Iva Kontic

An elegantly dressed woman with a travel trolley ventures into the construction site of the urban megaproject “Belgrade Waterfront”—nearly 2 million square metres of residential, office, and retail space, a new exclusive city within the city rising on the banks of Belgrade. Conceived through local political ambitions framed as national interests and born from the foreign investment of Emirati private developers, this concrete mushroom of buildings and skyscrapers has been growing steadily and relentlessly over the last decade amid violence, controversy, regulatory abuse, and public dissent—an ideological offspring of post-socialist transitional society and a perfect child of wild authoritarian neoliberalism.

Roaming along the fringes and sneaking through the work-in-progress of what some have nicknamed the future “Dubai of the Balkans” (or “an unlikely place for Gulf petrodollars to settle”, as others have described it), the author performs various scenes of the future life(style) promoted by the vast billboards that conceal foundation pits, diggers, and mountains of debris from the landscape that once existed, while the children’s classic “If You’re Happy and You Know It” murmurs in the background…