Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely by Postmedia Books

Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programme 2016-2017

eds. Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi

postmedia books

Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programmme 2016-2017 edited by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi ÂŠ 2016 Postmedia Srl, Milano

Translations by Emily Ligniti, Nastya Mednikova

www.postmediabooks.it ISBN 9788874901784

Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely A Natural Oasis? A Transnational Research Programme 2016-2017

eds. Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi

postmedia books

Foreword

01. Simone Frangi The Domain of Risks

02. Chiara Cartuccia Acque Ferme. Some irreducible fragments and one, univocal perspective

03. Maya Tounta Wooing Undone

04. Rachel Pafe Blotting Paper

05. Alessandro Castiglioni Declare Independence

06. Giulia Gregnanin Sine Cura

07.Erëmirë Krasniqi In the now: childhood for everyone, forever again

08. Lenka Đorojević

09.Valerie Visianich A Transnational Cultural Project on the Arts in Small States: The Case of Malta

10. Sergey Kantsedal and Anton Lapov Topographic survey of Ukrainian sociocultural landscape: description cards for the European cultural agents

Biographies 105 Bibliography 111

Foreword

“Let us say this again, opaquely” is a possible perspective on contemporary cultural research in the intersection between art practice and geopolitical issues. The book collects texts written in the frame of the transnational research program A Natural Oasis?

A Natural Oasis? is a two-year (2016–2017) nomadic free school dedicated to the development of new curatorial research paths in the field of contemporary visual and performing arts starting from the geopolitical peculiarities of the artistic scenes of San Marino, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Malta. The purpose of the entire project is to build a transnational cultural platform able to critically question the ideas of territorial remoteness, marginality, and smallness through the lens of artistic research, triggering a reaction on the fictional procedures that has empowered the idea of Europe in its geopolitical and cultural immunity via the exclusion or the vampirization of its “provinces.” The project aims to develop radical curatorial and artistic discourses assuming geo-cultural areas as polemical fields in which a precise ecology of uxes describe their cultural, economical, and political morphology. Moreover, this project focuses on the controversial shortage of cultural professionals in “peripheral” cultural and artistic systems, in relationship with ongoing processes of educational centralization and with the concentration of artistic legitimation processes in big European “centers.” The travels this book is based on structured its working methodology on the tactics of conversational and dialogical research and on the main strategies of oral history. In this view, work sessions and visiting professors’ lectures and seminars are characterized by a discursive approach based on study and in-depth analysis but also on storytelling and educational settings. 7

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Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely

This book is the result of research and it includes critical essays and investigations developed by all the participants of the program. Far from the desire to give a clear answer, the book itself is an object of process that questions its own nature and the whole research. That is why the title of the book, taken from Édouard Glissant’s text For Opacity, adds complexity to the nature of this tool, the book, designed to be presented and somehow performed during MEDITERRANEA 18 – Tirana (Albania) in May 2017.

The Domain of Risks. Archiving the Experience, Reifying the Other, Recentering Marginality in Western De-colonizing Cultural Practices Simone Frangi

This work starts with a set of questions: the question of the authority (Which? To do what?) and entitlement (When do we become entitled to talk about something? When our social and political privileges invalidate our entitlement? Does entitlement corresponds to asking permission?). But also the question of the power to “represent” or “present” an experience through writing (Can an experience be or should it be archived almost completely, or with a little rest, in language for the use of transmission?). And finally: Who gets to represent whom, what and by what authority? The ambition of this written work is then to “write about fire with burn hands,”1 and give an honest account of a long-term research experience by articulating theoretically some controversial points that it raised in its methods and its epistemological asset in order to measure the ideological and dialogical distance that the experience itself has created between the (good) intentions of the project (its social content) and its real social consequences.2 These controversial and conflictive points became precious triggers to put in place a reflexive analysis of my practice, its ambitions and its structural and non-structural limitations. As Janna Graham suggests in her highly disseminated text Between a Pedagogical Turn and a Hard Place: Thinking with Conditions, it became impossible and even undesirable in contemporaneity to cut cultural research from its “micro- and macropolitical circumstances of production, in favor of an idealized, or aestheticistically separate, condition”3: each project naturally raises conflicts and questions in the circumstances of its unfolding, as it is, by its very own nature, first pro-jected and then actualized. The ultimate aim of an “honest” cultural practice is then to mobilize problems, conflicts, and conditioning towards an affective work in which researchers let themselves violently be affected by the reality of their practice4 and react with the practice itself insisting on the most problematic knots of the cultural processes producing adjustments or radical shifts. This short essay responds to 9

