories.
The exhibition presents an imaginarium of historical fragments and charts the global spread
of relationships between supposedly unrelated geographies at a certain time.3 The monumental
playground welcomes diverse ways to approach and explore the exhibition, and offers multiple points
of departure for its exploration. As the exhibition travelled to different venues, the architecture of its
host institution determined the sequence of its components. Thus, each location yielded variations
on the exhibition. From its initial presentation at Marabouparken in Stockholm (2018), where the
project was constructed in collaboration with Bettina Pehrsson, to its final destination at Ivana
Gundulića Elementary Public School in the centre of Zagreb, the project was carried along by
collaborators and accomplices, including the Kalmar Konstmuseum and Malmö Konstmuseum
(2019), where the project was presented at the invitation of Cecilia Widenheim and curated by Anna
Johansson, Art Encounters Biennial 2019 in Timisoara, Romania, curated by Maria Lind and Anca
Rujoiu, and HDLU in Zagreb (2020), curated by Ana Kovačić and Lea Vene.
BLACK-AND-WHITE PSYCHEDELIA
The animated series Professor Balthazar rendered a colourful utopia. I understood later that its bright
and mesmerizing hues were unusually colourful, psychedelic, and abstract. Much later, I learned that
it was produced during the golden era of the Zagreb Film company, the birthplace of the Zagreb
School of Animation, which owes its fame to the iconic children’s program Professor Balthazar.
I also discovered that people of my generation, in Iran and Iraq alike, had grown up with the
same childhood memories constructed by the Yugoslavian animation studio. So much so that war
and Professor Balthazar merge in our memories of that time of hostility, anxiety, and political idiocy.
But the Professor had insinuated himself into collective memory far beyond Iran, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.
Others, in countries then positioned politically between the communist and capitalist blocs, also
know the Professor and can sing along.4 In 1961, many of these countries had come together in
Belgrade to form the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).5 NAM was founded by Tito, president of
Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, Egypt’s second president, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first
prime minister of independent India. Nehru eventually referred to NAM as “a queer mixture of the
East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.”6
Children from NAM countries and other states without affiliation to superpowers, like Sweden,
thus share the memory of the amiable scientist who tirelessly solves his fellow citizens’ problems.
Totally devoted to his calling, this perfect human being lives in Balthazargrad, a colourful and
convivial city. With his hullabaloo machine, the nature-loving ecologist protects all life forms and
fights the wicked and malicious. This strange and minute history is a childhood memory shared by
many people around the world, the echo of a certain time and geography from the near past.
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 Production team of Professor Balthazar, 1968. From left: Zlatko Grgić, Ante Zaninović, Boris Kolar, and Zdravko
Pavičić. Courtesy of the Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo private archive.

Professor Balthazar was written and directed Zlatko Grgić, Boris Kolar, and Ante Zaninović.
Balthazargrad, the utopian, abstractly semi-modern town, was created and designed by the
scenographer Zlatko Bourek. In their productions, the Zagreb School of Animation enlisted satire
and political metaphor to address salient issues of the Cold War period. They mobilized contemporary
global experiences of the arms race, wealth inequality, environmental exploitation, and humankind’s
alienation in the concrete jungle to enact a colourful protest against the Cold War’s pervasive
manufacturing of fear. In the face of the political dichotomy of the Cold War, the Zagreb film directors
asserted a humanist vision, informed by Yugoslav socialist self-management and the ideology of the
Non-Aligned Movement, to which I will turn shortly.
To invoke such a planetary memory of Balthazar is an act of hospitality. It is also an archaeological
enterprise that traces a memory in its shared global trajectory. As Walter Benjamin theorized, it may
be a process of “taking control” of my memory through the act of cultural translation.7

THE GREAT MEETING, OR TO EAST OR NOT TO EAST

For several years following the end of the Second World War, Yugoslavia was the European country
closest to the Soviet Union. Its relationship with the West, on the other hand, was tense and
problematic. Socialism conferred ideological intimacy between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and

