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The former Agency of Public Accounting (SDK) building finally given new life – new car park to open this Friday, 17 June, at 11:00.

#PnotUGM

Maribor to become richer for a brand new car park – City Garage – right in the heart of central Maribor. The former Agency of Public Accounting (SDK) building was first intended as the new location for UGM | Maribor Art Gallery, however the town leaders, with improved urban mobility in mind, decided that a new car park should be the priority. The city thus displayed a great sense for innovation and visionary transformation of vacant buildings in this most attractive of locations. A special feature of the car park is a level designed for tourist buses. Tourists will thus be able to get off the bus to find themselves right in the centre of town. For a progressive, creative and functional city!
― for Daily News, Toni Soprano

Museums on a Summer Night! Join us tonight for a free entry to the exhibitions at UGM and UGM Studio and a number of events. At 22:00 you are kindly invited to join us for midsummer bubbles at UGM Studio. We will give a toast to the new City Garage car park with artist Toni Soprano and dance the night away with dj dobesedno yas lp rip prjat. Our kind sponsor of the evening is Radgonske gorice. ALL WELCOME!

Images for publishing: 1, 2, 3, 4

The project was selected from among proposals for Art in Public Space programme. The author is Toni Soprano. The project is financed by the City Municipality of Maribor and Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

Brutalist building in Maribor, Slovenia transformed into mock car park

Artist Metka Golec, working under the name Toni Soprano, has transformed a vacant brutalist building in the centre of Maribor, Slovenia into a mock car park.

Maribor is the second largest city in Slovenia and has all the characteristics of post-industrial and post-socialist transition. Once a successful industrial city - TAM (Factory of Automobiles Maribor) manufactured buses, trucks and military vehicles for the entire former Yugoslavia – it now struggles to find a new identity. Shopping malls rise in the suburbs, while the old city centre becomes progressively deserted by the day, shop windows derelict, facades unkempt and streets empty.

UGM | Maribor Art Gallery decided to confront these issues by commissioning new public space interventions through their Art in Public Space programme. Selected by an international jury of art professionals from among four proposals, Toni Soprano’s 2016 project addresses multiple issues facing public space in Maribor at once.

The project focuses primarily on the issue of visual pollution in public space. While the public has been bombarded with unsolicited commercial billboards, screens and banners for decades now, this comes to the fore in Maribor in particular, where fast food locales and shops of questionable quality begin to pop up in vacant spaces throughout the city centre. Apparently unrestricted by local organs enlisted for the protection of architectural heritage, lightboxes with faded stock photographs, branded parasols and large poorly designed window decals slowly fill the public space, while the public becomes increasingly desensitised to it. Toni Soprano subverts the doleful phenomenon by using its exact visual language on a huge scale in order to bring attention to this corroding, yet seemingly unnoticed process.

Toni Soprano, formerly of art tandem son:DA, uses her characteristic computer-mouse-drawing style to cover more than 100 windows of an empty brutalist office block in full window decals depicting parked cars, air vents, waste containers and loud signage in order to transform the building into a mock car park. Toni Soprano is no stranger to large scale public space interventions, seeing she recently, as part of son:DA, participated in the Connecting Sound Etc. Cable Works, Cable Sounds, Cables. Everywhere exhibit at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Austria. While son:DA more specifically dealt with the invasion of technology into public as well as private space and the accumulation and subsequent discarding of unsustainable hardware waste, Toni Soprano addresses public space in broader terms, calling attention to misused buildings and the sort of visual defilement they attract.

Speaking of the building itself, it may also be pointed out that brutalism - a type of modernist architecture championing exposed concrete - is sorely undervalued in Slovenia. Understood as a reminder of a contentious recent past and seen as grim and austere, brutalist architecture enjoys little recognition from both the general public as well as indeed from those responsible for the protection of architectural heritage in Slovenia. Consequently it has fallen victim to bastardisation, decay and demolitions. UGM | Maribor Art Gallery wants to bring attention to what they believe is an important legacy of the city’s industrial past as well as a superb example of Slovene post-war architecture, built in 1970 according to designs by local architect Vlado Emeršič (1928-2003).

Lastly, the project addresses a wider question of the role of culture in the city. Selected as the European Capital of Culture alongside Guimarães, Portugal in 2012, Maribor largely failed to use the benefits of the title to its advantage and failed to bolster the role of culture as a sustainable development opportunity, with no cultural infrastructure built during or as a result of the EU supported programme. An international competition for a new art gallery building was launched in 2010, with a project by Hungarian architects Tamás Lévai and Ágnes Jószai winning first prize, however the project was left unrealised after unsuccessful negotiations with bodies designated for its development and completion. UGM | Maribor Art Gallery has since campaigned to be relocated into the vacant building - currently acting as frame to Toni Soprano’s mock car park - with a series of public debates, other public space interventions and support from self-organised Maribor city quarters and art professionals alike. The initiative was forcefully put on pause in March this year, as the local and national government decided to overhear the arguments to repurpose the building as a gallery and rather determined to use one third of the building as an emergency dispatch center, leaving the rest unused. Coincidentally, Toni Soprano’s project has since been understood - although proposed months before plans for the emergency dispatch centre were made known - as a form of protest on behalf of UGM | Maribor Art Gallery.

The public space intervention will remain in place through 31 October 2016.