OUTSIDE PROJECT / Belgrade 08

Geography of Gestures

City of Belgrade / Department of Culture
City of Florence / Council for Public Education
University of Arts in Belgrade
Florence Academy of Fine Arts

support / collaboration
Italian Cultural Institute, Belgrade [link]
Biro from Belgrade [link]
CANGO Cantieri Goldonetta Firenze [link]
Contemporary Art Gallery / Cultural Center, Pancevo
Center for the Arts Terra [link]
Noc muzeja / The Museum Night, Belgrade[link]
BIS Recycling [link]

The realization of the Outside program Belgrade 08 is planned for the period May 4-20. The program will include several workshops and public events dedicated to the observation of urban space, marginalization, material culture and environment.

The program will take place in several locations, that for the first time, beside Belgrade, will include other urban realities, such as Pancevo and Kikinda. The participants in the program, as every year, will be the students from Florence Academy of Fine Arts, their colleagues from the University of Arts in Belgrade, as well as other local, regional or international students.

Virgilio Sieni, a Florentine artist and the founder of the Cango', a space for theater and multimedia production, as a guest artist in the Outside program will lead a workshop on gestures, that will question the relation of urban space, architecture and identities. The workshop will focus on a particular area of New Belgrade, Blocks 45 and 70, with the intention to create through observation and organized or spontaneous social encounters, a particular map of a territory based on body language and daily itineraries. The workshop has been proposed as a continuity of a previously developed project by Virgilio Sieni, an obesrvation of gestures in some Florentine areas inhabited by traditional artistans (wood carvers, shoe makers, metal smiths etc). The results of the Belgarde workshop are planned to develop in a series of public actions, posters, video installations or performances. The workshop will be given logistic and creative support by Biro Beograd, a group of young Belgrade artists.

The New Belgrade Blocks built in the 1960's and early 1970's represent an urbanistic attempt to accomodate a large number of working families and provide plenty of social space in between the modern modular architectural forms. The Blocks were often seen as an example of architectural ugliness, a periphery deprived of a cultural potential, yet with the transformation of economic and political systems the Blocks nowdays appear as carriers of relevant cultural information and a case-study of a contemporary Belgrade identity. The workshop will also include contacts with ethnic minorities that for various reasons and in various ways inhabit the area, or its surroundings, such as Chinese and Roma.

Events dedicated to environment and recycling will take place in collaboration with the Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Cultural Center in Pancevo, as well as with support of the BIS Recycling, a leading Serbian company in the field of recycling of electronic equipment. With the intention to present the importance of the economic, cultural and esthetic potential, as well as resourcefulness of waste, a special workshop will be organized involving creative use of materials obtained from an electronic waste depository. This workshop, led by the Florentine professor Angela Nocentini, will focus on the creation of wearable outfits and objects, that will be presented in form of a fashion show at the end of the program. This workshop represents a continuation of a very succesful experience from the last Outside program which resulted in the creation of over 40 garements of a variety of materials (see: On Invisibility).

The choice of Pancevo is also related to this towns' serious envirnomental problems given by the presense of problematic and obviously uncontrolled petrol industries in its immediate surrounding, where the problem of polution, as in many other cases in Serbia, seems to be directly reflecting political manipulaton and individual economic interest. Our program will include meetings with artists and environmental activists who will present their points of view as well as their art / communication projects in regard to this problem.

Other support in materials has been provided by EKOSERVIS and Centar Boban from Belgrade.

In the town of Kikinda, some 80km north from Belgrade, a special workshop will be realized in an extraordinary space of an old (1800's) brick factory, that for the past three decades has been used for the activities of the Center for Arts Terra. A surreal environment of the old factory surrounded by hudreds of red clay sculptures will host a terracotta workshop, including both the production of objects as well as multimedia documentation of the place and processes. The founders and activits of the Center Terra will present their current work and plans of regional cooperation, as well as an ambitious project for a unique museal and educational structure planned for this location. The workshop led by one Tuscan and one Serbian artist/professor will therefore be focused on finding ways to connect the material culture (the artisan skills, the actual substance of clay) with a culture of communication (values of regional exchange, crossing borders, public projects).

