Beograd canalizationLjubljana central streetlidSlavonski BrodRamrexel Sarajevo

Prints from frottages and photos of streetlids, collected from the different cities in the Western Balkan, which should be spreaded over this area. Here are samples of Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Slavonski Brod. If you interested in one of these or if you wondering about other kinds, please contact me.

On the highway to Tirana

Highway to Tirana

Balkan Round Trip

In the performance 'Boogey Man" by Damir Niksic (August 24th 2006, 17.00 - beach along the river Miljacka, Sarajevo) some people was bringing small pieces of iron. Damir melted the pieces in the ritual to become a Legal citizen of the Country of Foreigners.

My "strategy" was not to bring any piece of iron, I just stole one of the melted pieces an didn't make the ritual.
SO, now I'm an Ilegal citizen in the country of foreigners.

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Novi Sad Free PlayNovi Sad Free Play Novi Sad Free PlayNovi Sad Free Play: game at the stadium cultureExpeditioners recreating at the site of the proposed Stadium Culture - Centre for Recreation and New Media in Danube park, Novi Sad

game at the stadium culture

I arrived in Belgrade early. Before the expedition officially begins I began my own.

While living in Amsterdam these past five years, I became close with a few wonderful people coming from various areas of the Balkans. I often got mixed up, much to the faux(?)-frustration of these friends,
as to who comes from Serbia or from Bosnia or from Croatia. They always corrected me, then chalked it up to me being American.

Now that I am here I begin to understand. The images that I've constructed of these cities- based on their stories and habits (and much less so by what I saw on TV) are quickly being eclipsed by what i physically observe before me. These friends-and now their friends, continue to act as my lenses. I view the city they show me- visiting their bar boats ("splav") on the river, drinking wild pear rakije, holding up the florescent tubes of tesla's museum as the little lightnings jump off the copper display, or sleeping in my friend's childhood bedroom in the hills of sarajevo.

Highway-corridors-planAutoput-planAs follows, a perhaps pertinent anecdote (I thought) from an extract taken from writer-reporter Michael Ignatieff’s book Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the new Nationalism

I began my journey [summer 1993] where it used to begin every summer of my Yugoslav childhood, on the highway between Zagreb and Belgrade. This was the highway we traveled, in a magnificent black Buick with lots of fins and chrome, to lake Bled in Slovenia. It was called the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity and it was built with a typically Titoist mixture of genuine national enthusiasm and socialist forced labor, to link together the economies of the two central republics, Croatia and Serbia. For 300 km it runs parallel to the River Sava, through the Slavonian plain, some of the flattest and richest farmland in Europe…

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/18/report_from_a_concer.html
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Report from a concert by a Serbian war-criminal

Serbian writer Jasmina Tesanovic has just written a new piece called "Ideally Bad, or, The Banality of Her Badness." It tells the story of last night's concert by Serbian turbo-folk star Ceca. Ceca is the widow of the Milosevic-era war-criminal Raznatovic, and she goes about in public adorned in kewelry looted from the victims of war atrocities. She is a Serbian ultra-nationalist whose fame is both nauseating and ill-deserved, and Tesanovic's account of her concerts is scathing, brutal, and brilliant: