A mapping of ideological interpellation (Althusser) at the scale of one municipality: Prijepolje, on the tri-border of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Three years, three ideological peaks: 1979 socialism, 1994 nationalism, 2013 capitalism. Source: the Polimlje newspaper archive at digital.biblioteka-prijepolje.rs.
💾 Exhibition
🟢 Mikrofilm diskursa — Admir Veljović
Salon ULUS, Belgrade, Serbia · 6–17 April 2026
🔴 Behind the microfilm (video documentation)
Technique
Projection on a 6 m long canvas, 1.80 m high.
Description
The exhibition develops a discourse microfilm from three periods — 1979, 1994, and 2013 — through which the ideological interpellation of the subject is analyzed along three distinct ideological directions, relative to the specific context of the municipality of Prijepolje, located in a tri-border area.
The projection reveals frames in a repeating process, alternating frames that each reveal one example from the map. This creates an assemblage of diagrams, photographs, sounds, and a rhizomatic search for modes of ideological formation and structure.
One representative frame is used from each year. Each frame has its own panel that theoretically explains its components with media records, and each year has a panel covering the global, national, and local context. The display is animated in After Effects.
The work is based on readings of Louis Althusser, Rastko Močnik, and Rade Pantić, along with conversations with Vladan Joler and Miško Šuvaković, who assessed it as very interesting in the field of post-conceptual practice.
💾 Unfolding (method)
By chance, I tried to think about the aesthetic synthesis of a large amount of data. The working title is microfilm of discourse, through which I attempt to depict the interpellation of the subject into three distinct "peaks" of ideology, using the concrete example of Prijepolje. First, I collected all the articles from old issues of the newspaper Polimlje, then grouped them according to the concepts that represent "frames" to me. After that, I synthesized them into a vertical column and narrowed the space to obtain abstract, narrow formations that take the form of a map. I did this for 1979, 1994, and 2013 (socialism, nationalism, and capitalism).
The 2013 microfilm is a theoretical mapping at the micro level of the municipality of Prijepolje that visually depicts the key "frames" that build interpellation (Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses).
What do we gain from the microfilm? Synthesized knowledge that observes discourse as a clear form, and a form whose conciseness demands reading and research. By forming a unique form for each year or specific environment, it seeks a reader who is a researcher of the context, treating the context as primary in analyzing society.
💾 5 plateaus (theory)
"In the discourse of ancient rhetoric, we could say that, in some way, automatically, without particular effort, we recognize the topos to which the expression with the preposition 'refers' and from which it draws its meaning. That topos is common, general, it is the locus communis, koinos topos. (...) The act of saying and understanding occurs in a non-problematic self-evidence." — Rastko Močnik, Tri teorije
The most evident things are a problem because we have an obvious agreement around them (like not perceiving sounds above 20 kHz). The obvious is normalized, and based on it, we move, we become lawyers, we get employed, we reproduce, we make ourselves happy or miserable. For it to be accepted, it must be justified, which in turn legitimizes and legalizes it. What operates at such low frequencies is the concordance we call ideology. A hidden totalization that can only be dismantled and decoded by recovering the expelled concepts and rejecting their reduction. To be able to see it, we must build platforms on which we move and analyze the structural pillars to which our subjects are fixed. Sometimes by identities and other times by desires.
I mapped 5 topoi, which I call plateaus, by reading Althusser and the commentaries of Rastko Močnik, and in discussion with @araujazz and Luis @pedaisgalegos. Through them we walk with two microfilms of discourse, from 1979 and 2013, Yugoslavia and later Serbia, as an example of how we were called into this world.
💾 Dance
1 second of becoming human · 1979 · Prijepolje, Yugoslavia
A dance spiral of interpellation into the Yugoslav subject, until privatization darkens the age. But the map continues.
The video shows three microfilm examples, small maps, each with its own set of film frames, capturing the ideological peaks of one town: 1979 as the peak of socialism, 1994 as the peak of nationalism, 2013 as the peak of capitalism.
The question is: in the name of Who is What doing? How are actions and ideologies framed within their historical moments?
The dances end in a spiral, symbolizing the moment of becoming within ideology, a concept inspired by Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation. Example: when police ask "Who are you?", your answer reinforces your identity within that ideological framework, even if only for a single second.
Made on cartographilion.com beginning in October 2023; the earliest dances date back to 2020.
🟢
Story of the Puzović family (Serbian)
The Puzović family from Prijepolje represents a trace of origin that reflects the influence of different social regimes, each leaving its mark on its period.
ArchMapLab (AML) is a program based in Senderiz, Galicia, Spain. Working through the Sende coliving space, AML creates archaeological intersemiotic translations into artistic forms such as diagrams, maps, and timelines.
AML connects researchers with artists through a mediator. The mediator guides the process, translating research questions into a broader historical and geographical context (spatializing time). A second translation of this context happens through form, as artists design maps and diagrams.
The program connects academia with cultural institutions, converting archives into a form for public dialogue while enriching academic researchers through a student summer school.
🟢
Fixar map of Galicia (Galician)
"Fixar - o mapa de persoas que fan cousas en Galicia. Un mapa único, levou 2 meses rematalo. Está feito con máis de 9000 pezas. Actualizarase regularmente con proxectos interesantes do rural galego."
Sende coproduction
🟢
Map for CRAB Creative Rural Hubs community (English)
"Tracking village spaces where tech and creativity solve real problems. Spaces which don't think only what happens under their roofs but keeping young people in town with local tech jobs, turning empty barns into places that boost the whole community, and teaching skills that cut energy costs for everyone nearby."
Sende coproduction
📂 Prijepolje 2024
🟢
Recap of 2024 in Prijepolje, Serbia (Serbian)
A combination of diagram and map that establishes new relations between events in a small town on the border of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia. Produced for the local newspaper Polimlje to compress all of the year's topics and articles.
The point is what you say it is — I am merely the catalyst for that point. I possess no inherent knowledge; I just read and contextualize my reading.
Abandon rational calculation (enslavement)
Let us extinguish rational calculation, for it is enslavement. Instead of clinging to the superstitious affect of the past, we must invent the future through theory, through new diagrams of organization and redistribution of power and resources, through an understanding of materialist dialectics.
The urgency for Serbia (and its bourgeoisie)
This is critically important for Serbia, particularly for its bourgeoisie today, of whom it can be said:
"Blinding signifiers, which once stoked revolutionary affect, now survive in the general culture, that is, in dominant ideology. Meanwhile, affect is domesticated into universal forms of submission (patriotism, political culture, constitutional patriotism, Eurocentrism, Orientalism, racism). In contrast, the proletarian revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past... but only from the future — from the future it itself produces: from theory." — Močnik, Theory with Ideology
