"Skirting the Center: Svetlana Kana Radevic on the Periphery of Postwar Architecture" - a collateral event at La Biennale Architettura 2021, 22 May - 21 November. The extensive built work, almost completely unknown internationally, of a celebrated Montenegrin and Yugoslav architect will be brought to light at the Biennale Architettura 2021 from May 22 until November 21 at the Palazzo Palumbo Fossati. Svetlana Kana Radević (1937-2000) among the most prominent architects in socialist Yugoslavia, designed anti-fascist memorials, hotels, and residential projects—celebrated for their deft synthesis of local materials and international tendencies, as well as a generosity of proportions and informal spaces for leisure and exchange. The exhibition will show original drawings, photographs, and correspondences from her personal archive, a trove of newly-discovered materials that make it possible to contextualize and historicize an exceptional, overlooked figure of postwar architecture. Her private archive shows that in the geopolitical circumstances of her professional life, Svetlana Kana Radević was an architectural figure across societal registers: regionally, negotiating between vernacular building tradition and the globalizing tendencies of late modernism; nationally, designing celebrated civic spaces and social condensers that facilitated a progressive public sphere between the socialist state and its citizenry; and internationally, articulating a decentered, post-colonial axis by which the Montenegrin architect simultaneously and seamlessly worked between Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Podgorica. Exhibition is organised by APSS Institute and Strategist, and supported by the President of Montenegro and the Capital City of Podgorica.