Delivered by Intellect to: ➦ Josip Broz Tito, Gabal Abdel Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru at Brijuni Island, 1956.
Courtesy of the Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade. 157
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Main production team of The Big Meeting at the office of Kerempuh magazine, Zagreb, 1950. From left: Vladimir
Delač, Norbert Neugebauer, Eduard Gloz, Fadil Hadžić, Walter Neugebauer, Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo, and Franjo
Vodopivec. Courtesy of the Borivoj Dovniković-Bordo private archive.
8
when Tito travelled to the East he was welcomed as a hero. But this close relationship was short-
lived. The official split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union took place on 28 June 1948. Tito
delivered a written speech to the Fifth National Congress of the Communist Party in Belgrade that
lasted nearly seven hours, in which he condemned the doctrine of Stalin. He then inaugurated the
new autonomous socialist state, which resulted in Yugoslavia’s immediate expulsion from the
Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) and the formation of the Yugoslav Informbiro, limiting
interactions with the USSR. This state of affairs lasted until 1955, two years after Joseph Stalin’s death.
The new autonomous socialist Yugoslavia required a new economic system, distinct from the
Soviet model. As the new political identity was formed, a key challenge was the redefinition of its
relationship to Marxism. On 26 June 1950, Tito gave a speech introducing the Yugoslav anti-Stalinist
version of socialism: an experimental market socialism founded on the political and social practice
of “workers’ self-management.” From top to bottom, the new Yugoslav system was distinct from the
economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communist countries. Based on collective
158 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
Still from A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2018), featuring a still from The Big Meeting
(Norbert Neugebauer and Walter Neugebauer, 1950).
initiatives organized by the workers themselves, it granted workers the right to control the conditions
of production and the distribution of value.
Tito positioned the new economic system as a continuation of Lenin’s political ideology, offering
an interpretation of his concept of state power:
Lenin said: “The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of power, an
organized force for suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and for readership of the
great masses of the population, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, and also for
the establishment of socialist ownership.” “But it should not be forgotten,” says Lenin,
quoting Marx, “that the proletariat needs only the state which is withering away.”9
Tito thus mobilized Lenin’s ghost to position Yugoslavia’s new configuration as the direct logical
expression of Leninist ideology, since it preserved the revolution as a permanent state and empowered
workers through the system of self-management.
The new system encompassed both industrial production and artistic endeavours. It was a beacon
for the artists and writers who had already disavowed Soviet socialist realism. By 1951, Yugoslavia
had also become more tolerant towards cultural production from across the Atlantic. The door had
been opened to waves of animated films and comics. In 1949, the brothers Walter and Norbert
Neugebauer, along with several young comic artists including Borivoj Dovniković, known as Bordo,
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had converged around Kerempuh magazine, where they published a series of bold and provocative
illustrations: satirical renderings of Eastern European leaders, from Stalin to Envar Hoxha, the
Communist leader of Albania. Two years later, the Neugebauers convinced the magazine’s editor-in-
chief Fadil Hadzić to produce an animated film, and so work began in the Kerempuh newsroom on
the propaganda cartoon Veliki Miting (The Great Meeting), which combined different design styles,
largely borrowed from Disney.10 Written by political satirist and journalist Mirko Trisler and produced
in Belgrade, Veliki Miting made fun of Informbiro propaganda.
Veliki Miting was a successful cultural production, presaging a new political tendency in the
Yugoslav cultural scene and society at large. Presented in different cities around the country, and even
in a public screening in the central square of Zagreb, it soon became the epitome of criticism of the
USSR.11 Film theorist and historian Nikica Gilić, referring to the work of historians such as Zlatko
Sudović, Ante Peterlić, and Midhat Ajanović, argues that the Neugerbauer brothers’ classical style of
animation was in fact the driving force behind a new kind of animation in socialist Yugoslavia.12

