Uros Pajovic: You Know Nothing About Time Uros Pajovic: You Know Nothing About Time

You Know Nothing About Time is not about how notions that consist the social context are connected by the physical manifestations of spaces and architecture – it’s vice versa: it’s about how architecture as a discipline and an element of everyday life is vowed with the paradigms of the social and cultural context (in this case, of the Balkans).

These unfinished houses, like common denominators, witnesses to the economic, sociological, aesthetic and political conditions in the Balkans exist across the region. As if all part of one big family, they tell many stories which somehow all sound similar: stories of structures built by and for people who primarily act on instincts, and whose decisions (including those architectural in nature) are primarily made that way.

In relation to the three cubic meters and the space of the window (or: window within a window), the installation relates to the ‘left behind-ness’, ‘incomplete-ness’, ‘useful-ness’ as a triad, but also as individual characteristics – just like the houses in question, You Know Nothing About Time is only a backdrop for traces of everyday life.

I was once in a Studio course where I was the only student from the Balkans.As the final presentations were coming up, one of the other students started suggesting how their building’s finishing would be in clay blocks and concrete structural framing, to which I asked whether that maybe left too much of an unfinished house vibe. All of the students in the group, coming from the US, Western European, Asian and African countries looked at me as if they didn’t understand what I was asking.

Despite this story being related to only a small sample of people, it led me to think about what different experiences mean in relation to how architecture and spaces are perceived.Also, the concrete-and-clay-block façades so typical for the unfinished houses in rural areas of Balkan countries. – Uros Pajovic