Paper short abstract:

The political argument over legitimate identity around Macedonia has created a new ‘becoming’ expressed in the solid concrete of the Skopje 2014 project. Skopje’s lived myriad of city-space is nowadays structured and objectified by the concrete of pillars and statues creating a new historical truth.

Paper long abstract:

Skopje 2014 is a highly advertised and contested re-modeling of the city of Skopje, capital of the Republic of Macedonia. Having been rebuilt once before after the devastating earthquake of 1963 in which 80% of the city was destroyed, Skopje today is being re-build as' timeless capital.' My paper will look at how an inanimate substance like concrete has the possibility to (in-)form individual becomings anachronistically, depicting an exclusive landscape that forms a moral and ethnic cartography. Life styles, genetics of the right ancestry, the resurrection of 'lost descendants' are expressed in concrete space. Hyper-Europeaness of ancient Macedonia legitimized by 'formed' bodies, 'concrete' space, birth-practices and life-styles in turn moralise Macedonia's answer to EU exclusion. Whereas the history of Socialist Macedonia told of Slavic tribes immigrating 600 A.D. into ancient Macedonia and mixing with its population, today the Republic of Macedonia is inhabited by 'true/concrete' and 'ancient'/modern Macedonians/European Autochtones, creating otherness within space and time, excluding Albanian and Roma population in Macedonia from its history, from the newly build spaces and European modernity. Skopje 2014 is constructed via space exclusion based on an ethnicity re-defined moral cartography. How is the new architecture speaking to people, changing their way of existing and their interaction with the environment that surrounds them? I am not looking at the nationalism as social agent of change, but at concrete buildings, statues and monuments who create the becoming of people in their own and unexpected ways.