EXAT 51 AND ZAGREB FILM: FINE AND APPLIED ARTS UNITED

In 1951, during the plenary meeting of the Association of Applied Artists of Croatia, nine artists and
architects founded EXAT 51. The aim of the new group was to condemn the hegemony of authorized
socialist realism, along with state censorship of abstraction and the rejection by Communist doctrine
of numerous motifs as decadent and bourgeois. Cultural historian Lidija Merenik argues that in this
political climate modernism was politically convenient, “providing an enlightened ‘civilization
wrapper.’”13 The new social norm, which she defines as socialist “underdevelopment modernism,”
spurned socialist realism in favour of Western models of living, working, and creating.14 EXAT 51 is
often defined formally, as an abstract movement, following traditional art-historical classifications
of “abstract” and “geometrical.” Merenik rejects these terms; instead, she proposes that EXAT 51’s
defining characteristic is the group’s ideological bent, most notably its idea of “progress.” She argues
that, for them, geometry is a tool to achieve progress.15 In their manifesto, EXAT 51 stated that there
are no differences between the so-called pure and applied arts, and that abstraction can enrich the
field of visual communication.16 Their combination of progressive, abstract, and unbounded forms
of practice led artists to new media, images, and subjects. EXAT 51 is also connected with the
foundation of Zagreb Film. Two of EXAT 51’s nine members were involved with film production:
Aleksandar Srnec and Vlado Kristl. Their attitude towards moving images conformed to the group’s
manifesto and its insistence on the commonalities of the fine and applied arts, leading them to new
forms of communication through moving images.
In June 1956, an animation studio was formally established within Zagreb Film. This afforded
Dušan Vukotić, Nikola Kostelac, Vatroslav Mimica, and Bordo the opportunity to pursue their
new predilection for animated production and to shape the studio’s new socialist modernism,
which was characterized by flattened, geometrically stylized figures and backgrounds with reduced
or absent spatial perspective, schematic and limited animation, and disregard for physical laws.
While representative of the auteur cinema tendencies of the time, Gilić argues, this Yugoslav
socialist modernism was significantly different from the established animation styles of both
the Eastern and Western bloc countries.17 The Zagreb School thus emblematized the Yugoslav Behzad Khosravi Noori, untitled poster (2018) quoting a background image in “The Rise and Fall of Horatio”
political position. episode of Professor Balthazar (Zlatko Grgić, 1967). Digital print, 100 x 70 cm.

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 The animation of Zagreb made its first major breakthrough when Mimica’s short Samac (The
Loner) (1958) won a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. That year at Cannes, after the French
scholar, critic, and historian George Sadoul saw the work of the Zagreb artist, he remarked that he
had never realized that animated film included such a wealth of genres and styles. He went on to coin
the term “Zagreb School of Animated Films.”18 However, Gilić remarks that the term “School” may
be misleading, as the filmmakers never shared a common style.19 International success continued in
1961 with Vukotić winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with Surogat, the first
non-American animated film to win an Oscar. Animation thus emerged as a legitimate practice of
the newborn Yugoslav socialist modernism, autonomous and carefully positioned between the
practices of the Eastern and Western blocs.

REBELLION AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT

Bordo, a contributor to Neugerbauer’s Veliki Miting, argued during our conversation that the School’s
characteristic was its rejection of Neugerbauer’s Disney-influenced style of animation.20 In another
interview with Gilić, Bordo defines the Zagreb School’s conception of animation by its opposition to
Disney’s classical model of rounded characters, fully phased movement (24 frames per second), and
orientation towards children’s themes and infantile (and infantilized) cognition.21
The Zagreb School of Animation could be understood as occupying the space between two
artistic imperatives. On one side was Kristl, whose radicalism and predilection for abstraction—
inherited from EXAT 51—are most tangible in his 1961 masterpiece Don Kihot. On the other was
Grgić, the director of Professor Balthazar, the most Americanized animator in the group according
to Ajanović.22 Yet, despite their individual preferences, the animators from Zagreb shared a disposition
against Disney’s classical style of animation.
In an interview by film producer and writer Nenad Pata, Vukotić defines his initial foray into
animation as a form of rebellion against the establishment:

I did not want to follow a well-trodden path, I did not want to be an imitator or epigone;
I firmly believed that animated film offered innumerable opportunities. There may have
been a touch of youthful rebellion in this, rebellion against the establishment,
conventional forms, a wish to be new and original, but one way or the other, it was
all quite enough to begin with.23

Pata goes on to cite Grgić’s position against the American-style industrialization of animation
production:

We Yugoslavs are not cut out for team work as the Americans are for example. The Zagreb
School consists of thirteen, fifteen, twenty-one people, their integrity, their independent
personalities. This is the main characteristic, the value of the Zagreb School which should be
preserved. If this cannot or will not be done, the whole thing will turn into an industry, and
that would inevitably mean the end of this phenomenon in the world of animated film.24

