FR~U exhibition THE HOUSE THAT IS FALLING APART

The exhibition The House That Is Falling Apart addresses the politics of space and urban transformation in relation to shifting power structures, shared heritage, and the city's identity of collectivity and care. It re-actualises modernist gestures of solidarity while critically observing the threats that contemporary urban growth poses to this legacy — and to the possibility of a just and equal future.

The exhibition brings together three artists — Winnie Herbstein, Filip Jovanovski, and Anu Vahtra — who work at the intersection of memory, architecture, cultural heritage, and space. For this project, all three adopted the role of the decolonising flâneuse, conducting three-week residencies in Skopje and using strolling and critical observation as research tools. The figure of the decolonising flâneuse creates a common space of learning, care, and participation through peripatetic experience and embodied critique — inviting active rather than passive engagement with the late capitalist city, and foregrounding the resilience of silenced voices and forgotten gestures.


The artists researched near-invisible and vanished public spaces in Skopje: buildings demolished through neglect or fire, gathering places threatened by urban development. These were places made with care, places that belonged to everyone. The exhibition maps a choreography of movement through this disappearing landscape, posing urgent questions: What will happen when the house finally falls apart? What political, social, and ideological forces led to this situation? And where can we locate care, neglect, and decay within a wider ecological and political crisis?

Without romanticisation or beautification, the artists present things in their current state — and in the gaps, offer small interventions towards more meaningful forms of agency. Taking care as its point of departure, the exhibition is hosted at the Museum of the Republic of North Macedonia, itself an institution that has long struggled for its survival.