Mišo Kapetanović

Mišo Kapetanović

Rijeka University


  • Research topic:
    Postsocialist Landscape: Informal Construction in Lviv Region, Ukraine
    Period:
    May, November 2019
  • facebook icon twitter icon email icon telegram icon link icon whatsapp icon

Mišo is a social science researcher working in the fields of cultural anthropology, material culture, and human geography with a regional focus to South East Europe. He is mainly interested in contemporary working-class culture and issues related to it, such as informal construction, labor migration (gastarbajteri), popular music and vernacular commemoration practices. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (2017, Balkan Studies program) and joint master’s degree in global studies and global history from the University of Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Vienna, Austria. He was a resident research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of South East Europe, the University of Rijeka and worked as a researcher for the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin for the exhibition "Brave New World – Migrants’ Dream Houses."

He wrote on modern urban planning in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia and is currently working on a book following his dissertation which deals with discourse and practices around informal construction in post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In Lviv, Mišo will look for connections and contrasts between Western Ukraine and former Yugoslavia through the relationship of modern urban planning and post-socialist informal construction. He will record the architectural form and decoration of private buildings in public space, through their facades, and constellations in larger material scales, the landscapes. Informal construction, as a disruptive force in space, introduces diverse and unorthodox aesthetics to the public space and brings the presence of marginal signatures employed by diverse groups that engage in the practice.  By analyzing its visual language, Mišo plans to involve with broader questions of modern urban planning after socialism, cultural communication between the European east and west, and reconfiguration of builders’ professions and practices in increasingly integrating European economies governed by the investors.