Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: EMPIRE LINES
Episode: Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo, Josip Seissel (1937)
Description: Dr. Aleksandra Stamenkovic constructs the struggle to unify post-imperial South Slavic identities, through Josip Seissel’s Yugoslavia Pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937.
The collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the First World War birthed a new European state – the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. National pavilions at international exhibitions, or Expos, became vital platforms to project the state’s internal unity and external strength on the global stage. Yugoslavia’s prize-winning pavilion for the Paris Expo in 1937 fused contemporary European and classical aesthetics, projecting a progressively modern culture steeped in diverse, Slavic histories. But it was also an...