THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY IN THE WORLD film essay, 11:30 min
(2023)Tending a vegetable garden stands at a peculiar intersection of fundamentally different ideologies in post-transitional Ljubljana. Vrtičkarstvo – the scarcity-motivated tradition of bottom-up self-organized community gardening associated with the Yugoslav (socialist) past has become a dire enemy of the local government and its attempts at turistification and beautification of the city.
The project (consisting of a publication and a film essay) critically recounts the local, yet universal story of a confrontation of two political aesthetic regimes: lively and spontaneous heterogenous informality of the people’s gardens and the authorities’ controlling and profit-driven standardization of space
The film essay juxtaposes conversations with my grandmother, a municipality employee, and a critical urban planner, accompanied by a voiceover. Combined with footage shot in Ljubljana between December and March 2023 as well as archival material, I thread a story of construction of The Most Beautiful City in the World, asking: Who has the right to design in a city condemned
to beauty?
Though direct and sometimes literal, the images remain suggestive, evocative, sometimes ambiguous; revealing but not explaining; shaky, awkward, uncomfortable.