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Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely

this injunction of the experience to let myself be affected by its conflictive core and try to articulate through theory this generative and confusing affection, reenacting theoretically, with the help of a constellation of authors, some of the risk that as a research group we maybe took and that we are still taking. Archiving the experience, reifying the other, and recentering marginality. A Natural Oasis? is a two-year nomadic free school dedicated to the development of new curatorial research paths in the field of contemporary visual and performing arts starting from the geopolitical peculiarities of the artistic scenes of San Marino, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Malta. The purpose of this project was to build a transnational cultural platform able to critically question the ideas of territorial remoteness, territorial or cultural marginality, and geopolitical smallness through the lens of artistic research, triggering a reflection on the fictional procedures that empowered the idea of Europe in its geopolitical and cultural immunity via the exclusion or the vampirization of its “provinces.” Since its beginning, the project aims to develop radical curatorial and artistic discourses assuming geo-cultural areas as polemical fields in which a precise ecology of fluxes describe their cultural, economical, and political morphology. Moreover, this project focuses on the controversial shortage of cultural professionals in “peripheral” cultural and artistic systems in relationship with ongoing processes of educational centralization and with the concentration of artistic legitimation processes in big European “centers.” The aim of the project is the development of what we can call situated practices in the context of a specific locality but with a transnational perspective in within a supposively “Mediterranean” area. Mediterranean appears to us in this frame both as a cultural formation and as a geographical and historical fluid entity: in both these two forms of material existence Mediterranean is “imaginatively constructed”5 by the mutual interaction of the many “identities” bordering or inhabiting its waters. To situate a cultural practice in the frame of the Mediterranean contexts corresponds then to precisely manufacturing a form of knowledge which is rooted on the one hand in the desire and on the other hand, as Donna Haraway points out, in a peculiar form of persuasion which “takes account of the structure of facts and artifacts as well as of the language-mediated in the knowledge game.”6 Each practice, which locates itself in a specific situation, is in fact a condensed expression of facts and socially constructed artifacts, which both take part in the powerful art of rhetoric: Haraway insists on the idea that “practice is persuasion . . . and knowledge is a condensed node in the agonistic power field.”7 Taking the persuational path of provincialism and assuming it as one of the most relevant epistemological features

of our research work appeared to us as one possible alternative to escape the restrictive identity politics of modern nationalism, looking for another standpoint to disclose the liminal identity of “European” Mediterranean area. Nationalism has always served the cause of marginalization, cultural repression, and physical and metaphysical eradication of specific social subjects and entire cultural formations from the polemical field of geo-cultural transnational recognition. The risks of taking the path of nationalism are then clear and not worth running. The risk of taking the “provincial” and non-hegemonic post-national “seductive rhetoric” is then exposing itself to another kind of risk, which has to do with the dangerous critical reparational act of re-centering marginality and locating it in a more central, “dignified,” and “respectable” position. As Bell Hooks clearly injuncts in her text Marginality as site of resistance, marginality is more than a site of deprivation; it is a radical possibility and a pole of resistance towards hegemonic discursive practices and it doesn’t need to be recentered to become an active standpoint for discourse as, in its very locality, it is already “a center location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.”8 In this sense, marginality is not and doesn’t have to be a positioning “one wishes to lose, to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center but rather as the site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.”9 Marginality thus offers a positional richness that needs to be operationalized to transform it into a point of view, a perspective from which social and cultural struggles start to imagine and construct new ways of seeing facts and artifacts. The margins of the modern nation are these ruinous but at the same time prolific sites from which theorist Homi K. Bhabha enacts a powerful critique of what he takes to be inadequate essentialist readings of nationhood in Western and, precisely in European, tradition. Instead of openly recognizing Western nations as manufactured narrative constructions that arise from and sublimate the powerful hybridity of multiple cultural interactions in a given territory, the West has traditionally contended, defined, and then naturalized national and cultural constituencies. Though the falsity of homogenous, holistic, and historically continuous narrative, nationalistic trends in the construction of the European and Western identity have programmatically prevented the emergence of the interstices, overlaps, and displacements of the plural domains of the difference. Modern nationalisms have subsequently hampered the settlement of a nationless, community-driven, and culturally negotiated values and perspectives in which our multiple senses of territorial belonging are produced performatively through 11

