A TALE ABOUT PRISHTINA

Back in Skopje, Center for Photography

Yane and Elena at Pro Helvetia Skopje.

A catholic priest explaining the church gate's ornament to Sixten.

Martin and Elena interviewing a theorist in Sopje.

Taken from the bus – from Skopje to Prishtina

On the way to Satcion in Prishtina.

Albert at Stacion in Prishtina.

September 23/24, 2008, or, Two times 122 km

There is always a before (traveling)

As always, it takes other people to get your own shit running. In this case it all started with Sarah Lookofsky. We were both at the board of the catalogue committee for the megalomaniac Master of Arts exhibition of the eight Southern Californian art schools in Pasadena. This was in 2004. We kept in touch and three years later, the both of us won a curatorial competition to organize the international exhibition Land Grab at apexart in New York. It was at the opening of this show that I met Yane Calovski. He seemed to have fallen from the sky when he addressed me that night, as I hadn’t noticed him in the crowd before. Wearing big, black glasses and a broad grin, which seemed to reach from one end of his face to the other, he left a vivid impression on me. When we ran into each other again at an art fair in Rotterdam, I immediately remembered these two character traits. This second brief encounter was followed by a few emails and a phone call, which resulted in an invitation to come to Skopje and work at Press-to-exit, the art space Yane and Hristina Ivanoska are running. Yane showed up at apexart because of Albert, who participated in Land Grab. Albert Heta is an artist and the director of the contemporary art space, Stacion, in Prishtina. He runs this Center for Contemporary Art with the architect Vala Osmani. They have a child together whose godfather is Yane. Wooloo Productions, a Danish duo with an online art community, offered their online platform for an open call for Land Grab. Sarah and I went by the place where they housed a project in New York while we were setting up our show. During the sushi dinner that followed that night, we found out that Sixten’s life partner was the best friend of one of my friends, the Danish artist Bettina Camilla Vestergaard, whom I got to know in Los Angeles. Without this exhibition and the people I met through it a, by now four year long, study on the relationship of art and politics would not have taken place in that way, and this story could not have been told.

0

September 24, 2008. I looked over to Martin who stared out of the window. His posture communicated a state of contemplation, maybe surrender, too. His left hand rested on the seat before him, his right knee pulled up and squeezed in, in front of his chest. Sixten sat in the row behind me. He didn’t make a peep. We were exhausted from the attempt to be idiots. From the trial to care about what we felt and could not express instead of doing what we were expected to do. As we pulled out of the bus station in Prishtina, I asked myself why it felt so bad to be courageous? To disobey?

We were still shattered to the bones, trying to catch up with what had happened. Only half an hour ago, we had been sitting in the contemporary art space, Stacion, in Prishtina. I sat in the middle, with Sixten on my right, and Martin on my left. Three wooden chairs next to each other. Half in anger, half despairing that the crowd in front of us did not listen, our bodies started to stiffen. They didn’t want to hear that we didn’t know what to do. You are invited here, you have to deliver what you signed up for, you cannot come here and ask for something, you’re here to give, was the reaction to our deeply felt conviction that being in Prishtina, being in this part of the world (the east of Europe, the western Balkans, Ex-Yugoslavia – all naming is incompetent when it comes down to subjective histories) rendered us mute. And that this mattered. That in fact nothing else mattered but this. We were incapable of reproducing what we had in mind initially when we got invited to the workshop on ‘Politics of Contemporary Art’. We felt the need to rebel against the way things were done (in the West, in the art world). To copy that, to copy ourselves, our own boring gestures, while we actually seemed to be absent or displaced in this here and now, not “at home”, not in language, felt wrong. It felt impossible. We had something to say, the idiot has something to say, the problem is not a lack of output, but that there is no one on the other end who comprehends. Although, Albert did, he got it right away. He showed the right sense of humor or cynicism. It must have all sounded a bit blunt, careless, and maybe even arrogant to the audience consisting of younger artists and theorists from Kosovo, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Croatia. Were we behaving childishly, insisting on, or revolutionary, or simply irresponsibly? Unanswerable? I remember pulling my right leg up at one point and shoving my boot under my buttocks in an act of suppressed fury. I was leaning forward and I was, quite likely, shouting too. I was sweating. I turned my head left and right. Martin and Sixten sat there in silence. Not at ease at all, they tried to cut in, a bit uninspired and without much success. In the end we probably achieved what we wanted to prevent by all means. We tried to say: you don’t have to listen to our story, you have nothing to learn from us, you have seen things we cannot even imagine (does that give one the right to ask about it?), you tell us. But they did listen, and they got upset and they did not talk. At least not about themselves, but they did talk about us, we were incapable of shifting to focus. I don’t think we were surprised, but we became frustrated anyway. Probably more with ourselves then with our audience. We knew we had fucked up but couldn’t do anything about it. (I remember Ambassador Richard Holbrooke the architect of the peace accord in Dayton for Ex-Yugoslavia, and what he had achieved by means of talking and listening. “How to end a war?” – I should finally read that book.) We hadn’t had the chance to prepare our speechlessness, to translate it into a clever act of communication. The need to not talk but listen hit us, and we were still tumbling from the blow. We felt horribly sensitized. We were helpless as how to transfer this need to a local audience or to function in a workshop structure that, all the same, we absolutely wanted to contribute to. We had something to say, we just didn’t know how. And we could not give up on the importance of that ignorance.