As usual, the introductory part of the Outside program in Belgrade will include lectures on history and urban space, as well as visits to museum collections and places of particular interest for our program. Collaborating lecturers include professors Irina Subotic, Milan Prodanovic and Nikola Suica.

Visiting students will be accomodated in a comfortable hostel, at a walking distance from the Belgrade downtown area. All students will attend the introductory part of the program in Belgrade. The workshops in other towns will have a duration of 5 to 7 days. Workshop and lecture spaces in Belgrade will be the ex-Turkish Baths and Magacin, a new Belgrade space for contemporary art.

NOTE: This page will be updated regularly during the preparation of the program. For more information please write to:

info@outsideproject.org
datanac@yahoo.com

Free Cultural Activities of the Biro from Belgrade

presentation of the projects Under the Bridge Beograd, Festival of Free Culture 2, platform Re-Reader

http://birobeograd.info

About Biro Belgrade

Biro Beograd is an independent association for culture and communication founded by a group of cultural practitioners and artists in Belgrade in 2004. Biro supports, researches and promotes critical innovative practice that steps beyond conventional forms of art, cultural and social research or activism in Serbia and in international context. Offering public platforms for discussion and presentation Biro encourages new cultural and activist practices appearing in contemporary society, enhances exchange between groups and practitioners from different backgrounds and countries and introduce their topics to the broad public.Biro suggests cultural practice without centers and territories.

One focus is the realisation of exchange between people, that belong to different social groups, worlds of experience or fields of knowledge. Biro sets up meetings, that bring forward communication, give impulses and encourage a process that is shaped and carried on by the participants themselves. As new communication technology plays an important role in contemporary society, another focus is on the impact and usage of new media in culture, education and art. Organizing educative workshops, festivals, congresses, presentations and exhibitions biro enhances the conscious and creative use of new communication technologies and supports upcoming discussions on related issues.

With the wide variety of its program biro has become an important connecting link between artists, creative practitioners, cultural workers and various cultural and social activists, associations and institutions not only in Serbia and in the region but as well worldwide.

Biro for culture and communication is part of the regional platforms slobodnakultura.org and Druga scena and partner of Wikimedia Serbia.

In the council of the association are: Predrag Miladinovi?, artist and scientific assistant University of Fine Arts Belgrade, Milica Lap?evi?, artist and journalist, Selena Savi?, architect.

Zoran Eric

New Belgrade

The initial concept behind the building of New Belgrade, which was first conceived after WWII, was the creation of a capital for the new socialist society in a completely unpopulated space, actually a swamp, which was ideal for inscription with new social projections and ideological constructs.[1] The post-war idea of a new society had to be materialized in the form of new urban structures and the architectural shapes of the socialist city thus constituting a new administrative, economical and cultural capital of Socialist Yugoslavia. The first urban plan of New Belgrade was adopted after the public competition in 1947, which had as its goal functional organization within an orthogonal urban structure with two dominant buildings of the Palace of Federation and Central Committee of the   Communist Party of Yugoslavia. This "contemporary socialist architecture" as it was defined at that time, quickly gave up the idea of socialist realism, with the conflict between Tito and Stalin in 1948. The idea of social modernization and modernist orientation was thus proclaimed. Already in the 1950s, the entire concept of constructing an administrative centre for the socialist country was abandoned and in next two decades social housing prevailed in New Belgrade. The failure to create a complex multifunctional spatial-urban structure produced a central space in the capital city which remained as an economic, social and finally a spatial void. New Belgrade thus never managed to fulfil either the physical or the symbolic space envisioned by the 'socialist society of workers' self-management'.

After the political changes in 2000, the earlier failure to realise the concept of full urbanization in New Belgrade made possible the creation of new social paradigms to be inscribed in this space and its urban structures.

New Belgrade could be now seen as "the city within the city" and as one of the biggest and most populous counties of Belgrade that continues to face fast urban restructuring, both in terms of gentrification and ghettoisation.