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Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely

1. This idea refers to a passage of French author Gustave Flaubert, translated and quoted by Marina Garcès in her essay “Honesty with the Real” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 4, 2012. 2. Janna Graham, “Between a Pedagogical Turn and a hard Place: Thinking with Conditions” in Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson (Eds.), Curating and the Educational Turn, Open Editions, London 2010, p. 127 3. Ibid. 4. Ref. “Accordingly, honesty is, in some sense, always violent and exercises violence. This violence is two-way: towards oneself and towards the real towards oneself since it means letting oneself be affected and towards the real because it means entering onto the scene” (Marina Garcès, p. 2). 5. Ian Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity, Duke University Press, 2008 p. 10. 6. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), p 577. 7. Ibid. 8. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, South End Press, New York, 1990, p. 341. 9. Ibid. 10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London 1994, p. 2. 11. Ibid., p. 148. 12. Ibid., 145. 13. Ibid., p. 3. 14. Ibid., 142. 15. Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis 2010. 16. Reza Negarestani, “The Militarization of Peace: Absence of Terror or Terror of Absence?,” in R. Mackay (ed,), Collapse I. Oxford: Urbanomic, September 2007, p. 55. 17. Ibid., pp. 55–56. 18. Ref. Vasant Kaiwar, The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincialising Europe. Leiden and Boston: BRILL, 2014. 19. Rosi Braidotti, La philosophie…..là où on ne l’attend pas, Paris: Larousse, 2009. 20. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in theory). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 4. 21. Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Idendity’?” in Paul

du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (eds.), Identity: A Reader. London: SAGE, 2000, p. 17. 22. Ibid., p. 29. 23. Ibid., p. 19. 24. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 25. Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recherche)” [1970] in Positions (1964-1975), pp. 67-125. Paris : Les Éditions sociales, 1976. 26. Antonio Gramsci, La questione meridionale (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2005). 27. Paul Ricoeur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 40. 28. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978) (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 29. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Orientalism’s Genesis Amnesia,” in Antinomies of Modernity: Essays on Race, Orient, Nation, ed. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Muzumdar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 98-125. 30. Vasant Kaivar, “What is Postcolonial Orientalism and How Does it Matter?” in Transeuropéennes. Revue Internationale de Pensée Critique, Paris, December 2010. 31. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 32. Sarah Ahmed, Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Sara Ahmed, “Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness,” New Formations, no. 63 (Winter 2007/08): 121- 37. 33. “[…] an ideology that has spread in Italy during the forty years after his death […] a consensus – almost a unique case in Italian cultural history – that transcends political as well as religious affiliations. Right and left (including far right and far left), Catholic traditionalists and inveterate laymen, conservative cultural critics and aspiring modernizers of the country, may argue and debate on anything, but on ‘Pasolini’ – the quotation marks are necessary – they are all in agreement,” in Rocco Ronchi, “Critica del pasolinismo. L’ideologia italiana. ‘Pasolini’ a quarant’anni dalla morte,” Doppiozero (November 2015), http://www.doppiozero.com/ materiali/ppp/ critica-del-pasolinismo. 34. Luca Caminati, Orientalismo eretico: Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007). 35. Ibid. 1 36. “For an entire generation of Italians raised

during Fascism, the proclamation of victory in Ethiopia became the high point of their lives. It was like great cinema. But in Mussolini’s empire, too, Africa could ultimately be controlled only as a cinematic fantasy. Two-thirds of Ethiopia withdrew from colonial control because the country was too large. Ethiopian guerrilla units, such as the Black Lions, continued to fight the Italian occupiers and the Balkanization of their country. Mussolini’s dictum about cinema being the regime’s strongest weapon was based on Lenin’s maxim about electrification. The Istituto Luce was founded in 1924 to enforce the production of documentaries; the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia emerged in 1935, Cinecittà two years later. Within three years, fifty-five cinemas with 60,000 seats were built in Africa Orientale Italiana. One of the largest was the Cinema Impero in Asmara on Viale Mussolini, today Godena Harnet (‘Street of Liberty’). Strict racial segregation reigned and different programs were offered: for the African audience, mainly documentaries intended as reminders of Rome’s greatness and the power of the Duce. Outside the cities, the cinema was underway via truck as a mobile unit.” Peter Friedl, Secret Modernity in e-Flux Journal #10, November 2009, p. 13 37. Rif. R. Bernasconi, « The Assumption of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and the Vicious Circle of Racial Politics », Parallax, 2002, Vol. 8, n. 2. 38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Che fare col ‘buon selvaggio’?” (1970), L’Illustrazione Italiana CIX 3 (February-March 1982). 39. ibidem. 40. ibidem. 41. Rosi Braidotti, “Cyberfeminism with a difference,” New Formations, no. 29 (Fall 1996): 9-25 42. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).

