Stadium CultureThe damaging decade of nationalism and crisis in Serbia during the ’90s resulted in the total neglect of both official and unofficial institutions for the youth, now yielding dangerous outcomes. STADIUM CULTURE is an ongoing project to renovate and expand an existing open handball stadium located in Novi Sad to become an electronic youth center and event place. The main challenge in this project is to fortify support and infrastructure for youth culture in a city that had plenty of state support during both the Serbian and Yugoslav Kingdoms before the WWII and the Socialist era after WWII.

For STADIUM commissioned by kuda.org - Centre for New Media based in Novi Sad, we propose a hybrid program for based on the two central agents for youth activity: sports and electronic media, lingering at loose ends in today’s transitional society. STADIUM would
create an identity that engages some positive elements of the socialist past while defining urban future on some new terms. STADIUM should materialize the city’s situation of occupying a complex transition space lingering at the outer edge of the European Union.

From the beginning of the 20th century in Novi Sad both Western and Russian building types were modified to create community athletic space for youth and workers. Later during the reign of Tito from WWII until the early 1980s a number of institutions supporting culture were initiated. Compared to the number of youth organizations in Novi Sad at the time of Tito’s death in 1980 (48), today’s figure (3) demonstrates a devastating score. The few that struggle to remain are the scouts and ecological initiatives. An unfortunate but logical outcome of this situation is the recent shift of young people towards political extremisms.

STADIUM CULTURE is meant to become a public space bringing young people together virtually, as well as in person, to participate in the social and political impact of new technologies and in sports, play, and friendly competition. Such models of institutions fueled by individual artists that served youth through art and culture were present in Novi Sad in the 1970s. It is their legacy that survived more than two decades and become now valuable points of departure for the current generation. Architecture for the Center for New Media takes its cue from the flow of alliances necessary to pursuing this project towards construction and it combines the innovations of long lost modern architecture with emerging identity politics of the electronic media.

For the Lost Highway Expedition exhibition at Galerija Skuc in Ljubljana, NAO will present the full proposal process for STADIUM CULTURE displaying research, design, conceptual underpinning related to history and current youth art and activist practice in the city, scale models, legal documentation, correspondence between key actors including government entities undergoing major transition. The installation will demonstrate how STADIUM CULTURE has negotiated and made visible the issues of public space that are at stake in the emerging democracy in the Western Balkans today.

NAO (Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Thad Pawlowski and Katherine Carl)
http://www.thenao.net/