On one side, there is a problem of a loss of the public space that was never fully developed in New Belgrade and is now overtaken by big supermarkets and shopping malls. On the other side, the new segregation, which is driven mostly by economic, social or even racial distinctions, has created new homogenized neighbourhoods and even new "urban ghettos". This recent socio-political context of New Belgrade is putting into focus urban issues such as: social migration, "crises of identity", processes of homogenisation and de-homogenisation, the impact of neo-liberalism and processes of gentrification, to name the most prominent. Particularly important, are the difficult questions facing urban areas with marginalized social groups like refugees, Roma people that were not accepted to certain blocks in New Belgrade, or the Chinese community.

[1] This concept was best elaborated in the unpublished Ph.D. of Ljiljana Blagojevic, an architecture theorist from Belgrade. See Lj. Blagojevic, 'Strategije modernizma u planiranju i projektovanju urbane strukture i arhitekture Novog Beograda: Period konceptualne faze od 1922. do 1962. godine' (Ph.D. diss., Belgrade University, Faculty of Architecture, 2004).

Nikola Suica
Belgrade's Old Fairground: a site of unfinished modernity

The lecture aims at a specific position of a spatial legacy in central Belgrade's topography. Old Fairground in New Belgrade is mapped on the left bank of Sava River. As a site of specific location with turbulent past. It can reflect a city of Belgrade's strive toward ideals of a modern european 20th century city, but also a remarkable depth of perplexed phenomena.

The First Belgrad Fair when built and constructed in  1937 challenged a technological and urban development of the city that was soon obscured by the abyss of World War II and the decades of communist regime neglect. Nevertheless it's paradoxes goal for our perception of contemporary societies, specifically of Belgrade and Serbia that are now on the brink of significant changes. Old Fairground Belgarde lecture / presentation with photographs and diverse material gathers architectural, artistic and historical data into threads of a troubled account of Belgrade's past and present.

Milan Prodanovic
Reinventing a Danubian City

The concept of reinvention attempts to address the new need for shifting and reshaping ideas deeply imbedded within the traditional disciplines conventionally marked as urban planning, urban design, management, entrepreneurism, and of course art, architecture, even fashion, media, cooking etc.., all based on disciplines, methods, including the more fundamental codes which inform cultural perception. The new framework for thinking cities emphasizes the evident influences of forces of globalization, of course with the evident counter processes which follow. Both realities of globalization, understood here mostly as the communicational phenomenon of a global city, and on the level of our region - EU unification and enlargement, both hand in hand, face the obstacle of inherited nation-state paradigms, the body of knowledge, concepts, political practices, cultural frameworks, all related to persistence of superseded cultural backlash. New proposed concepts should be deeply related to developments of urban culture, especially the idea of   "Open City", "Citta' Aperta", "World City", noticeable in wider literature on urban question, communicating the cosmopolitism as a frame for cultural diversity, tolerance of ideas, and above all, the concepts now widely present as "multiculturalism".

The need of a changed framework, for the new cultural paradigm and architecture and urban development in the Danube region and the Balkans, it is an ultimate attempt to to overcome the practice of "urbicide", as the set of actions of deliberate attempts at the annihilation of cities as mixed physical, social and cultural spaces, also place annihilation by urbicide as war on collective and architectural memory, of popular and media cultures and representations of urban annihilation, urbicide, terrorism and the 'war on terror', but stretching now to practices in neoliberal cities where even   urban planning annihilates places,

It is a pity that inherited regional variety did not get enriched, that diversified historical processes of cultural diffusion and acculturation which formed multiculturalism as an important impetus to cultural creativity, as one was able to choose from a range of cultural models or combine elements of various cultural origin in unprecedented ways, confronted various degrees of obstructions.. New cultural scene is now in the need of revision on many levels, just to mention the media language, educational system to accord to new "Post-transitional Enlightenment", stretching to   the new spatial arrangement where the morphology dominated with grand rivers would inspire the composition.

The "reinventing" of individual Balkan cities has to take place as part of a broader regional reconstruction plan, whereby the new developmental concepts are in cultural terms ripe for symbolic, even for physically motivated action based on slogan "lets get from hilly Balkans to plains of  European rivers" the construction symbolizing many levels of meaning, and forming a possible base for the new developmental vision and reinvention agenda.