Delivered by Intellect to: ➦ Behzad Khosravi Noori, untitled poster (2018) quoting a background image in the “Happiness for Two”
episode of Professor Balthazar (Zlatko Grgić, 1967). Digital print, 100 x 70 cm. 163
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THE INVENTOR OF SHOES, SLEEP-CREEP, OR:
AN ANIMATOR WHO WORKS LIKE A MINER
Grgić was one of the School’s more elusive contributors. Sleep-Creep, the title of one of his films,
seems to aptly define him. In this animation, a worm sleeps and creeps across the ground, through
water and air where, hunted by one and all, he is caught by none. It is in fact impossible to catch it,
as Pata notes.25
Even Grgić himself is unable to catch it. At the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in
1969, the film was well received but did not win a prize. A West German journalist in attendance thought
it was the story of little Yugoslavia, and the desire of the Soviet Union and other superpowers to conquer
it, but this is not what Grgić had in mind; in fact, it never even consciously occurred to him.26
Grgić began his career studying journalism. In 1951, he joined Duga Film, a short-lived film
company founded by Fadil Hadžić that specialized in animated and puppet films. There he worked
as an “in-betweener,” that is, the illustrator responsible for finishing the scenes by drawing in between
the areas that the animator leaves open, ensuring continuity of motion. When Duga Film filed for
bankruptcy in 1952, he started studying law, but once again changed course to join Zagreb Film in
1956. In a rare interview, Grgić told Pata about his unorthodox approach to animation production.
He never had a script for a film. Thinking in lines and colours, he explained the situation through a
series of drawings. Details came later, through the drawing process. His sensibility and his artistic
method of thinking through drawing relied on a logic that cannot be articulated in words. Its humour
reflects a form of absurdity that can only be expressed through movement. He describes himself as
an animator who works like a miner, digging to unearth hidden gems. His approach to animation
was deeply influenced by an older generation of American animators, including Tex Avery, Chuck
Jones, and Hanna and Barbera. This was quite typical at the time, as American production methods
were often deemed canonical. His first film, Musical Pig (1965), demonstrates his mode of thinking.
It is a simple story: a pig wants to sing, while the people want to eat it.
The idea for Professor Balthazar crystallized two years later, when Grgić started work on “The
Inventor of Shoes.” Bordo mentioned that the idea came from a children’s book, and that the initial
concept for the character of Professor Balthazar was a collaboration between him and Grgić: a crazy
scientist—bald, bearded, and bespectacled—performing experiments in his laboratory, including a magic
potion that could be used to make shoes, which everyone needs. This strange scenario was peopled by
curious creatures from Grgić and Bordo’s extraordinary worlds. This was the Zagreb School’s second
attempt to develop a series for children’s television, which would remain an atypical direction.27
“The Inventor of Shoes” was completed in 1967 and convinced its producers that the idea
warranted a whole series. It received the Golden Pelican, the prize for best children’s animation at the
Mamaia Festival of Animated Films in Romania in 1968, where it was screened in an open-air theatre
on the bank of the Black Sea.28
Professor Balthazar breathed life into the animation studio, enabling a new generation of
filmmakers to join Zagreb Film from 1970 to 1972. It was also a springboard for many who had been
labouring for years in the shadows, giving them both visibility and the opportunity to explore for
themselves the creative possibilities of animated film. Produced from 1968 to 1972, Professor Balthazar
became the Zagreb School’s greatest cultural export and its only successful cartoon series.
164 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
MYRORNAS KRIG
Our 24-inch Philips black-and-white television had four detachable wooden legs. Its buttons allowed
us to choose between channel 1 and channel 2. It had other buttons too—up to channel 4 or 5. My
sister, who is four years my elder, told me that before the 1979 Revolution, channel 3 was an American
TV station. She remembered the whimsical children’s programs and cartoons. Faithfully, I would
change the channel to 3, hoping to catch a glimpse of them, but I never did—there only was noise
and the myrornas krig (battle of the ants), as we say in Swedish.
Like many of our generation, we encountered the Stranger through our television set, a portal
into other places and foreign parts of our own land, a crossing and a hosting of the “uncanny”—
between the familiar and unfamiliar; between self and other, host and guest. This experience
transported us elsewhere, enacting both symbolic hospitality and a rehearsal for future performances
