Gesamtkunstwerk Metelkova City

For the last twenty years the protagonists of the ACC Metelkova City have been transforming its public space and the façades of the buildings by architectural, constructional, artistic and handcraft interventions, thus creating a unique kind of gesamtkunstwerk. The article focuses on the key points of the construction process and its contextualization in a broader historical, social, political and cultural context, thus aiming to define the constitutive elements of artistic practices and procedures of setting up the Metelkova artists’ community. The article highlights the necessity to perceive the entire area as a work-in-progress, with individual segments sometimes disappearing or gradually overlapping with other interventions, and with a number of elements that from the very beginning were meant to be only temporary. This principle, in contrast to the traditional understanding of cultural heritage preservation, appears to be crucial