Virgilio Sieni: Geografia dei gesti
Maria Antonia Rinaldi

Virgilio Sieni, coreografo, danzatore e artista, creatore dell'omonima compagnia di danza, è dal 2003 Direttore Artistico di CANGO Cantieri Goldonetta , luogo dedicato alla sperimentazione e ricerca per le arti contemporanee, che si trova nel cuore del quartiere dell'Oltrarno fiorentino. Residenze artistiche, laboratori didattici, collaborazioni con molte rassegne di arte contemporanea italiana, e la creazione di site specific work da parte di numerosi artisti, fanno di Cango uno dei luoghi più attivi della scena artistica a Firenze. Nel 2007 Sieni   ha dato vita all'Accademia sull'Arte del Gesto, da lui stesso definitita un progetto incentrato sulla trasmissione, l'insegnamento e la creazione. L'Accademia è la naturale conseguenza di uno studio, portato avanti da Virgilio, sull'ontologia del gesto, considerato nei suoi aspetti quotidiani, nelle sue qualità fisiche e nelle sue accezioni più diverse: nel lavoro domestico, nel gioco dei bambini, nel mestiere dell'artigiano, nei moti di affetto, nella sua valenza iconografica all'interno di una messa in scena, di una coreografia.

I lavori esposti, e documentati, all'Istituto di Cultura Italiano di Belgrado, vogliono introdurre questa ricerca.   Attraverso l'attività di laboratori che hanno coinvolto persone di età e formazione differenti, sono stati realizzati alcuni progetti dove il gesto è stato esperito, ripetuto, insegnato, trasmesso, copiato, trasfigurato, mostrato in tutti i suoi aspetti.

Nel caso di Bottega inside , il lavoro di ricognizione sul gesto e sulle sue modalità, si è sviluppato, come dice il titolo, all'interno delle botteghe artigiane dell'Oltrarno fiorentino. Il gesto ponderato dell'artigiano, la conoscenza di un   movimento, l'utilizzo calibrato di un utensile sono mostrati nello scambio di movimenti tra artigiano e danzatore. Il gesto acquisisce nella lentezza del movimento una sua specificità; connette pratiche e saperi diversi, tra persone che condividono lo stesso spazio fisico, quello della bottegha, del quartiere, della città - della polis . L' aspetto etico e politico del gesto è intensificato, la conoscenza del movimento è veicolo per la conoscenza fondante di noi stessi, lo   scambio diviene sociale e culturale, un'apertura verso l'altro. Il progetto, iniziato nel 2002, è un lavoro in divenire, che annualmente si ripropone articolandosi e sviluppandosi in nuove direzione che vedono ogni volta la partecipazione di differenti attori. Così nel 2007, Mani d'oro ha coinvolto un

gruppo di bambini, con i quali parallelamente era stato affrontato un laboratorio sul movimento. Un doratore ha ricoperto con la foglia d'oro le mani dei bambini ed i gesti lenti e precisi del processo di doratura sono stati videoripresi. L'inquadratura mostra il rapporto tra le mani offerte dai bambini per essere trasformate dai movimenti esperti dell'artigiano. La potenza evocativa dell'oro, il dialogo che si attua tra le mani, aprono il gesto ad una lettura iconologica, metafora della potenza umana, che i bambini poi riproporranno mimando alcune scene degli affreschi di Masaccio e Masolino nella cappella Brancacci della Chiesa del Carmine, in Oltrarno. Il cortocircuito virtuoso creatosi, ha scardinato la visione tradizionale, ha travalicato i confini tra lettura iconografica per quanto riguarda il gesto nella rappresentazione artistica, e lo studio antropologico del gesto quotidiano, mostrando l'assolutezza del gesto, svincolandolo da ogni lettura a posteriori. Ulteriormente, le foto dei bambini, trasformate in manifesti ed esposte nelle strade, hanno connesso tutti i protagonisti al tessuto urbano.