of hospitality.
Our TV was old, its internal sound system dysfunctional. We had to scan FM radio frequencies
for the sound that accompanied each program while we waited for our favourite animated character
to appear on channel 1—five or six minutes of pure enjoyment that would welcome us to the “realm
of harmless irrationality.”29
Bal-Bal-Balthazar … Bal-Balthazar … Balthazar. And then the introduction to the first episode,
“The Inventor of Shoes”:
Once upon a time, once upon a time, once upon a time, there was a camel.
But that’s a very long story.
By the way have you heard the story about double birth?
No? Oh, you must hear it.
But first things first.
I’ll start with the story about the camel.
Now! Once upon a time, once upon a time, once upon a time, there was a camel.
No, no! I’d rather begin with the story about double birth.
You know what, I’ll tell you those two stories some other time.
Now, here is a third one.30
But how did the Professor land on Iranian national television?
NEITHER WEST NOR EAST:
THE NON-ALIGNED MOVEMENT AND THE HOSPITALITY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH
Following the 1979 overthrow of the Shah, one of Iranian revolutionaries’ main slogans was “Neither
West nor East.” The statement, which still adorns the entrance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in
Tehran, is a straightforward declaration of the political position and foreign policy of the Islamic
Republic of Iran: an autonomous state between East and West.
The Shah had in fact sought to negotiate a similar position between East and West since the
Second World War. Mohamad Reza Pahlavi had an obvious affinity for Tito, and they met several
times in Iran and Yugoslavia. Undoubtedly he could understand the political conundrum faced by
Tito and Yugoslavia, since both countries lay between the two superpowers and shared a desire to
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maintain their independence. The entente between Tito and the Shah had much to do with the
centuries-long history of tension between Persia and the Russian Empire, and then between Iran and
the Soviet Union. This stemmed from the aggressions of the Russian Empire, and the early nineteenth-
century war in the north of Persia, leading to a substantial loss of territory by Persia in the Treaties of
Gulistan (1813) and Torkamanchay (1828). Even though the Russian empire’s encroachment of Persia
had been thrown off balance by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the newborn Soviet Union backed
Iranian Leninists until the Second World War. Wartime Soviet occupation of the north of Iran and
the 1943 meeting at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—held
without the knowledge or assent of the young king Reza Pahlavi—are mere episodes in the tumultuous
relationship between Iran and Russia. The fear of communism fuelled Mohamad Reza Pahlavi’s
political manoeuvres.
Relations between the United States and Iran had their own hurdles and complications, especially
after Mohammed Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. This nationalization and
Iran’s subsequent challenge of British hegemony in the International Court of Justice at The Hague
in 1952 promoted the decolonialization process—in fact, they emboldened newly independent
countries across the Global South in their struggles towards decolonialization. However, the defiance
of European and American hegemony would be short-lived; the anticolonial project in Iran ended
abruptly on 19 August 1953 with the CIA-backed coup d’état known as Operation Ajax.
Two years later, however, solidarity among East Asian countries was on full display at a conference
held in Bandung, Indonesia. Historian Shahla Aminifar believes that the Bandung Conference had
been suggested by Mossadegh, noting its kinship with the movement for oil nationalization.31
Following the 1953 coup d’état, Mossadegh was accused of conspiracy to overthrow the king and
constitution; he was incarcerated for three years, and then put under house arrest for the rest of his
life. Iran attended the 1955 conference, but ultimately refused to engage actively in the discussion.
Instead, Iran joined the 1955 Baghdad Pact, later known as the Central Treaty Organization
(CENTO), a military alliance between Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi believed that in order to be strong, Iran needed to have close relationships
with powerful nations. In 1958, the United States joined CENTO’s military committee. Seen today as
one of the least successful of the Cold War alliances, CENTO was dissolved in 1979, the year when
Iran and Pakistan both joined NAM at the Havana Summit, and a couple of months after the
overthrow of the US-backed Shah.
“Neither West nor East” became a lever to promote cultural productions from autonomous and
Non-Aligned countries. It was therefore easy, and seen as innocuous, to promote animation from