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Acque Ferme Some irreducible fragments and one, univocal perspective Chiara Cartuccia

I grew up in a little city by the lake. An Italian volcanic lake, round and soft, easy to look at. So easy that, sat by one of its shores on a Saturday morning, lazily observing it, you can have the feeling your gaze is embracing all of its secrets; everything is just there, in front of you, shamelessly exposed by this natural panopticon. On certain days, when the air is exceptionally dry and your mind can move faster, you can think it would be possible, if your eyes were good enough, to look right inside the little houses you can guess at the horizon. See the life buzzing within them: men and women and children and animals thinking simple thoughts, round and â&#x20AC;&#x201C;apparentlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; safe, as the lake itself. I remember traveling to a nearby town, as a kid. The usual road, which ran, and still runs, along the lake took me to something unexpected. An amazing anomaly. A pretty extended inlet, which eluded my eyes so far, was breaking the supposed perfect roundness of my all-showing lake. Something was escaping my curiosity all the way along; something was hidden, in perfect daylight, by my own perspective, my own position. I remember the feeling I felt, the vague horror triggered by this betrayal of my sense of childish transparency. Not everything was just lying under my eyes then, ready to be observed, scrutinized and, eventually, ready to be understood. Not even the entirety of my familiar, soft, easy, round, volcanic lake. *

Years later a much bigger stretch of water will become, to me, a source of interest and romantic fascination, as well as the indirect subject of the words I am about to write: the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly to the lake of my childhood, this Sea, which the Romans claimed as their own, gives the illusion of homogeneity, clarity and unity, both when looked at from too far and from way too close. An excessive distance can well be determined by the intellectual monotony of a guiltily 25

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Wooing Undone Maya Tounta

. . . is a short, unfinished text about the legibility of anecdotes and their denotation of dormant and partial belonging, inspired by Edouard Glissant’s idea of opacity and by my encounters with things, people, and surfaces during my intermittent travels to Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, Malta, San Marino, Italy, Greece, Lithuania, and the UK over the past year. It features national anecdotes and biographical episodes disguised—or shall we say, “told again, opaquely”—in a language of metaphor and poetic monophony, pushed against the flat, time-poor, and insoluble heartaches of exploration. Of the things to catch your eye, some will display a special realism, and although unconscious, they will also show erudition and insight and an unerring ability to be striking while staying in the covert. These things will be felt inside surfaces, like wallpapers, drawings, coats of paint, curtains, or steel lattices. In Pristina, it was pasted onto a clean wall, of the street or of the gallery, closing in on two slight finitudes, mangled between this and that—an unschooled appetite for gratifying the mind with sense, but remarkably, and a holding ability for galvanized notions and dulcet promises. In other words, a good feeling, of which we know little, and only through the bitty breath and thin feeling that alone can creep in. These (things) will draw you in, and you’ll be made to listen to the stories they tell though they tell no stories, and to the sounds they divulge though they make no sound, even when they are loud, audibly; they have no meaning, even when they’re decipherable, soberly. Fantastical? Or about a life, and a death? Or about one, or two, or all of history? Or about a love whose breath outlived the fragrance of the act? Or a halted war and an ended hero now cast in granite and molten rock next to a line of power-punching machines? 31

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Let Us Say This Again, Opaquely

