Jelena, Bojan and DusanAlessandro and VahidaSkopje summitPeter, Claudia, Laia Under this months’ simmering heat, about 28 participants gathered in Skopje for the second-in-line of Building Lost Highway workshops. Aim of the meeting was to draft entries to the Lexicon of Provisional Future(s); entries that come from or are being inspired by the so called ‘Western Balkans’. Previous to the meeting, the participants’ five teams travelled for three or more days towards Skopje, experiencing different routes, stories and cities to support their lexicon entries.

The trips included a travel along the edges of Macedonia, a ferry rides from Italy to Montenegro and Croatia and further detouring to Macedonia, a north - south Serbia section, to all in the end converge at Skopje summit on 17 and 18 July 2007. The summit was co-organised by Press to Exit and held in the beautiful XVI century Kurshumli An (Leaded Caravanserai) where Centre for Contemporary Art of Skopje is housed. Deep shades of this heavy stone building saved us from overheat and sun blast with over 40C!

The format of preparing the lexicon entries along a travel showed up quite inspiring and provoked the teams to converge their ideas and speak from their own experiences, not only general knowledge. Each team presented their concepts/notions, some of them being: brotherhoodness, continuous reinvention, culturalisation, emotional jukebox, identitismo, joyful self destruction, melon football club, non-aligned but (still) connected, perpetual yesterday, progress-future-futureplus, quality kitsch, redefining monuments, self-management, waiting churches of communism…

Inspired by Peter Lang’s presentation on the radical history of the future, the discussion went around the issue whether future to come is pre-apocalyptic or do we need to understand better what is going on already - a low cost future. Is it about neo-, slow-, forget- or post-future, the point when we are getting sick of high-tech? We still have to find tools to deal with globalisation, global warming, global terrorism; we are still to identify what is new.

By the beginning of August, about 25 Skopje lexicon entries (200-500 words) will be available online. At that point, another round of participants will be invited to make on-line contributions to the net based Lexicon of Provisional Future(s), proceeding the next summit in Novi Sad to take place in late October or beginning of November 2007. More information on lexicon contributions and Novi Sad summit is to follow.

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Skopje summit made by - team 1: Yane Caloski (Skopje), Hristina Ivanoska (Skopje), Filip Jovanovski (Skopje), Kasper Aksoj (Copenhagen), Alenka Gregoric (Ljubljana), Aleksandra Petrusevska (Skopje), Velimir Zernovski (Skopje), - team 2: Ivan Kucina (Belgrade), Kristian Cebzan (Belgrade), Giulia Fiocca (Rome), Laia Sole (Barcelona), - team 3: Jelena Vesic (Belgrade), Dusan Grlja (Belgrade), Vladimir Jeric (Belgrade), Bojan Djordjev (Belgrade), Vesna Madzoski (Amsterdam/Belgrade), - team 4: Ana Dzokic (Rotterdam/Belgrade), Marc Neelen (Rotterdam/Belgrade), Piet Vollaard (Rotterdam), Dubravka Sekulic (Belgrade/Nis), - team 5: Vahida Ramujkic (Barcelona/Belgrade), Alessandro Floris (Milan), Claudia Fraone (Venice/Barcelona), Heath Bunting (Bristol) and Peter Lang (Rome/New York), Ajdin Basic (Ljubljana/Sarajevo), Igor Ivanoski (Skopje), Oliver Musovik (Skopje).