Each year at the anniversary of poet Oton Župančič’s death, we are awarding the highest recognitions of the City of Ljubljana in the field of art. We are introducing this year’s recipients of Župančič Awards which are going to be ceremoniously presented in September.

The Župančič Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 goes to the academic architect Stanko Kristl.

Academic Stanko Kristl is a highly sensitive architect and thinker about space whose work and thoughts have significantly marked our city. Stanko Kristl was in the first generation of students of Prof. Edvard Ravnikar who created the highly recognisable architecture of the sixties. His architecture is noted by a sense for humanity, it is dedicated to people, their needs and their spatial experience. The kindergarten Mladi rod is accommodating the needs of the youngest children with its experimental design and its special shape. The atrium houses at Borsetova are still an unsurpassed example of high-density low-rise housing architecture in Slovenia. A special contribution to the city is the emergency services building of the University Medical Centre Ljubljana, his project to which he devoted a big part of his creativity as he wanted to provide doctors with a high-quality work environment and patients with a humane space.

Župančič Awards for Two-Year Creativity (2018-2020) go to:

• creative duo in the field of performance arts Dunja Zupančič and Dragan Živadinov
• poet and performer Nina Dragičević
• film and theatre music composer Nino de Gleria

Dunja Zupančič and Dragan Živadinov are an inseparable artistic duo in the field of performance arts and wider who with their work greatly exceed city and country limits. Their projects and performances of the past two years Odilo. Obscuration. Oratorio; Reka, Reka/Syntapiens::IZ; informance Cosmism and Biocosmism reinforce them as key artists of our time.

Nina Dragičević efficiently combines social criticism and experimental sound expression. She is a writer, essayist, theoretician, journalist, composer and experimental musician who with her first poetry collection Love Says Let’s Go fuses words, rhythm and sound into a moving story and invites questions about survival in the contemporary society and reflection on the insufficiency of classical forms of rebellion against violence.

Nino de Gleria as an instrumentalist developed his unique and recognisable style on the acoustic contrabass and electric bass guitar, and as a composer he is creating in a wide scope of very diverse musical expressions and styles. He developed a special relation towards children’s and youth theatre performances and youth film by nobly enriching the film’s plot with his music.