Feminizing the City

Walking as a Way of Knowing – Belgrade

In March 2024, the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do launched a series of artist-led walks entitled Walking as A Way of Knowing – Belgrade. Conceptualized by the curator and WCSCD founder Biljana Ćirić, the program included a number of guider tours by by local artists, curators, and architects, designed through their own research interests, providing different perspectives of Belgrade, its history, complexity, and often overlooked viewpoints.

Feminizing the City is a walk through Belgrade’s feminist history and present – an invitation to (re)discover the streets, monuments, and artistic interventions in public space that tell the city’s history from the perspective of women.

The names and faces we pass on our daily commutes and wanderings are rarely reflected upon, and sometimes they even seem arbitrary, but the ways in which our public spaces are organized are highly political and shape our cultural and collective identities. In Belgrade, only 4.37% of streets are named after women, many of whom are not even historical figures but mythical heroines and metaphors. Out of the 115 streets whose names commemorate women, 73% are among the smallest, and 26.1% are so-called ‘dead end’ streets. What this speaks to is the implicit gendering of public spaces and the century-long division between the private and public spheres as inherently masculine and feminine. In order to see beyond the systematic exclusion of women from public spaces, we have to look not only at what little is there, but at what’s invisible and hidden within the margins.

As Rebecca Solnit put it, names subtly perpetuate the gendering of a city. The 1990s conflicts in the ex-Yugoslav region have prompted a re-traditionalization of gender roles and spurred nationalism that has become increasingly evident in present-day cultural policies and public spaces. Street names, squares, and monuments reflect a revisionist, one-sided understanding of history that celebrates violence and oppression.

The aim of this walk is to map out and uncover some of the marginalized aspects of Belgrade’s recent history – the names and actions of feminist activists, their anti-war protests, calls for solidarity, and artistic interventions in urban spaces. By naming, remembering, and walking in the footsteps of Žarana Papić, Borka Pavićević, Women in Black (Žene u crnom), and other women who shaped and imagined a more peaceful and inclusive Belgrade, we can start collectively creating an alternative map.