The Beginning of the End by Cindy Blazevic on September 3rd, 2009
Nearly three years have passed since Pascal, my husband, and I embarked on our project, The Culture Lobby. Three years. Yikes.
In 2007 we had an idea for a little project, which for one reason or another turned into a big project. A very big project. A thank-you-British-Council-Open-Society-Institute-European-Cultural-Foundation-Ontario-Arts-Council-Balkan-Trust-for-Democracy kind of project. Two years later, after finding our project soul mates in Milica Pekić and Ana Adamović, the directors of the NGO KIOSK, after asking our friends and relatives to read over grant applications, to translate, to proofread, to listen, to dispense advice, to lend us cars, to guide us, to feed us, after scouring the Western Balkans for partners, for photos, for ideas, after two years of seemingly endless grant-writing, we are finally, really and truly beginning. The end has arrived. Woot, woot.
So, what about this project. In a nutshell: visual artists from each of the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia) will travel to another country and ask people there what they think will change or disappear when their country joins the European Union. Whatever the answer, the artists will find some way to interpret it creatively, documenting it as a photograph or as an audio recording. The artists will also mark the locations of what they photograph or record in a GPS system. Pascal and I will also do this, but free range style, covering the areas others can’t reach or don’t have time to reach. Artists-at-large, if you will.
The idea is to record the subjective perceptions of the process of EU accession, giving ordinary people a platform for voicing their expectations, concerns, fears, aspirations with regard to EU membership. The goal is to create an archive of the answers, paired with the photos or audio and a GPS point that will allow anyone interested to visit these actual spots and see for themselves what has or hasn’t changed, what predictions have or have not come true, if and when the countries of the Western Balkans join the EU (eventually). It is supposed to become an archive of cultural memory, an archive mediated by art, which has great potential to open a world beyond the empirical, to improve understanding and to create a source of alternative knowledge.
That wraps up this little intro, which I write from my sublet apartment in Belgrade, sandwiched between the Serbian Parliament and the Museum of Yugoslav History. The latter never, ever seems to be open (how fitting). The mosquitos are dive-bombing me, and Pascal is smoking up a storm while reading Watership Down (also fitting). Although now he’s stopped to watch a Discovery channel show about bed bug infestations. More dispatches soon. Until then here are three years worth of haircut self-portraits on the road.