In Vilnius, walking down a gray road, I saw a piece of cloth mangled around a steel pole: flaxen (a dark muddy yellow), juniper (a dark muddy green), and merlot (a dark muddy red), I quickly realized it was the flag, ripened and made heavy by the rain, once yellow, green, and red like the fluorescent sign next to it, once yellow, green, and red also, now irreparably dim, but still resilient, calling elbow-benders inside, in whose eyes a hazel starchy glow leaked a fated group drunkenness, blind and stinking. I remembered that Lietuva—the Lithuanian word for Lithuania—means “to rain” (to reign). These uncounted encounters speak of history without charting heritage and claim no historical dimension yet bear an unresolved weightiness reminiscent of historical work, or something other rather, convincing, beguiling even, so much so that you are sent back to the drawing board to create ceremony, hoping it will bring your writing reticence and a feeling of planned uncertainty, just like in life. And then you think life is not expansiveness, though expansiveness may be part of life, and ebullient that is, undemonstrative is the best of it, and most of it. In Pristina, a man sat down by the side of the road to have a cigarette. Searching his pockets for rolling paper, he found none, and so he decided to roll one using a ripped inked piece from that day’s newspaper. As his eyes grazed over the now separated sheet whose sequestering left the print moderately gashing (the news lacerated), the man read: “Dead in a traffic accident because of speeding.” Within a moment, a stallion, a human-motorcycle mixed-breed, had raced by in high speed, stirring the naked tobacco that lay unhinged on the parted newsprint, causing a tidal shift of anger in the man who upon the passing of this split moment looked down at his cigarette, then back at the man who had swiftly been reduced to a dot on the yawning horizon, opened his mouth widely, as if to take a drag on the embryonic fag, and let out a clear-headed yell that resounded across the mountains as a judicial voice of bonfire dimensions: “I’LL BE SMOKING YOU SOON!” It is this unpublished life that resists being colonized because it is shared but never bound by one specific arrangement of words, and because regardless of iteration, it remains cryptic to those who have not lived it. An anecdote, the ἀνέκδοτον, in Greek meaning the unpublished, is also a surface, seemingly palpable but actually ghostlike, not so different from poems—ambiguous and partial, resembling riddles, repositories, and molds. An anecdote is an inside joke, shared by strangers who recognize themselves through it as friends. Its language, cadence, silences, and mouth whence it comes are part of the code. I did. I loved an Estonian, a Lithuanian, a Bulgarian, and a Russian, and they took

Blotting Paper Rachel Pafe

A field of light towered behind him, marking a glowing horizon. A rectangle composed of choppy segments: bisecting browns, blues, blacks, greys. A fragment of wood or a newspaper, the end of a pipe or the trail left behind by a cartoon character racing away from an enemy. A tablecloth or a block of marble, stitched together in a quilt, seen by pressing closely against a guitar, lashes matted against the strings. The door opened and a head cautiously poked through the door. A dark mass apologetically slunk over to a seat in the first row. This resulting breeze from this entry caused the image to tremble.

It again lay flat after this shiver, this time gaining warm tones through a halflowered eyelid. Snow fell outside and the barren trees pressed themselves stoically against the unfriendly grey sky. It was an early hour during which the carefully trimmed grassy knolls that adorned the campus were exposed in a moment of weakness, each blade a weary finger curling inwards. *

A group of fatigued travellers walked through the city, bodies shimmering with sweat. Behind them rose the outlines of concrete towers with satellite dishes angled towards the sun like overgrown mushrooms, villas with winding vines intermingled with tangles of power lines and unfinished structures whose exposed bricks were plastered with posters that calmly watched the scene.

After several hours, they entered an unassuming building whose only giveaway as to its function was the bold black letters scrawled across its faรงade: Gallery. Inside, they were greeted by the faint strains of jazz music and the soothing expanse of all-white interior. The sweat settled. They gazed up from their damp skin and were greeted by an unexpected sight. In the centre of the room was a white structure raised on a plinth: a miniature museum with its top sliced off. 37

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Declare Independence Alessandro Castiglioni

The question of independence is key, vital, a part itself of the idea of state and national sovereignty. This principle is valid, more so, for a small state. Nations that have no linguistic specificities or important physical extensions base their own identity mainly on documenting and supporting their ability for independence. These are the countries that Pier Paolo Coro called “Territori ad Alta Definizione Simbolica” (TADS, Territories of High-Symbolic Definition).1 This reflection is part of a vaster art and research project, begun in 2004, with the name Little Constellation (LC).2 LC is a network built on the work of Rita Canarezza and Pier Paolo Coro that developed and develops, through different research strategies and tools, an investigation devoted to Small States and geopolitical micro-areas across Europe. The entire A Natural Oasis? project comes under this framework and, from this perspective, questions the relationship between territoriality and contemporary artistic practice. From this point of view, the geopolitical reflection that distinguishes the TADS further problematizes the question of independence. In a state in which the first dimension missing is territorial extension, the metaphorical value of its historical and political symbols, or the claim to define a specific cultural identity, becomes very important. First and foremost, this identity passes through defining independence. But an independence that is often paradoxical, contradictory. These local and global territories evidently exist through interdependence with larger states, in a complex perspective of roles, “yokes” of strength and power. The stereotype of the “fiscal paradise” that often accompanies countries like San Marino was confirmed in reality, with the widespread presence across the nation, for example, of limited liability companies and various holding companies that evade taxes. The fact that San Marino between 2009 and 2014 was part of the so-called “Black List” (that is, countries with a privileged tax system), in correspondence with a drop of the country’s GDP by around 12%, proves how much the prestigious independence of the oldest republic in Europe is, at least, 43

