Xiaofu Wang is a Chinese-Australian artist working in Berlin
Episode 425: Nearest Truth Photobook Program illuminary Xiaofu Wang and I managed to find a minute amongst the busy release schedule of her book The Tower (designed by Lee Tesche, Production Management Ioannis Markakis, printed at Future Format) to walk listeners through all of the work that we have put into making a book of (biased here) excellence.
I am incredibly proud of Xiaofu and the book itself. I believe it is an atmospheric walk through something approaching a documentary project, but that deviates more toward the realm of the cinematic. It has particular overtones of science fiction, brutalism, and something like a post-punk post-Yugoslavian observation of the Genex Tower, the famous Belgrade concrete towers nestled along the city’s skyline.
The project explores the historical paradox of the tower as well as the people who upkeep its interior and exterior. It is a location of significance as differing worlds of varying ideological concern hem it in. Xiaofu visited numerous times to gain access to the towers and befriended many of its inhabitants. She was also given access to the building’s bureaucratic rooms and made documents of the time capsule they represent. Strange Communist artifacts litter the frame, and new questions from the present moment are derived within the fading veneer of past glories. From the viewer’s position, the investigation takes on a forensic quality. We search for more clues, meaning, and the tower’s position in 2024. There are more questions than answers, which was a fundamental drive of keeping the project loosely situated at the edges of the documentary tradition.
You can pick up a copy directly from the artist, and please tune into this conversation to hear about Xiaofu and her story. There is quite a bit to delve into!
From the original Press release…
Genex Tower, in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, is one of the most iconic buildings in the former Yugoslavia. Consisting of two towers connected by a bridge, the giant brutalist structure looms above the rest of the city, standing stoically as the world changes around it.
Designed in the 1970s by architect Mihajlo Mitrović, the left side of the building consists of 30 floors of residential apartments. At the same time, the commercial tower on the right served as the headquarters of the now-defunct trading company Generaleksport, the “crown jewel” of Yugoslav industry, as one former lawyer for the company put it.
The labyrinthian networks of offices in the commercial tower housed Generaleksport’s dozens of subsidiary companies, while the restaurant on the top floor was the setting for important business meetings. Today, only two floors are occupied, while the others have become eerie museum displays of the building’s past glory and some of its more nefarious secrets.
In the residential tower, hundreds of residents have lived out daily routines and personal dramas. It’s a place where couples fell in love, teenagers went through rites of passage, a security guard penned a science fiction novella, and a computer engineer painted Mondrians in unexpected corners of the building. More recently, the building has also been used as a set for dozens of films, TV shows and music videos, and a YouTube star created his content in a studio in the building’s basement.
Despite being laden with a heavy ideological and historical legacy, Genex Tower is impossible to pigeonhole, and its unchanging exterior belies a dynamic interior. ‘The Tower’ is a subjective documentation of how the past intersects with the present in a place full of possibility.
Title: The Tower
Photos by: Xiaofu Wang (https://xiaofuwang.info/)
Year of publication: 2024
Publisher: Nearest Truth Editions (https://www.nearesttrutheditions.com/)
Design: Lee Tesche
Art Direction: Brad Feuerhelm
Texts: The Sight of It, translated as home, no title, and The City and a Tower and a Tower and a Tower, written by Maša Seničić
Between Symbol and Symptom, written by Sonja Jankov
Printed by Future Format in Greece
First edition 500 copies
