Author: Zexi Wang
Exposed to the wide, straight avenue that crossed the new and old Belgrade, Serbia, I was drawn to the socialist city landscape with purely functional architecture. In the face of the sublime yet cold buildings presenting vast scales of angular forms and rough materials, I felt belittled. However, a sense of familiarity rose at the same time, perhaps because I share pieces of socialist mentality with Serbian people, being raised in China.
Along the wide, straight city avenue is a plethora of sections of bare soil, where you can see how roadside flowers are contrived to add to the country’s solemnity , The continuous chain of bare buildings are manifestos of the lifelessness, which is inscribed in the gray building exteriors as raw industrial materials, filling people’s everyday life with cold cement.
That was my first impression of Belgrade, where I spent my summer break. To my surprise, by the end of the summer break, I was wavering over not what feelings I hold toward this city and this country. The only certainty is that those feelings do exist and are constituted by several dimensions.
The first impression of what socialism meant for the city was an important aspect that constitutes my attitude. The concept of “Zenit” was another. I immediately felt attached to this concept as soon as I saw it in the “Zenit” exhibition in the National Museum in Belgrade. Zenit is a revolutionary art movement idea and an ideology and philosophy that emphasizes the distinctive nature of the Balkan region, in an attempt to differentiate it from that of the rest of the “more modern” countries in Europe. As an avant-garde idea that broke many norms, Zenit was first proposed when Yugoslavia had not disintegrated yet. Proposed after WWI, the idea of Zenit distinguished itself from Dadaism, another art idea proposed in Western Europe at the same period by shedding light on the political status quo, seeing “Balkan as an as-yet-unexplored territory that offers freshness, incorruptibility, the ability to regenerate the faltering Western Euro.”
I resonated with this strangely veiled term for reasons I couldn’t really pinpoint . Maybe as westernization swept through the globe, I could not dodge passively being on the receiving end of Western ideas that have been regarded as progressive, and a part of me attempted to seek an uncontaminated yet authentic ground for finding and grounding a humanistic difference in search of my own personal identity. Getting out of the museum building, I began to see the socialist architectural traits from another perspective, one that reveals something incredibly relevant to myself.
When I got to Block 70, a complex sense of affinity towards Serbia increased even more. Block 70 is the largest Chinese market in the Balkan region, and the representational city avenue I mentioned above leads to it. Block 70 is a bizarre market of all things miscellaneous and fascinating, from clothing to kitchen utensils, from tropical slippery to children's toys, from Dongbei Dumplings to Taiwan bubble tea. I found myself to be a constant visitor there over the summer– around 5-6 times in total. Yet each time I enter the market, the magically vast range of commodities dazzles me as if this is my first time abroad and my first time in the market.
More specifically, such a scene where groups of foreign people congregate and form a community reminded me of what happened back in my hometown in Guangzhou, China. In Block 70, it is precisely this spatial dislocation that drags me to recall a stream of memories.
Surrounded by ethnically brown and black merchants always carrying large and non-transparent bags, Tangqi Clothing Building (唐旗外贸服装城市) was located in an area called Guangyuanxi, where many foreigners resided. Guangzhou is one of the biggest export cities in China, and the majority of Middle-east and African merchants chose to run their own tiny businesses between their home country and Guangzhou instead of utilizing multinational corporations and benefitting from positive amounts of budgets for advertising Their businesses were down-to-earth– products sold included cosmetic products, clothing products, and electronic products. It embodied a phenomenon that anthropologist Mathews Gordon refers to as “low-end globalization.” The merchants, though foreigners, assimilated organically into the Guangyuanxi area, and led their businesses successfully. Mathews Gordon highlighted the blend to the extent that he even discussed the possibility of a Chinese version of “Barack Obama”.
However, in the 2010s, things changed. In cases of serious confrontational physical clashes between police and African merchants, the government took charge to deal with them; thus, many African merchants were expelled. Due to the covid, the last time the place was haunted when I last visited the center of its community Tianqi Clothing Building (天旗服装城): only a few stores were open with no merchant present. An overwhelming force of sadness engulfed me and fused through my cells. . It was the first place I viscerally witnessed how diversity functions, but it was all gone.
Coming back to the experience I had in Belgrade, it truly felt like all of the diversity and the clamor of the stores came back.
Just like the Middle Eastern and African migrants in Guangzhou,I became the foreigner who had the potential of obtaining a sense of belonging. Just as commercial buildings like Tianqi were the concrete assembly spots for Middle Eastern and African foreignersto find “their” people, Block 70 was mine. Even further, as the merchant community had almost integrated into Guangyuanxi, I felt similar possibilities unravel in front of me in Block 70.
Many thoughts swirled in my head during the summer. It was fascinating yet perplexing.
Whenever I hear of Serbia and its capital city of Belgrade as the crossroad of Eastern and Western Europe, flourishing western liberal democracy and residues of communist ideology, I could not help to relate myself to the city, and to the experiences that I had in the past and am having in the present.
While electric buses and streetcars ply amid the plainly gray residential buildings on both sides of the main city avenue in Belgrade, not only do I see them bridging the gaps between Yugoslavia and Serbia, but also between my past and my future – it bridges the gap between the foreign land and the homeland, the Other and the Self .