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Sine Cura Giulia Gregnanin

It was the summer of mugginess. Not bearable mugginess that softly envelopes you and accompanies your every move. It was the summer of great mugginess, the kind that suffocates, fills your throat, and dries the hairs in your nose. Mugginess that gives sweat to every nook and cranny of your body while turning you into a fresh water dowser in search of the slightest relief to boiling limbs. That summer, Luca was more fidgety than usual. He thought he had gotten used to seeing the sea. Red roofs, green hills, and, then, a long strip of water that fades into the grayish-blue of the sky. A perfect, geological layering. From man to nature to beyond. Posterized as far as flat and abyssal as far as profound, with that power to attract that urges you to it as if it were holding forth invisible bait hooked to the navel. Visceral. The coffee pot was piping in the kitchen and the TV was turned on to the local newscast, with a balding man, fiftyish, listing the latest news events, at a rhythmic pace, with a dragged-out “s” typical of the dialect from San Marino. At that moment he was emphasizing, with the help of charts and line graphs, how in the past five years San Marino had a 2% drop in employment and how, at the same time, crime fell 80% with respect to 2016. – Safety has never been so high – the anchorman said enthusiastically. Outside the French doors Fanny was whimpering, jumping up on her small hind legs. Echoes of sounds, a small domestic ensemble repeated daily. For a long time, Luca had hated such a strong and pronounced accent that was now coming from the TV amps. During his university years he had followed some evening diction classes, in an attempt to get rid of such an invasive accent. It had become a small obsession of his. Those times when someone pointed out his accent—and this was particularly the case when he was nervous and not able to fully control his speech—he felt his mask had been removed, a violation of his privacy that forced him to talk about himself. Like when Thomas arrived in the 51

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Xhevdet Xhafa, Pse/Why (1971), Ink on paper, 76 x 53,5 cm. Photo courtesy of The National Gallery of Kosovo. From the collection of NGK.

In the now: childhood for everyone, forever again ErĂŤmirĂŤ Krasniqi

I wish the past was composed of more historic moments, living in postindependent Kosovo, every moment in the now is a historic moment. As I sit obliviously in front of the TV, as one does now and then, someone leaves a historic mark; someone has done something mundane again, as none before after the independence of Kosovo. All these narratives marking history forever glorify the small man, but infantilize the whole nation watching television that day. The story that the contemporary history of Kosovo narrates today is that of a new country which declared its independence from Serbia on February 17, 2008, becoming the Republic of Kosovo, the country of the young europeans. However, what is mostly new about Kosovo is its legal status. This kind of narrative creates an imaginary of the people cut-out from life dating prior to the independence - a childhood for everyone, forever again. When you live here, it becomes a quintessential task to draw parallels to the past events to contextualize current ones, at least for a brief moment to live before and beyond now. Living in the constant now makes it hard to create any continuity, be that cultural or political. It becomes difficult to talk about anything when stories about yourself and your country are constantly revisioned or overshadowed by other glorious stories happening in the now. Images of individual success and dreams of successful marriages furnish every life goal. Unfortunately, no dream grows big enough when you live in the constant now. Modernity: forever ago

The Yugoslav federation of 1945 situated Kosovo as a province of Serbia. It was only in 1974 that Kosovo gained the status of the autonomous province of Yugoslavia. As a supranational constellation, Yugoslavia was considered very authentic in its path to socialism; an experimental and flexible socialism in approach that responded and adapted to the needs of its people, as such, 61

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Montenegro Case Outline Lenka Đorojević

