Rijeka Café

Rijeka is an industrial city transitioning towards a strengthened knowledge economy deeply rooted in the arts, culture and creativity.

In Mediterranean Breviary: A Cultural Landscape, Predrag Matvejevic declares the richness of the Balkans and the beauty of Croatia which—to its gain and grief—lays claim to the greatest stretches of the rugged eastern coast of the Adriatic. In this philology of the Mediterranean he rhapsodizes about the magic and poetry of this vast basin—about the legendary bura, the fearsome pirates of Senj and the might of mythological sea creatures. He writes about thousands of years of cultural mixing and remixing that has given us Roman ruins in Istria, Byzantine architecture in Zadar, and the Lion of Venice in Rijeka.


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Rijeka is an industrial city transitioning towards a strengthened knowledge economy deeply rooted in the arts, culture and creativity.

In Mediterranean Breviary: A Cultural Landscape, Predrag Matvejevic declares the richness of the Balkans and the beauty of Croatia which—to its gain and grief—lays claim to the greatest stretches of the rugged eastern coast of the Adriatic. In this philology of the Mediterranean he rhapsodizes about the magic and poetry of this vast basin—about the legendary bura, the fearsome pirates of Senj and the might of mythological sea creatures. He writes about thousands of years of cultural mixing and remixing that has given us Roman ruins in Istria, Byzantine architecture in Zadar, and the Lion of Venice in Rijeka.

A philology of Croatia’s coastal cities today would include the remnants and ruins of the last two centuries: the abandoned sites of industrial might and military power that occupy vast urban spaces in Split, Zadar, Pula and Rijeka. As Croatia’s economic strength has continued to grow since independence in 1991 and the end of the Croatian War of Independence in 1995, these sites are increasingly being seen as an immense, untapped resource for both economic stimulation and cultural engagement. The debate over how to reoccupy and repurpose these sites engages policy-makers, artists, developers and citizens.

When Musagetes first began researching Rijeka as a potential site for dialogue about creative practices, we were seeking a specific context within which to frame a global exchange of ideas on the transformative role of the arts. What we discovered in Rijeka was the unique combination of an enlightened municipality, an artistic rigour, a distinct youth culture and a concentrated urban core. That convinced us Rijeka is an ideal experimental site to launch an expanded multi-year initiative that would contribute to the intellectual body of knowledge about creative processes and to the realization of a multinational cultural program.

Rijeka has a solid track-record of cultural efforts often supported through infrastructure contributions from the City. These include an extraordinary 1970s cinema dedicated to art films and documentaries; an independent bookstore with biweekly readings and cultural events; a new apartment dedicated to the City’s newly-established artist residency program; and underground tunnels and bomb shelters that are used as alternative recording studios for emerging punk and rock bands.

There are two projects of interest for the Rijeka Café. The first is the transformation of a 19th century cigarette paper mill into a youth culture centre; this would expand upon an existing spontaneous youth music festival that has been taking place at the site for the last five years. The second potential project is a two-kilometre water-break pier running parallel to the industrial sea front, which the city has recently taken over and slated for redevelopment as a recreational area.

Rijeka Café: Three Conversations

Can creative practices effect social change when they take place in public, with the public, and across communities?

• What is the nature of publicly engaged artists’ social responsibility? To what extent must such an artist reconcile individual artistic vision and interests with the aspirations/taste/opinions of the public? What authority does an artist have to act in the public realm? Does working to affect social change demand a greater degree of caution on the part of the artist to avoid overbearing artistic visions? Or are the arts about collective engagement?
• What is the distinction between an "artist" and a "creative practitioner"? Are there any parameters that define or characterize the artist as a creative practitioner and vice versa? Does “design” factor into this?
• When creative practice delves into the middle of the social/political world and the realm of everyday life, does it cease to have the potential to be considered art? To what extent are “artistic practice” and “creative practice” distinct modes of working? If an artist is doing both, are there distinctions between the products of artistic practice and the products of creative social practice; and, if yes, what are they?

In cities undergoing cultural, social and economic transitions, can the development of new cultural spaces provide new relevance to the arts, leading to deepened public engagement?

