Polonca Lovšin: Why Slovene Houses Look the Way They Do

Videoanimation, 7:19 min, KUD Obrat, 2007

In Slovenia, only 50% of the population lives in cities. In other developed countries, this number is around 80%. In our country, migration to urban centres took place primarily between 1950 and 1980, when people from rural areas and migrants from other Yugoslav republics moved to cities and started working in factories. In this thirty-year period, the urban population grew from 26% to 49% of the whole – almost the same as it is today.

In the mid-sixties, my father was one of those who moved to Ljubljana from the countryside. He built a house for himself on the outskirts of the city. Over the years the house grew, developing and changing with the growth of the family and my father’s resourcefulness at making and saving money. This video describes the transformation of a typical Slovene one-family house and how that relates to the then typical “parallel” economy.

Video animation based on research on parallel economies

Voice: Polonca Lovšin

English translation: Rawley Grau

Supported by: KUD Obrat

______________________________

Architect and artist Polonca Lovšin (1970) focuses on self-organised initiatives and alternative forms of action in architecture and urban planning. As a co-founder of the cultural association KUD Obrat, she has been involved in developing the multi-year community garden project Beyond a Construction Site (Ljubljana, 2010-ongoing). Her most prominent independent projects include Movement for Public Speech (Trg svobode, Maribor, produced by Maribor Art Gallery, 2015), Soil, Water, Garden, Freedom (MSUM Ljubljana, as part of the Draught series, 2015) and Elektrisierende Träume/ Electrified Dreams (Kunstverein Gera, Germany, 2011). Lovšin’s work has been shown at numerous group exhibitions in Slovenia and internationally; she has participated in artistic residency programmes and received a number of grants and awards.

Artist's web page: www.lovsin.org