Entrance The neo-liberal order is constantly pushing us into increasingly faster movement, which is perverse, complicated, and biometrically impossible. The capital is an autonomous corporate high-tech machinery that is controlling the social psyche while emancipating itself from mankind. Inside the exhausted imaginarium of everydayness the biopolitical machines are promising a liberation of desires while the mechanisms of control of imagination are staging a constant terorr-de-territorialization of the individual and social body through different processes of desire’s internalization and staging. Inscriptions of Power / Eastern European Context

The traumatic disintegration of the socialist system is not over yet. Euro-centrist colonial policies are hiding in plain sight inside different forms of racial, gender, ethnic, anthropologic, and nation-based discrimination. These intersubjective constructs, which Quijano calls “specific colonial matrix of power” “. . . were even assumed to be ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ categories, then of a historical significance. That is, a natural phenomenon, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which the other social relations of classes and estates operate.”1 Considering the region of the former socialist east, the ex-Yugoslavian republics, a constant practicing of these same “colonial matrixes of power” has been put into action, generating a devastating neo-liberalizing machinery within the local marginalized contexts: “It is not only about money, but also about history, rewritten to accommodate the ‘civilizational’ missions of the West in the East, supported by the turbo-constructed elites of money and power that expediently expropriated the social, political, and economic structures of former socialist countries. In order to do this, powerful processes of fascist nationalism and eradication of history and memory were developed in the former Eastern European space.”2 67

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A Transnational Cultural Project on the Arts in Small States: The Case of Malta Valerie Visanich

Introduction The maxim small is beautiful is often applied to small-island states. It is also a fact that small islands are often faced with vulnerabilities and challenges for their remoteness and insularities. This article examines such peculiarities of small states focusing on art practices from a sociological approach. Can sociological investigation ignore the contextual factors, the limitations and challenges of a small geographical territory and its influence on art production and practices? This was one of the main questions tackled by the BJCEM (Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean) transnational cultural project, involving an ethnographic study with artists in various small states. This full cultural immersion in Euro-Mediterranean small states aimed at mapping the differences and similarities in constraints and challenges of artistic practices. The working sessions of the BJCEM program A National Oasis? A Transnational Research Program aimed at deepening curatorial and cultural knowledge of visual, performing arts and cultural studies in small-states. It explored the geopolitical peculiarities complexity of territories such as of San Marino, Montenegro, Kosovo and Malta. This article specifically focuses on one location that was part of the project location, the small state of Malta. Reference to this location is made not to suggest identical challenges faced in small-states within the Euro-Mediterranean region. In effect, I contend that the distinctive socio-economic and cultural conditions of these locations contribute to different peculiarities. There are various aspects worthy of analysis, including the institutions of power in Malta, such as the Church and its work on censoring in the arts throughout the years. However, this article specifically focuses on the notion of insularity outlined by referring to three features â&#x20AC;&#x201C; artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; need to train and work abroad, the status overlap of the artist, and the patterns of cultural consumption. 75

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Curators

Chiara Cartuccia is an Italian art historian, independent art writer and curator based in London. She studied Art History at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and Freie Universität Berlin. In 2012 she earned a Master of Arts Degree in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Between 2012 and 2015 she was Curator of the Performance Art Programmes at Berlin art institution SAVVY Contemporary. For SAVVY, Chiara curated the performance art programme PRESENT TENSE SERIES and took part in the organisation of the exhibitions and performance series Giving Contours to Shadows and Wir Sind Alle Berliner 1884-2014, among others. Chiara is co-founder and co-director of the curatorial project EX NUNC. She is a freelance contributor to several art magazines, and a PhD candidate at the School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam.

Lenka Đorojević is an artist and a curator. Her work explores the relations between contemporary theory and philosophical thesis as pertaining to various forms of mediated visual, which is shown in her works either directly or through the inclusion of processuality of such a media into her mediaart installations and theatre set designs. From 2015, she is a part of the ISU – Institute for Contemporary Art which was established in Montenegro. Since 2012, she has also been collaborating as an aristic duo with Matej Stupica. They have received the OHO Group Award for their installation Monomat in 2015. Works and lives in Ljubljana.

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Giulia Gregnanin is a wirter and curator based in Milan. She obtained a MA in Contemporary Art History from IULM University presenting the thesis The Nose: a work by William Kentridge, carried out in Johannesburg. She attended CAMPO15, the Curatorial Course directed by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebuadengo in Turin. She worked as editorial apprentice at Corriere della Sera and Flash Art International. She is currently Flash Art Italia editorial assistant. She is the co-founder and co-curator of Il Colorificio, an indipendent project space voted to artistic and curatorial research based in Milan.