1

September 23, 2008. It was early in the morning when we left the house in Skopje. Our group of three was in a subdued mood. A friendly lazymouthedness that would soon change into a wave of exhilaration, and, a by now, well-acquainted series of slow morning jokes letting us slide unhurriedly into the fullness of the day. We were in this part of the world – the so-called western Balkans or the east of Europe – to investigate precisely this – the confusion of naming and belonging. The idea of the West and where it finds its end, its limitations, not so much geographically, as there clearly is no limit there, you can always go further west, but mentally, historically or psychologically within the framework of self-identification. Where does this label “the West” expire, where do people not care anymore which side they belong to? I had just written up a concept for an investigation dealing with these and acquainted questions, when I got invited to do a curatorial residency at Press-to-exit in Skopje. I decided to take the Wooloo Productions along.

The taxi driver ignored our attempts to get through to him, or maybe he was just not a morning person. I remember Martin’s black leather jacket, and Sixten’s piercing blue eyes communicating an alertness that his, still tired, body could not live up to yet. I was clearly under the weather, too, as I had had a bad cold since day one in Macedonia. My sinuses were inflamed, a reaction to my exhausted physical state. What might have slowed down my recovery was the fact that the streets of Skopje were filled with cars that polluted the air to a degree that I have not experienced before, not in L.A., not in New York, or London. Most of these vehicles were third rate cars from Western Europe being sold on in the east, where everyone wants a car and drives whatever is available, and, more significantly, affordable. Breathing got hard in some parts of the city, especially when your nose is blocked and your throat burns like hell already. I believe it was raining that morning but maybe I am mistaking the grey and dreary look of that early fall day in retrospect for something it was not. I might misremember a lot but not the feeling inside me that I was off to see something important in my life. We were headed to Prishtina, and that was not a small thing.

After a short taxi drive, we got to the bus station in Skopje. We bought our tickets in the busy waiting hall and found our vehicle in the outside car park without difficulty. We sat down somewhere in the middle of the bus, amongst a crowd of people, mostly men, who probably did that trip every morning to go to work. We were guessing and knew we wouldn’t get it right anyway. I remember vaguely that at some point we started to throw questions in English into the open to see whether someone would understand us and could reply. We were eager to know and unashamed enough to try all means at hand. We had done street interviews in Skopje, in the centre, at the big market and in the Jewish quarter just the day before, with people selling stuff of all kinds. We had chatted with a local music star that we had come across by coincidence and had followed for a while, and with other people, most of which would not speak English but use their own language and individual gestures. We would listen, observe and reply with smiles, words and nods. The exchange seemed enriching for both sides.

Once in the bus, I looked at my Danish friends. We stood out. A bit too blond, a bit too excited, roaming about in our seats like little children on a church bank while everyone else was just there, unaffected, in routine. Was this man going to see his sister again after many years of silence, his sister who had five children and a sick mother to take care of with no job and no man in the house? Hardly. Maybe he just wanted to buy a lamp in Prishtina he could not find in Skopje. And the young man before me, was he nervous because he was going to interview for a job in a hotel, something he never wanted to do and at the same time was anguished to mess up? It could as well be that he was just itchy from a late mosquito bite. In about thirty-two hours I would take a picture of Martin, then sitting at the window on the other side of the aisle. Silent, exhausted, looking out of the bus window with one hand holding on to something, one knee pulled up and pressed against the seat in front of him.

