We are in Ljubljana in January 2008. The sun is shining, the alpine peaks are glittering with snow, the sky hints at the nearby Slovenian Riviera. It is so small, according to a Slovenian joke, that you have to carry your passport in your mouth if you go for a swim. The innumerable open-air coffee-houses and bars are full to the last seat and radiate a Mediterranean atmosphere. Since August 2007 smoking has been strictly forbidden in Slovenian workplaces, public buildings, restaurants and bars. Now the smokers sit – and work – under outdoor gas heaters. I meet the Slovenian Maja Vardjan at the weekly market so that she can show me her Ljubljana. She is an architect, a journalist and for a good half-year now the manager of her own design gallery, the T5 Project Space. »The nicest thing about my city is that you only need to drive for an hour to get to Trieste for an Italian cappuccino«, laughs Maja. With just under 280,000 inhabitants, Ljublana is small, and in the cultural scene everyone knows everyone else. »You have to go away often, for example to Vienna, to see international exhibitions. Here, sadly, no museum can afford them, if only because of high insurance costs. We are really a ›capital village‹.« We go to the Moderna Galerija, the »Museum for Modern Art«, which is celebrating its 60th birthday this year but is now being rebuilt. In addition to Slovenian modern art it also houses the »ArtEast Collection 2000+«, an excellent collection of contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe from the 1950s to today, which has been collected by the curator Zdenka Badovinac. The collection, which focuses mainly on Concept Art, has already been shown several times internationally. The museum also has an external branch, the Mala Galarija, for more innovative exhibition projects and young artists.     In the legendary Galerie Skuc we meet the artistic director Alenka Gregoric. The gallery, which is now partly commercial, is still one of the most important places for contemporary art in the city. It was founded in 1978 as a protest against established art institutions. In the mid eighties it was the centre of a sub-culture, where many legendary exhibitions (such as »Homosexuality and Culture« in 1984), performances and happenings took place. Between the death of Tito in 1980 and the 10-day war in 1991 actions critical of the state, punk concerts and also gay and lesbian bars characterised the underground. Important impulses came from the platform NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst – New Slovenian Art) which was founded by three groups in 1984: Laibach (Music), Irwin (painting and graphic art) and Noordung (theatre, at the time known by the name »Sisters of Scipion Nasice«). Less known in the West was the then legendary industrial funk band Borghesia, centred around the charismatic artist, journalist and DJ Aldo Ivancic, who also founded the performance and theatre group FV112/15. In Dada manner the name was simply taken from a Slovenian encyclopaedia. On page 112, line 15 stood: »C’est la guerre!«. In those exciting times many personalities emerged who are still influential and internationally known, including many women such as the co-founder of NSK, Eda Cufer, now an expert in cultural theory and a dramaturge, the artist and architect Marjetica Potrc, the philosopher Marina Grzinic, who was also artistic director of the Skuc Gallery, and her even better-known philosopher-colleague, Slavoj Zizek. The Industrialband Laibach, which created a furore partly because of its use of Nazi aesthetics and was banned by the Yugoslav government, still gives concerts to this day.
    At the unusually early age of 26, Gregoric took over as director of the Galerie Skuc in 2003, replacing Gregor Podnar, an important figure in the Ljubljana art world, who had found it too quiet in previous years. Now Podnar runs a commercial gallery with Slovenian and Scandinavian artists in Berlin and is active in Ljubljana only sporadically. »What are the most important galleries in Ljubljana these days?« we ask Alenka. »The Galerija Kapelica, which has its name because it is housed in a former chapel and is certainly one of the most committed places for present-day art, and the P74 for new media and music, run by the artist Tadej Pogacar. Young Slovenian artists also exhibit in the Galerija Ganes Pratt. And the Galerija Alkatraz in the autonomous art centre of Metelkova, is still an important institution «.

Joze Plecnik and his successors

We cross the Ljubljanica River over the »Triple Bridge«, a work of Joze Plecnik, and buy cigarettes at the tobacco kiosk he also designed. Last year was celebrated in Ljubljana as the Plecnik Year: hardly anyone has had such an influence  on the image of the city as he has had with his general urban plan and more than two dozen monuments, squares, public buildings, villas, gardens and religious buildings. His most beautiful building is held to be the National and University Library, with its famous reading room. Not far from the library Maja shows me her » favourite Plecnik«: a street lamp with two strangely rolled-down phalli. »Column of Double Impotence« is what the German architectural theorist Andreas Ruby called them. One of those many interventions in the city area, which are examples of the architect’s idiosyncratic sense of humour.
    Even today, the young architecture scene is very lively in Ljubljana. »In the nineties the competitions were still open. As a result, a few small firms could establish themselves in their formative years with major projects. The legendary exhibitions Sixpack (2004), which started from Genua and Rome on a tour, and »Young Blood – I’m a Young ‚Sloven’ Architect« (2005), which was shown in Ljubljana and Prague, even made the up-and-coming architects of Slovenia known worldwide.
    Maja leads us to an old, abandoned tobacco factory (»Tobacna Ljubljana«), one of the many old industrial sites from the time of Yugoslavia, which are now being restructured into offices and loft apartments for the country’s »creative industry«. Fashion designers, new architecture firms, graphic artists and galleries have moved in there. ROG, an abandoned bicycle factory, is another site of this kind, where a centre for contemporary art combined with an architecture and design centre is planned, cross-financed by commercial tenants. This is in keeping with the taste of the current minister of culture, Vasko Simoniti, who has a conservative image and is said to have little interest in the contemporary. The art scene views the commercially oriented project in ROG with scepticism: after all, people have grown accustomed to anarchic scenarios such as the »Metelkova«, a barracks occupied by the autonomous art scene since 1993, with state-supported galleries, clubs, studios, social institutions and a youth hostel in a former military prison. It is situated in the inner city, fiercely fought over by real-estate sharks, not far from the main railway station. The city authorities have tried repeatedly to tear the building down or at least to cut off the electricity, until now, without success.
    Maja and I end our walk on the market again, over a Slovenian coffee under the gas heater. »It tastes almost as good as in Trieste«, jokes Maja. When we say goodbye, I ask her whether the Slovenians have any problem with the term »Balkan country«. »No, at worst we tell jokes about it. The Slovenian media artist Igor Stromajer once told me the following story: during the Balkan wars people wanted to transfer bears that had been driven out of their habitat to the French Pyrenees. The local people there protested: bears from the Balkans, they claimed, were too bad mannered.«

Translated by NELSON WATTIE.

ANTJE MAYER is a journalist and editor of »redaktionsbuero». She lives in Vienna.