Sergey Kantsedal is an independent curator based in Turin, Italy. He was born in Kharkov where graduated from State Academy of Design and Arts in Theory and History of Art and worked at the Centre of Contemporary Art “YermilovCentre”. For several years he was running Biruchiy contemporary art project, an open platform of interaction between artists in unique natural conditions of the Biruchiy island on the Azov Sea. He also took part in the 3th Moscow Curatorial Summer School and attended a residence at Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy. Between 2015 and 2016 he has been a participant of CAMPO, the Curator Course of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and worked as an assistant curator of the Festival of Independent Art Projects NESXT in Turin, Italy.

Erëmirë Krasniqi is a researcher and curator. Graduated from Bard College Berlin in Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature and earned a Masters degree in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth she worked as Teaching Assistant for several courses (Transnational Muslim Feminisms, Krieger’s Virtual Girlfriend: Japanese Anime and the Idea of Post-human, Introduction to Film Studies and Film Noir). Currently, she is the Lead Researcher at Kosovo Oral History Initiative and Head of Research and Publications at the National Gallery of Kosovo. Also, attending a year long program in museology and curatorial practices, Exhibiting Contemporary History - Representing 20th Century, at the Friedrich Schiller University.

Rachel Pafe is a writer, researcher and freelance editor based in Amsterdam. From 2011 – 2014 she collaborated with Italian curatorial collective, vessel, and in 2015 she earned her MRes in Exhibition Studies from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. From 2014-2015 she collaborated with Sakina Dhif on a series of writings and performative lectures dealing with fictive exhibition histories, presented at PARSE Biennial Gothenburg (2015) and Central Saint Martins lecture series Exhibitions: Histories, Practices (2015). Since early 2016 she has worked as Research Assistant for independent curator Galit Eilat.

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Maya Tounta is a freelance curator and writer based between Athens and Vilnius. Between 2014 and 2016 she was curator at Rupert, Vilnius where she worked with the Exhibitions, Residencies, Public and Alternative Education programmes. Her recent projects include Double Bind, a yearlong exhibition and public events programme exploring affective economies of failure, produced in collaboration with The Academy of Fine Art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik. She is the editor of A Solid Injury to the Knees, a collection of essays on depression’s percolations into politics.

Valerie Visanich received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2012 from Loughborough University, UK. She is a resident lecturer in Sociology at the University of Malta– lecturing study-units including ‘Sociology of the Arts’ and ‘Popular Culture & the Arts’. She is the nominated chair (2017-2019) of the Research Network Sociology of the Arts within the European Sociological Association. Valerie is the main coordinator, with the University of Malta, in hosting of the International European Sociological Association on the Sociology of the Arts and Culture, to be held in Malta in 2018.

Alessandro Castiglioni develops educational programs and research activities at Museo MA*GA and he is the General Co–Secretary of the Premio Nazionale Arti Visive Città di Gallarate. He is the curator of Little Constellation Network, San Marino and Lecturer of History of Art, Design and Visual Cultures at Istituto Marangoni, Milan. Institutions he has worked with include: Italian Cultural Institute in London; BJCEM as curator of Mediterranea 16 XVI Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterrean, Ancona; Viafarini, Milan; Museo di Villa Croce, Genoa; MCA, Valletta; National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik; Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. He has written and edited books published by Corraini Edizioni, Mousse Publishing, Postmediabooks.

Since 2014 Alessandro Castiglioni and

Simone Frangi are curator of the project A Natural Oasis?

Simone Frangi is a cultural researcher, writer and curator. He holds a French-italian PhD in Aestethics and Theory of Art. He’s currently artistic director of Viafarini – Non profit Organization for Contemporary Artistic Research (Milan, IT) and co-curator of Live Works – Performance Act Award at Centrale Fies (Trento, IT). He’s Lecturer of Theory of Contemporary Art at Fine Arts and Design Academy in Grenoble (FR) - where he founded the workshop and residency based research program “Practices of Hospitality” - and of Theory and methodology or Art Writing and Critique at Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. In 2015, he was one of the five curators of the 10th edition of Furla Prize for Contemporay Art and in 2016 one of the ten curator of Quadriennale of Rome. 109

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