Apart from these initial observations and thoughts, I don’t recall much of the bus drive or the landscape of the first part of the trip, before we hit the border to the Republic of Kosovo, or Kosova, as Albert calls his country. I guess, I had been falling in and out of a deeply needed series of naps. We drove uphill on a meandering street, and drove past a green woody area before we stopped at the border. The abundance of bright green leaves, dewy, moist (maybe it really did rain that morning) took me by surprise. I felt welcomed, and that seemed vital for a moment. I should have prepared myself – for Prishtina, the workshop at Stacion, and Albert, who had invited us, but I did not.

At the border the bus stopped. We sat there for what seemed a rather long time. The border control collected most passports but only checked ours. The officials were not friendly, and not unfriendly. It was the usual wordless act of power that is imposed on all people crossing borders around the globe; this was not Gaza or Afghanistan, and still, it made me nervous. I watched every single move of the guards, their eyes and hands. The driver let the engine run the whole time through. When we drove out of the border control building, I was relieved that my body was finally taken elsewhere. The landscape that opened up in front of us was flat with hills in the far, it seemed dry, although I remember green patches and bits of woods. The villages we drove through appeared poor and were partly rebuilt with isolated houses in between them, building sites everywhere. I saw a lot of cement, men in leather jackets, women with head scarves, and kids walking, running, laughing.

2

And with these more tangible images, my mood changed. Something froze inside me, something got afraid.
I remembered that time; it was a good seventeen years ago, when I had read things about the war in Yugoslavia in the newspaper that would literally make me throw up. This was the first war in my life that I had followed with a fully developed political consciousness. It was the media that informed me every day, and it was not a distant description of war in a novel, or a biography. Of course it was still a safe 1250 kilometers away, but all the same, it had been the closest I had ever gotten to a misery of that dimension. I knew people from Yugoslavia, the drama was not remote, and it had a tangible effect on my life, too. My family and I were dumbstruck when hearing about the rape camps and other cruelties only humans that go insane beyond salvation can come up with. (Is really everyone a victim in a war?) We were in pain, the silent, burning pain of compassion. Why does another’s bad lot hurt us? Some say, it is because we are all always/already connected. We are all too close as human beings; this is the heavy part of belonging to this earthly race. Not that we do not understand each other, but we are too much the same. And what makes us turn away is not the misunderstanding, or that we’re fed up or bored or disgusted with someone. We are appalled with ourselves, the sheer possibility that we can fail, suffer and be destroyed too. L’enfer c’est l’autre.

After having learned about the rape camps, a distinct image, or rather scene, started to form in my head that I could not get rid of. As a matter of fact, it is still there, but it takes more will and time to recreate it now. I cannot say from where exactly I got it. Everything in it is in sepia brown. When I thought of the war back then, I saw a ramshackle gym hall with a row of school tables stacked one next to the other on one end of the room. Behind it I saw large windows reaching form the ceiling almost to the ground. The time was not detectable; it could have been night or day. Laid and stretched out on these tables were women of all age. Fully dressed, half dressed, half naked; some were completely naked, showing abused skin with bruises in all colors. Some were half dead, some were crying and shouting; some were silent in tears, whereas others seemed to breathe with difficulty or did not at all anymore. In front of every woman stood a long line of soldiers waiting to be next to climb on the tables to rape, or rape again. Many of the soldiers were drugged or drunk or in a state of frenzy; they did what they were told to do and sought in their own way to be absent while committing this crime. Their eyes were wandering around in hate and helplessness. Some wanted to run away and were held back; others were intently loud and aggressive to steam up the atmosphere. There was blood on the women and around them. Some had been pregnant, but by the end of the day, were not anymore. Some had lain there dead for hours already. Others tried to kill themselves but were hindered by the soldiers. Whenever this image started to manifest itself in my brain, I used to wonder whether the women would have looked at each other while this insanity was going on, trying to comfort each other, to tell each other that they must not feel shame. Trying to make one another understand that none of this was their fault and that none of this had to do with them. Were they trying to give each other little signs of humanity, or were they all drowning in humiliation?

