Heading into the woods for the green and solitude is reason enough, there’s often no need more than that. If there is a reason, bicycles don’t enforce a rule about the why of pedaling. They are open possibilities of motion and space. We set off from Belgrade, Serbia with a different collection of hopes than merely wild camping in the forest or ascending dirt tracks to horizon-surveying hilltops. Those were glints of our ambition, too, but I’ve been drawn again and again to the former Yugoslavia for more than that, the history the transformations, the architecture. So tracing a wavy line from the Serbia capital to Podgorica, Montenegro, there were specific highlights crucial to the trip.
We wanted to see the heroic built environment of post WWII. Concrete buildings that express the socialist ideals of community, of sufficiency within a small geographic area of accessibility to the many, and a design where functionality is placed at the fore. I have thought and written about the concrete and metal monuments of Yugoslavia before, their aesthetics and politics, their way they work on our psychology.
These spomeniks have surged in the world’s consciousness after years of neglect and afterthought. They stand as instagram-ready graphical otherworldly visions, though their genuine meaning is far deeper and in danger of getting obscured by their sheer audacity. The monuments of Yugoslavia presented a mechanism of unification of ethnically different people, they proclaimed the majesty of a pan-slavic federation, they were abstract vehicles for the sculptural artistic ambitions of their creators sometimes to achieve subversion and commentary. Notably they were diverse expressions of local consideration and context. Even if the cal for their construction was centralized, the execution expressed a distributed substantially fragmented conception of commemoration.
It was with all of this in mind that we toured Belgrade itself, and then set off into the grey southward. How does it look to make buildings with the idea that they should rationally ride on vectors that meet the needs of people? What if this has to be done under inevitable, honest economic constraint?
Here’s a truth about a bikepacking trip. You spend most of the days pedaling, breathing into ascents, exulting in downhill breezes, bending toward the verge when you hear cars behind, kicking left right left to find the smooth line on a rough double track. The illusion is that that’s the comprehensive emotion of it. Again, it can be, but that’s not anymore my sort of trip.
It’s not exactly instead a quest or a project, but maybe more an opportunity for narration: I rode in Serbia and Montenegro, I lined together plans of architecture, historical significance. I tied to understand a fragment of the beautiful of here by seeing its heroic buildings and monuments in a way that would give me some basis for asking people for their thoughts of their own place.
