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The post-modernist turn and spectres of criticality in post-socialist architecture: ‘one:table’ at the Venice Biennale 2012

This article examines the ‘one:table’ installation in the pavilion of Serbia at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2012). The large empty table put on public view by its co-authorial team of ten architecture graduates is argued to be meaningful beyond its reasoning as an exhibit responding to the Biennale theme of ‘common ground’. The inquiry aims to demonstrate that this one simple object has an important critical effect in the architectural discourse of post-socialist Serbia. Its effect, it is argued, is complementary to designs for prominent buildings in Belgrade by the world-renowned architects Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Wolfgang Tschapeller and Sou Fujimoto. Conversely, its implicit criticality is compared to the method and media of an analogous case of post-modern critique in the installation ‘Table (of a Dancer, of a Marksman, of a Philosopher)’ (1982) by the architect Mustafa Musić. The aim of the article is to compare the two exhibitions where the thematic of the table as architectural exhibit opens a discussion of criticality in post-modernist and post-socialist moments. The article discusses the two table installations in terms of Jacques Derrida's thesis of ‘hauntology’, which is itself derived from the analysis of another table, that is, a ‘simple wooden table’ used by Karl Marx in his seminal section on ‘the fetishism of the commodity and its secret’.