"To travel abroad in 1990, you normally took your passport and went to Italy, just nothing. In 1991, to go abroad, you had to have a Yugoslav People's Army permit in addition to the passport to go back. I, whenever I went abroad, to Hungary for example, I had to go to the leadership, to the recruitment centre or where they give out these assignments, which soldier will go to Belgrade, Zagreb and so on. And they issued me a paper saying how long I was going to be there, I said three days, so they issued me a paper saying I would be back in three days, if I didn't come back in three days, I could be in trouble. They'd write in my military book, I'd come back late, and I could have gotten in some trouble for that. And I'm in that 1991, because I was already planning to leave Yugoslavia. So every month I traveled somewhere abroad to have that tracking record of traveling often. And then when I escaped in January 1992, they already knew me at the border or they already saw how many times I had traveled, I had my passport already, so I didn't have a problem."
"The key difference between socialism in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia was, in my opinion, that in Czechoslovakia everything belonged to the state, the state owned everything, right, and you couldn't even have a butcher's shop, that was also a structure and so on. Yugoslavia, like Poland, preserved completely the structure of those small entrepreneurs, those tradesmen, which are the basis of the economy here in the Czech Republic today. And in addition, and this is forgotten, there was socialist self-management of property. That is, if you were an employee of a company, specifically the company where my mother worked, Energo Invest in Tuz, then they, as employees, through the self-management decided on the basic investments of that company, for example, when Energo Invest wanted to build a new office building. So everybody, the majority of the employees, and that means including not only the management of the company, but including, I don't know, the lady who worked in the kitchen, who worked in security, the engineer who developed the deposits, and some management, they all decided democratically whether the company would take a loan and build a new building that was just an office."
"I always say that my childhood was, there were always bananas in the shops, oranges and so on. Sometimes there was a shortage of coffee that had to be imported from Germany, I remember that as a child, someone always came from Germany, brought coffee. That Yugoslavia... For me, my childhood was that I never thought at all that I was missing something, like materially, spiritually, that's because of that grandmother, or the sight of some freedom. Even my family was not persecuted in some way, not tormented in some way by that regime. When I started to find out afterwards, the number of people who were sort of tormented by the regime in Yugoslavia was terribly like minimal. And the important thing for me was that I grew up in a world that was a very good environment for a child to live in, and I didn't notice anything that somehow... There was one thing, one single thing, and that was, and I remember this from my childhood, that nationalism was banned."
Igor Kovačević was born on 17 October 1973 in Brcko, former Yugoslavia (today Bosnia and Herzegovina) to Zorica and Slavko Kovačević. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Tuzla in the northeastern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1988-1991, he studied at a grammar school with a pedagogical focus, graduating a year earlier than his classmates. He first visited Prague not long after the Velvet Revolution. Due to the deteriorating political situation, he legally left Yugoslavia in January 1992. Until October 1992 he worked in Stuttgart, Germany, to earn money to study in Prague. In order to get his parents across the border, he paid a Croatian soldier ten thousand marks in September 1992. In October of the same year, he went to Prague, where he began his studies at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University. He completed his engineering studies in 2000, then went on to complete his doctoral studies, which he successfully completed in 2010. He was a founding member of the Centre for Central European Architecture. He has been engaged in research, curatorial and publishing activities. He has also worked at the International School of Architecture at the Architectural Institute in Prague and as an expert of the European Mies Van der Rohe Award for Architecture. In 2023 he lived in Prague.
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