Yugoslavia on Iranian state television and to feature independent filmmakers such as Andrei
Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Chen Kaige, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Theo Angelopoulos, Werner Herzog,
and even Ingmar Bergman, in Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s.
SUPER POWERS
The political climate in Iran in the early 1980s is perhaps best summarized in the short animation
Super Powers (Noureddin Zarrinkelk, 1982) produced by the Institute for the Intellectual
Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA, also known as Kanoon).32 Clearly influenced
by Kristl’s short Don Kihot, Super Powers also nods to Borivoj Dovniković’s Ceremonja (1965) and
166 PUBLIC 61 CURRENCIES OF HOSPITALITY
Raoul Servais’s To Speak or Not to Speak (1970), in which a journalist asks people in the street, “What
is your opinion about the current political situation?”
In the film, red dashes divide the screen down the middle. The short vertical lines represent the
border shared by two neighbours, on one side a plus, on the other a minus. They march along,
avoiding one another. The scene is dark; the border, the plus, and the minus are illuminated by a
small spotlight. The soundtrack, composed by Mohammad Reza Aligholi, emphasizes the military
aspects of the abstract image: guarding the border, preserving territory, each nation unified against
its enemy. Suddenly, a minus skews the dividing line, making a protrusion on the other side. The plus
reacts; war breaks out between them. Other pluses and minuses are enlisted. For 8 minutes and 28
seconds, the audience observes the projected battle of abstract symbols, culminating in a vast
necropolis. The minuses have now become graves and the pluses their markers.
THE FUTURE OF OUR COLLECTIVE PAST
In the struggle over the future of our collective past, the absentee is the present. With his concept of
historical materialism, Walter Benjamin reminds us that history cannot do without the present.33
History enacts hospitality in its radical openness to the present, whatever it may be. It welcomes the
memory that flashes up in the moment of danger, which is neither ephemeral nor passing but
something more permanent—a state of danger. History welcomes a before-and-after conflictual
memory that flickers frame after frame, a déjà-vu history. The orthodox way of beginning a story
with “Once upon a time,” Benjamin believes, confines its subject to the “bordello of historicism.” In
my project, I forgo “Once upon a time,” beginning all stories by referring to, or making space for,
someone else: “Somebody told me.” Benjamin proposes that we confront and reject the subjugation
of what passes for history in order to welcome the rich multiplicity inherent in history’s micro/macro
relationalities. This refusal is an act of hospitality.
IVANA GUNDULIĆA ELEMENTARY PUBLIC SCHOOL
The Home of Croatian Artists (HDLU) made a public announcement, which local newspapers picked
up immediately: “A Monument to the Invisible Citizen is looking for a permanent home. We invite
institutions interested in hosting the monument permanently to contact us and to send a proposal
with a statement of interest.”
After almost four years, the exhibition A Monument to the Invisible Citizen was finally installed
at HDLU, in the Meštrović Pavilion on the Square of the Victims of Fascism in the centre of the city
of Zagreb. The project had finally come “home.” However, this was no simple exhibition. It was an
ephemeral presentation of the monument in a temporary location: a place of conversation that people
could visit and where they could engage in discussions about the work’s future. Where should a
monument dedicated to invisibility be permanently installed? HDLU received 14 proposals, which
were reviewed by Ana Kovačić, Lea Vene (the curator of the Zagreb show), and myself. We finally
selected the proposal from Ivana Gundulića Elementary School, which read as follows:
The installation would be located in the schoolyard at Gundulićeva 23a and accessible to a
large number of students. The yard is used for various activities, including dance, musical
performances, and sports. We share the playground with the Blagoja Bersa Music School.
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 3 Sanja Horvatinčić, “Synecdoche, Yugoslavia,” in Professor Balthazar and a Monument to the Invisible Citizen (Malmö:
Malmö Konstmuseum, 2019), 22.
4 Many of these countries are now referred to as the Global South. Professor Balthazar was also broadcast in Sweden, and
to the Swedish-Finnish minority in Finland, who watched Swedish TV during the Cold War.
5 Thomas Ohlson, Arms Transfer Limitations and Third World Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 198.
6 Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper, 1954), 59.
7 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the
Concept of History,” trans. Chris Turner (New York and London: Verso, 2005), 42.
