Azra Aksamija and Ute Meta Bauer. Photo by Ana Dzokic.

Meg, Azra, Anna Neimark, Ulises, Carla Herrera... Photo by Ana Dzokic

Photo by Ana Dzokic.

Photo by Ana Dzokic.

Mitja Velikonja speaking. Photo by Ana Dzokic.

Photo by Ana Dzokic

The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) presents
The Lost Highway Expedition
And Self-Organized Archive

Join the initiators and travelers of the Lost Highway Expedition during two workshops that consider the role of an archive in relationship to an expedition.

MIT archive workshop: Meg, Azra, Anna Neimark, Ulises, Carla Herrera...MIT presentations: Azra Aksamija and Ute Meta BauerMIT archive workshop, brainstorm: Khadija, archive taxonomy brainstormMIT archive workshop, folders

Thursday Oct. 26, 2-5 PM, CAVS

Europe Lost and Found
October 24, 2006, 10 am to 5 pm

Columbia University
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
International Affairs Building, 15th Floor, Room 1501
420 West 118th St. (corner of Amsterdam Ave.)
New York, NY 10027

Organized by Consulate of Slovenia and Columbia University with Centrala Foundation for Future Cities and School of Missing Studies

ELF at Columbia, On Nostaligia, lecture by Mitja Velikonja

ELF at Columbia, elevatorELF at Columbia, audienceelF at Columbia, crew

On Sep 3, 2006, at 12:25 PM, jaume nualart wrote:

> LHE people are mainly architects and artists, and some of them are
> afraid about their "creations", you know :-)
> I proposed to use the module Copyright (http://drupal.org/project/
> copyright).

hi!

i would strongly recommend to make a general note that all work is
published under a creative commons license. every other license or copyright would heavily collide with our policy (and this is share-alike! by nature), with our free hosting concept and the idea of collaboration and networking as such.
i am sure that it is possible to explain this to the artists and
architects in a way that they
understand that only CC enables creativity and makes sure that the
rights of the authors are respected at the same time...

Text by Igor Štiks

From: http://www.blesok.com.mk/tekst.asp?lang=eng&tekst=662
Text in Bosnian can be found at: http://www.zarez.hr/133/temabroja2.htm

Recently, several of my friends from the former Yugoslavia started a band and now they are having a lot of success playing “Gypsy Music from the Balkans” in Paris bars and clubs. Perhaps it would be superfluous to mention than not one of them is a Rom, and that the music they play is, for the most part, Bosnian, Serbian, and Macedonian, with a sufficient number of gypsy hits to legitimate the band’s name and to advertise it as authentically gypsy and Balkan. When I accuse them of inauthenticity, they laugh at me and tell me to forget about such trivial details. Basically, they insist, who here knows what we’re playing, no one notices when we change languages, and if people would rather think that they’re listening to gypsy songs and not to Bosnian ones, who has the right to disappoint them? To figure out whose music is whose, who borrowed what from whom, who influenced whom, and who is, en fait, a real Balkan gypsy seems to them a waste of time, and, as they note, a question without a definite answer. We are all Balkans here, pal, and if that means we even have to be Rom in order to get the Western dreams fired up, then it is to everyone’s benefit. Anyway, can’t you see how many people are coming to our concerts? Or have your glasses fogged up amidst the crowds, or maybe someone stepped on your foot and so now you’re splitting hairs and moralizing?!

http://www.lse.ac.uk/Depts/global/Publications/BalkansWorkshopReportHelsinki.pdf
The Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics, announces a new Report prepared on the basis of a workshop held jointly with the Finnish Presidency of the European Union (17 May 2006, Helsinki). The Report summarises discussions and recommendations for developing a human security approach for the EU in the Western Balkans.
For further information please contact Iavor Rangelov at i.p.rangelov@lse.ac.uk
Feed from Balkan Academic News
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/balkans/

This artcle was published in DELO Newspaper (Saturday Release, Slovenia)and Letopis Porabskih Slovencev. Translation into "BSH - language" (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) was published in Album Magazine (Sarajevo).
Scroll down to English Summary.

Jože Kos Grabar:
O PROBLEMU IZJEDNAČAVANJA EVROPSKE UNIJE SA EVROPOM

U sredstvima masovne komunikacije u Sloveniji se zadnjih godina može primetiti sve više slučajeva izjednačavanja pojma "Evropska unija" sa pojmom "Evropa". Predstavnici Evropske unije, u mnogim svojim saopštenjima, već više godina rade to isto. Uz to, Evropska unija pridev "Evropsko…" upotrebljava kao sastavni deo naziva svojih institucija. Takva praksa saopštavanja i imenovanja je problematična i odnosi se na temu ideološki i politički uslovljenih značenjskih punjenja onih izraza, koji su prvenstveno namenjeni geografskom označavanju.

Before we leave, before we arrive, we should ask where we are going.

We cannot assume to travel innocently, to explore, without leaving a trace.

Every map we even just desire to draw implodes upon the lost highways of our desire, yet another way is taken in this implosion, what is your way?

We face the space of foreignness. The future.

What do you see? How should you respond?

What is a realizable future for Europe? Please take a moment to write a 400 word (or so) utopia. A utopia that could become the future.

These will become the basis of my project, so please send away: kzcarrol@fas.harvard.edu

Text by Katherine Carl

Lost Highway Expedition does not have a linear directive or purpose, specifically because it is highly susceptible to change as it unfolds. The cities are physical and temporal hubs for participants coming in and out from different directions, connecting through shared interests for a period of time that they determine as they go. Before the expedition, participants create and manipulate content on the website, and through these acts, already the time of expedition has begun.

