Metelkova City is an autonomous social centre in the centre of
LjubljanaLjubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...
,
SloveniaSlovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
. It is located on the site of former military barracks (the Slovenian headquarters of the Yugoslav National Army) and was
squattedSquatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use....
September 1993. The site consists of seven buildings and was 12,500 m². The squat is named after nearby Metelko Street , which is named after the 19th-century Slovenian Roman Catholic priest, philologist, and unsuccessful language reformer Fran Metelko.
Activities
At Metelkova City a range of activities have been held. These include an art gallery, bars, artists studios, space for designers, offices of cultural organisations and concerts featuring different types of live music from
Free JazzFree jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
,
Heavy metalHeavy metal is a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the Midlands of the United Kingdom and the United States...
and
NoiseNoise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically...
to
DubDub is a genre of music which grew out of reggae music in the 1960s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae...
and
TechnoTechno is a form of electronic dance music that emerged in Detroit, Michigan in the United States during the mid to late 1980s. The first recorded use of the word techno, in reference to a genre of music, was in 1988...
.
Since it hosted
LGBTLGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
and anti-racist activities, Metelkova was targeted by
Nazi-SkinheadsWhite power skinheads are a white supremacist and antisemitic offshoot of the skinhead subculture. Many of them are affiliated with white nationalist organizations....
in 1994.
One Building Demolished
On August 2 2006, the Inspectorate for the Environment and Spatial Planning demolished one building,
known as the Small School , after several previous attempts were thwarted. There are plans to rebuild the school .
External links