Lecture on Rijeka – European Capital of Culture 2020

Nevena Škrbić Alempijević took part in the international conference “The Interaction of Ethnic and Confessional Cultures: Ethnological Research”, organized by the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius. At the conference held in an online format from November 26 to 27, 2021, she held an invited plenary speech titled “The European Capitals of Culture and the New Normal: the Case Study of Rijeka 2020”. Her talk was based on the research carried out in Rijeka within the project “Urban Futures: Imagining and Activating Possibilities in Unsettled Times”, which dealt with politics of urban regeneration and its transformations in the pandemic context.

Abstract:

The European Capitals of Culture and the New Normal: the Case Study of Rijeka 2020
The aim of this article is to discuss ways in which the pandemic context has affected a specific type of public event – performances related to the European Capital of Culture initiative. The author applies urban anthropology approaches to show how city spaces are recreated by the programme. She pays special attention to the strategies of regenerating cities and fostering cultural diversity, key concepts in the EU policies in the field of culture. She also shows how the visions of urban futures, outlined in the ECC bid-books, are being transformed due to the impact of COVID-19. Her focus is on the mechanisms for reimagining an ECC city under the conditions of the New Normal. In order to outline those processes, the author presents the results of her ethnographic research related to Rijeka, a Croatian harbour city and a 2020 European Capital of Culture.