This distributed creativity will be based on what participants experience in the territory of the Western Balkans, as the last leftovers in Europe are now called. (With the nomenclature of relational direction already built into this term, it displays its very own self-organization of mutual distance coming from within.) Thus multiplicity is inherent in the place and the people and stories that make those places distinct, and is perhaps most deeply embedded in the image of the self. Specific topographies, technologies or typologies as well as routes of communication and interpersonal creation will be the topics and methods of study which will challenge the singular reality of political delay imposed from outside, and offer the means for a kaleidoscope of aspirations.

Text by Marjetica Potrc

To make a long story short, Kyong Park and me, we saw the future of the European Union being played out in the cities of the Western Balkans. Maybe most important is the fact that the Western Balkans is an incredibly dynamic region. It accepts the state of transition as a working model and a core gain. On the one hand, you see a new society in the making; on the other, the colossal collapse of modernism. All of this is recorded in the architecture. Cities read like an open book.

During the last half-century, both Western and Eastern Europe embraced modernist architecture and the modernist ideals of the social state under the slogan "equality and justice for all". While modernism functions from the top down and thinks in large-scale terms, the cities and regions of the Western Balkans today celebrate, and are the product of, bottom-up initiatives, fragmentation, adaptability, and an emphasis on the local. As the recent rejection of the EU constitution by French and Dutch voters proves, EU citizens wish to live in a more localised European Union; similarly, the EU explores a paradigm in which the regional serves as a counterbalance to the nation-state. An emphasis on the local means that more decisions are taken on the local level; bottom-up initiatives increase, and state and local institutions become more adaptable. Fragmentation and parallelism, which I call "Balkan strategies", are in fact already EU strategies.

Text by Azra Aksamija

The Lost Highway Expedition represents an adventurous production of knowledge in movement. While travelling, the multitude of involved individuals, groups and institutions will be researching, developing ideas and producing projects. The expedition programme is organised around a two-day stay in each city, and one day’s travel time between. The expedition participants may organise their journey around these events. They can enter and exit the expedition at any preferred point and location. Instead of an organized ‘pilgrimage,’ whose arrival in a city could be staged as a public spectacle, the Lost Highway Expedition takes a more subtle approach. As an alternative to travelling in a single crowd, this massive journey is conceived as a self-organised system of dispersed participants who congregate for programmed events according to their individual interests. The mixing of the sedentary population in the cities with the nomads of the Lost Highway Expedition thus happens in a more discrete and more powerful way.

Text by Ivan Kucina

What kind of structure could sustain the inevitable continuity of fragmentation and encapsulate shared meanings? This unanswered question motivates research into the relationships among the dismantled entities of the Western Balkans. Once unified by an ideology of brotherhood, then fenced with nationalism, the states of the former Yugoslavia were framed again from outside with a newly invented name. For all of us, the Western Balkans is an outline without content. It represents a disconnected territory with a shared past, shared bloodshed, shared economic transitions, and a shared set of obligations towards European administration, but without shared reasons for interacting in the future.

Text by Ana Dzokic

The Lost Highway Expedition will move along a highway initiated in 1948. It was to connect some of the major cities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), and was given the name ‘Highway of Brotherhood and Unity’. The road was built by massive work brigades in the enthusiasm of rebuilding the country after WW2, which involved many volunteers. At the age of 14, pulled by this energy and much younger than allowed, my father smuggled himself into participating in the first year of the highway’s construction. From the 1960s the road was upgraded with a number of new lanes. Although a major state project, the highway was not completed during the ‘lifetime’ of Yugoslavia. Coincidentally or not, unfinished sections happened to be close to the border zones between republics. In 1991, the year the country split up, the road’s condition was as follows: the total length of the highway in SFRY was 1167 km, of which 703 km were completed (60.2 %), while 464 km were not completed - for instance its total length through Serbia was 500 km, with 374 km completed (74.8%), and 126 km not completed.(1)

Text by Srdjan Jovanović Weiss

Nothing new and nothing alike.

Global Problem: It is still baffling that the most beautiful highway to drive on is an empty one. Why?

My Balkan introduction to the problem is complex:
It is very well known that highways tend to extend over their physical boundaries towards unlimited political, mental, and digital territories. After all, that is the natural destiny of hard-core infrastructure. However, this multiple extension of boundaries is not singular in nature. On the contrary, the extension of a single human being when extended to the extension of belonging to a slightly wider realm tends to extend further to reach the extensions of the internal ambition of a human, persevere, and finally extend limited expectations from a distance as such to the n’th degree multiple of the self and of the other; all glued to a flow of sophisticated matter and memory. It is baffling that such sophistication of expanding distance is carried by such an idiotic banality as a highway comes to be. Human bodies are extended to aluminum and the glass surface of cars, buses and tracks, car-pooling as caravans of car-sealed fake friendships and families, the formations of tolerable cruise speeds, creatively boring radio waves, and still the anachronistic function of the sober driver into the day and into the night.

Text by Marc Neelen

So what is it for, this expedition? The Lost Highway Expedition, as the initiating event of Europe Lost and Found(1) is the start of an attempt to articulate and imagine the current evolution of new and transforming borders and territories of Europe. Is it possible, stepping beyond the established beliefs and practices of nation-states, to envision alternative and more open definitions for peoples and societies in movement? This quest for the future, embedded in the expedition, will most probably not reveal a set of straightforward answers. It might even be better if the future remains ahead, and we only get a hunch of what shape it may have.