Bootlegs have been invisible in the larger urban scale but played an important role in the street life and culture of every city. Through “marketing behind façade” they never interfered with company billboards and highly visible advertising. The neon signs „Digital Justice“ and „Sound Traveller” by Fogarasi, are derived from two companies selling pirate copies of western Pop-CDs in Serbia. The ironic naming deals playfully with the inbalance of local and global economies. The signs are uniformly designed and without any connection to known consumer goods and are pure illusions of desire and availability while formulating at the same time a political demand for justice and the free flow of people and information. What shapes a city? What is behind the material? What is its identity? How does it sound? Influenced by urban spaces and references to a site or fictional places, Fogarasi and Tkacenko are elaborating on the re-reading of the city of Belgrade through memories of materiality and sound. By investigating the relationship between architecture and representations of culture, both artists follow the path of changes in urban spaces and the conditions of their perception in daily life. Preoccupied with utopias and full of questions on social ideas Tkacenko’s 1:1 replica of the remnants of the unfinished Museum of Revolution, situated in an entirely forgotten park in New Belgrade, he investigates in a narrative way the history of urban sites, their presence an disappearance over time, their current evidence of existence in our environment and everyday realities. Which are not only shaped by the political and economical surroundings, but by our personal constructs and ideas of the city. The traveling of sound, a song – made from mouth to mouth, from place to place, reflects intimate memories, but as everyone‘s story is different, yet the song remains the same.

Courtesy of the Artists

Organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum Belgrade.

http://www.mgb.org.rs/en/desavanja/izlozbe/2015/item/1143-tracks-and-traces