8 Tvrtko Jakovina, “Historical Success of Schizophrenic State: Modernisation 1945–1947,” in Socialism and Modernity:
Art, Culture, Politics 1950–1974, ed. Ljiljana Kolessnik (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art / Institute of Art History,
2012), 7.
9 Josip Broz Tito, “Workers Manage Factories in Yugoslavia,” speech delivered on 26 June 1950 and published as a
pamphlet (Belgrade, 1950), online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/tito/1950/06/26.htm.
10 A picture of Walt Disney even hung in Walter Neugerbauer’s office. See Giannalberto Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred
Years of Cinema Animation, trans. Anna Taraboletti-Segre (London: J. Libbey / Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994), 252.
11 See Branko Matan, Pjesme o drugu Titu i ostalim drugovima – Povijest u stihovima (Zagreb: Gordogan, 2007), 318,
quoted and translated by Jakovina, 8.
12 Nikica Gilić, “Zagreb School of Animated Film: Flourishing of Individualism in the Context of Collectivist Tendencies,”
Contemporary Cinema 33.11 (2016): 195.
13 Lidija Merenik, “Before the Art of New Media,” Mute, 3 October 2007, https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-
new-media.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Jessica Lack, “M14: EXAT 51 Group,” in Why Are We “Artists”? 100 World Art Manifestos (London: Penguin, 2017), 122.
17 Gilić, 196.
18 Nenad Pata, A Life of Animated Fantasy (Zagreb: Zagreb Film, 1984), 9.
Behzad Khosravi Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (2020). Permanent installation at Ivana Gundulića 19 Gilić, 196.
Elementary School, Zagreb. Photo: Juraj Vuglač.
20 Bordo, interviewed in the film A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (Behzad Khosravi Noori, 2018).
21 Rade Dragojević, B Is for Bordo (Zagreb: Srpsko kulturno društvo, Prosvjeta, 2006), 39. Translated by Nikica Gilić.
22 Midhat Ajanović, interviewed in A Monument to the Invisible Citizen.
23 Pata, 17.
In our educational framework, we focus on national minorities students. The 24 Ibid., 18.
25 Ibid., 95.
monument will be used by them as well as kids from the children’s hospital nearby.
26 Ibid., 97.
In our school we have a large number of students with special needs and this playful 27 In 1962, they had attempted to develop a series titled Inspector Mask.
monument would be part of their mental and psychological relaxation and therapy. 28 Bordo, interviewed in A Monument to the Invisible Citizen.
Every year, we organize Erasmus Day and welcome visitors from Radovljica in Slovenia 29 I have borrowed the idea of a “realm of harmless irrationality” from an episode of Professor Balthazar entitled
“Happiness for Two” (1967), in which a character, failing to find their soulmate, travels to the realm of harmless
and Szerench in Hungary. A Monument to the Invisible Citizen could be the location for irrationality.
our Erasmus Day and regional activities. 30 Professor Balthazar, season 1, episode 3 (“The Inventor of Shoes”), online at https://tubitv.com/tv-
shows/368343/s01_e03_the_inventor_of_shoes.
On 7 September 2020, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen was installed at the Ivana Gundulića 31 Shahla Aminifar, “Iran, NAM, Iraq, the Non-Aligned Movement and Iran-Iraq War,” Zamaneh Magazine 36 (August
2004): 24. Translated by the author.
Elementary School in the centre of Zagreb, the last stop in its long itinerancy. 32 Kanoon was founded in 1965 with the publication of a Farsi translation of The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian
Andersen, complete with illustrations by the queen herself, Farah Diba. Under the direction of Lily Amir-Arjomand,
the Institute was from the start one of the many cultural enterprises that fell under Diba’s broad purview. An
NOTES organization on the front lines of cultural production in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it served as a platform for many
of Iran’s most highly regarded artists and filmmakers. Kanoon continues to exist as an institution serving children and
1 My title borrows from Midhat Ajanović’s chapter title, “Little Man at the Turn of the Worlds: A View of the Origin,
young adults.
History and the Ideological Foundation of the Phenomenon of the Zagreb School of Animated Film,” in Propaganda,
Ideology, Animation: Twisted Dreams of History, ed. Olga Bobrowska, Michał Bobrowski, and Bogusław Zmudziński 33 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History.”
(Krakow: AGH University of Science and Technology Press, 2019), 153.
2 See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).

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IP: 163.247.100.4
On: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:58:34
 Delivered by Intellect to:
Nicolás Elías Adasme Corvalán (33340268)
IP: 163.247.100.4
On: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:58:34
 Delivered by Intellect to:
Nicolás Elías Adasme Corvalán (33340268)
IP: 163.247.100.4
On: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 18:58:34