URBOGLIFI: MULTIPLYING THE CITY – OPEN OFFICE – KREŠIMIR’S SQUARE (April 15 and 16)

Building on their twenty-year practice of engaging with the city, its material and immaterial heritage, spatial interpretation, and educating citizens about the resourcefulness of shared spaces, Shadow Casters have been conducting a project titled “Urboglifi: Multiplying the City” for several months.

“Urboglifi” is a research program conducted in the form of lectures, workshops, and cinema screenings held on weekends at various locations including the Matko Laginja Neighborhood Council, Ribnjak Youth Center, Prince Zdeslav Park, Eugen Kvaternik Square, King Petar Krešimir IV Square, Croatian Heroes Square, and several micro-locations in the lower town on Laginja and Martićeva streets in coordination with co-owners. The goal of this project is to rediscover the urban identity of neighborhoods together with residents based on raising awareness of the context of coexistence and community, as well as the resource potential of the given space.

During the project, they have decided to set up Open Offices at several locations for a duration of five days, where they contemplate the city and its changing identities with the citizens themselves in situ.

The second Open Office of the “Urboglifi – Multiplying the City” project will be on April 15 and 16 at King Petar Krešimir IV Square.

At this Open Office, they will engage in discussions with citizens about the quality of space in the popular Krešimirac as one of the few green and urban-designed green oases, and about possible and impossible transformations. One potential transformation is the treatment of the Branimirac market, on the outskirts of Krešimirac, as an interpretative and multifunctional center, where the proximity of the bus station transforms Krešimir’s Square into a space beyond the “city gates” and they explore the possible alternative resourcefulness of this space.

Through Open Offices, they also test and improve the entire “Urboglifi” program directly with citizens, organize and promote the project, and collect stories that will be incorporated into further thematic events, as well as all other project activities. These offices thus become “mobile interpretative centers” of the neighborhood and meeting places. The aim of setting up open offices is to raise awareness of the neighborhood’s everyday life as a resourceful and useful resource for thinking about the betterment of the local community. This will be done by collecting urboglifi, symbolic and spatial accumulations, signs, and meanings that arise from events being inscribed into the place. By collecting statements and testimonies from random and intentional passers-by, they jointly explore the character of the city and discover its resourcefulness.

About Shadow Casters

Project Support: City of Zagreb

Support for Shadow Casters: National Foundation for Civil Society Development, Culture Nova Foundation, Croatian Audiovisual Centre