Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her work connects spatial knowledges and political emancipation, thinking with solidarities and struggles from below. She proposes minor planning as the articulation of these approaches. She is the MA City Design Programme Lead at the Royal College of Art, London (UK). She holds a PhD from the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH), on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-Aligned Movement. With Godofredo Periera, she is working on an edited volume “Take Back the Land: Architecture, Land, and Liberation” (Bloomsbury, 2027). With Gal Kirn and Žiga Testen she co-edited Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments (Jan van Eyck, 2012). She is the author and editor of several books, including“Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade” (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), “Exhibiting Matters” (jovis, 2018) with Milica Tomić, “Curatorial Design: A Place Between”, co-edited with Wilfried Kuehn (Lenz,2025), “Geography with John Berger: Questions of Space and Practice” co-edited with Ben Garlick (Bloomsbury, 2025). She collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman on Don't Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform. Her interest in pedagogy and public spatial knowledge extends beyond her academic work and takes form in many collaborations including Memory of the World/Public Library with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, New Schools for Spaces with Jonathan Solomon and Elise Hunchuck and Curriculum Revolution with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. Dubravka curated Peti Park: A Struggle for Everyday (2010) and Zoran Bojović: Three Points of Support (2012). She lectures and exhibits widely in Europe and North America.
Space to the People! Anti-fascist Space in Žilnik's Black Film and Uprising in Jazak
"Black wave", now the most common name associated with a period and a group of authors in Yugoslavia, originated in the state-driven critique accusing the authors for depicting Yugoslav reality too harshly in their films. In August 1969, the article "Black Wave in our fim" was published in the newspaper Borba [Struggle]. Written by Vladimir Jovičić, the article critiqued a tendency present amongst many filmmakers identified as Yugoslav New Cinema towards portrail of bleak stories showing socialist Yugoslavia failures to live up to its promise of building equitable society. Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent authors associated with black wave, makes Black Film in 1971, appropriating the association with the "black" for a film that cuts into one of the core issues for a society, then and now, access to housing. In this lecture, we will match Black Film with Uprising in Jazak (1973), another Žilnik's short film, in which he asked inhabitants of the village Jazak, well known for its contribution to the anti-fascist struggle during World War 2, to explain in situ how they had fought.
Writing a preface to a new edition of A Seventh Man, John Berger remarked in 2010, "It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass." While Žilnik's new films continuously prove how young he is with each new film, these two films grew younger, especially in the recent decades, both for their theme but also their formal commitment. If Black Film put a mirror for Yugoslavia to see how it was failing to equitably grant the "right to housing" enshrined in laws as the responsibility of the society for all of its members, Uprising in Jazak, confronts not only the society and its practices of anti-fascist memorialisation but also the mainstream film as well. Fascism and the housing crisis are the two urgencies of our time, which need to be understood as related to each other, underlined both by the obsession with property. Focusing on spatial reading of the films Black Film and Uprising in Jazak while watching them together, we will discuss what both anti-fascist film and spatial praxis can be.