• Cultural spaces are the principle sites for presentation and public access to the arts, but many artists are interventionist, working outside institutions. How can the creation and revitalization of cultural spaces—particularly repurposed industrial sites—be relevant to socially engaged creative practices and provide extra-institutional space for creation?
• In post-industrialized cities with increasingly knowledge-based economies and creative industries, how do artists contextualize this transition and address its inherent social and cultural complexities?
• If we consider the social, political and economic roles that industrial manufacturing plays, what are the gaps that its departure leaves behind in a city? How do creativity and knowledge activities move into these gaps? What changes do they bring the places they move into?
• Industrial manufacturing is a material process whereas creativity and knowledge activities tend to be based in the immaterial realm of ideas. How do the ecological and environmental concerns of a transitioning city change? Does it relieve certain environmental stresses or are they just being shifted to another part of the world?

Can public space be creative space? How can we establish and design public space for creative interventions?

• Creative space—a non-physical space where creativity is encouraged and nurtured—is lacking in many communities. What policies, practices and arguments can we make to establish and protect creative space?
• How do we ensure that Public Art— artistic interventions in municipal efforts—maintain the disruptive and subversive role of challenging assumptions and confirming a collectivity far greater and more profound than the sociological constructs of cities, nations and classes?
• How do we engage the viral expansion of empowerment through Public Art? The current and renewing qualities of potent art may be ossified in the cement of permanent public installations. What ingredients of creative practice can be grown and re-formed year after year?
• What can we learn from cafés, piazzas and agoras as the sites of historical social change?

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Participants

• 
  Carol Becker | bio

  Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts.

• 
  Sergio Bregante | bio

  Sergio Bregante is an architect and graphic designer.
  

• 
  Bob van Dijk | bio

  Bob van Dijk is a multifaceted story-teller, designer, entrepreneur, lecturer (and DJ) in The Netherlands.

• 
  Ryan Doherty | bio

  Ryan Doherty is the Curator at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
  

• 
  Karen Farbridge | bio

  Karen Farbridge is Mayor of the City of Guelph.

• 
  Branko Franceschi | bio

  Branko Franceschi is the Director of the Virtual Museum of Avant-garde Art in Zagreb.
  

• 
  Gregory Greene | bio

  Greg Greene is a Toronto-based documentary filmmaker.

• 
  Kenneth Hayes | bio

  Kenneth Hayes is an architectural historian and a curator/critic of contemporary art.
  

• 
  Lisa Hirmer | bio

  Lisa Hirmer is the Principal of Design and Research at DodoLab.

• 
  Andrew Hunter | bio

  Andrew Hunter is Director of DodoLab and Adjunct Faculty and Researcher at Waterloo Architecture Cambridge (University of Waterloo).

• 
  Gordon Knox | bio

  Gordon Knox is Director of the Arizona State University Art Museum.

• 
  Lorenzo Pignatti Morano | bio

  Lorenzo Pignatti Morano is Professor of Architectural Design at the Facoltà di Architettura – University “G. d’Annunzio” in Pescara  (Italy) and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo (Canada).

• 
  Dalibor Martinis | bio

  Dalibor Martinis is a video artist and teaches at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka.
  

• 
  Shauna McCabe | bio

  Shauna McCabe is the Executive Director of the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto.
  

• 
  Davor Mišković | bio

  Davor Mišković is a cultural worker in Rijeka.
  

• 
  Antoni Muntadas | bio

  Antoni Muntadas is an artist and Professor of Practice in the Visual Arts Program at MIT.

• 
  Carmen Robillard | bio

  Carmen Robillard is a Program Manager with the Ontario Trillium Foundation in Sudbury.

• 
  Ivan Å arar | bio

  Ivan Šarar is co-founder and co-owner of the marketing agency Manufaktura and organizer of the Hartera Music Festival.
  

• 
  Plamena Å arlija | bio

  Plamena Šarlija is an officer of the Department of Culture, City of Rijeka, in charge of museums, galleries and visual arts.

• 
  Jeffrey Schnapp | bio

  Jeffrey Schnapp holds the Pierotti Chair in Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford.
  

• 
  Irena Kregar Å egota | bio

  Irena Kregar Šegota is Senior Associate for international cooperation in culture at the City of Rijeka.

• 
  Jerica Ziherl | bio

  Jerica Ziherl is director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.