My fantasies of these long lines of soldiers, and the women of all age suffering, the dying hands cramped into a soldier’s coat or shirt while the woman wanted to be as far away from that very body as possible. Being locked in by the perpetrator while fading, not free to turn one last time, to a blue sky, a friendly face, or just to see nothing. Brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, mothers and sons, everyone against everyone.
I could hardly bear looking at my family in those days, the scene sat in my head so starkly, clouding all human interaction. To be told to kill what one loves, what one would die for oneself but wasn’t allowed to. Or to being forced to watch such a thing. Rape for ethnic cleansing happened in Kosovo at the border to Albania by Serbian militia. Rape was a way of dragging people down to the very bottom of the pit. It is the act of killing a person without dying. Women have to live with the memory and they have to face their parents. It is also an assault on a woman’s identity because they can end up giving birth to a child that is partly Serb.

My boyfriend at the time stopped making love to me, as he could not forget about the things he had read about.

3

I saw Prishtina in the far stretching out in front of us, encircled by a softly sloping row of hills. It was bigger than expected and then again smaller than history would make it sound. It looked grey, grey in shades of yellow and red. The newly built skyscrapers at the periphery of the city seemed to stand out too tall, out of place. I learned later that this was a new housing project for young families; these flats were less costly than the ones in the center.

We got out of the bus, and the first thing we realized was that we had no Euros on us; our Macedonian denars were useless here. We succeeded to buy some bananas anyway; we were starved. The name of the hotel we had to go to was well known to the taxi driver, and to the little crowd of his peers that soon gathered around us. All the same, everyone was pointing out something else on the map laid out on an engine hood, we laughed, while an impressive amount of fingers fluttered over the lines and color pads that symbolized the capital of Kosovo. The drive up to the hotel went smoothly, we drove past rows of city houses, bars and little grocery stores. There were not that many people in the street. The mood in the city seemed somber and controlled. The taxi stopped opposite from the address we were meant to be taken to, the Grand Hotel, in the city center. We walked into the hotel hall, and I checked in. My two companions were accommodated with a young curator from London who was also in the city for the workshop at Stacion. They had to sleep on the floor; I believe I felt treated like a queen, and Martin and Sixten were like my private slaves. We made jokes about this. They often sensed that they were not living up to the macho standard of the city and were looked down at. Both fled more than one bar feeling out of sorts.

After checking in, we did what most Westerners do in Prishtina – we sat in the waiting hall of the Grand Hotel and drank cappuccino. We were waiting for a coworker of Stacion to take us to the place. All the suits I saw, men in black, pretty waiters and a lot of gentle arrogance lying in the air, impressed me. The Grand Hotel was famous for its melting pot grandezza. I remember an article by the BBC news about this location. The author stated that, while everyone’s lives have been changed by the war, the centre of Prishtina seemed little damaged, at least compared with some of Kosovo’s other towns. Many of the shops were open; some of those formerly run by Serbs have simply been taken over by returning Albanians. He further was asking himself who was owning what in Kosovo these days, what belonged to the Serbs, what to the workers of Kosovo and what to the Albanians, including this hotel.

Although, we had never seen the person from Stacion before, we could spot her immediately when she entered the hotel hall. She was a global art world fashionada, accepting the current western law of style. Wearing a bit more color than everyone else, the right kind of shoes, the apt type of scarf in terms of the pattern and the way it was knotted. She took us to the art space along the main street. On the way I saw a large collection of letter-sized color photographs of young men (being missed from the war?) hanging on a white gate in the center of the city along the main street; nobody seemed to be interested in them but me. I passed women fully covered from head to toe and others being dresses according to a more western style. Older men were walking in clusters blocking the rather wide walkway. Stacion sat neatly on the left to an ample gate entrance. It looked like a little church with a star on the back entrance. We had to walk around it in order to enter the building through the front door. On a green patch next to it, a bunch of kids were playing soccer. Stacion is not hidden away, and still, one is doomed to miss it if looking for it for the first time. It was impressively neat and spacious inside, with an upper office floor; rough and refined in its architecture. What struck me, though, was how invasive the visual language of the Western art world is. One can go almost anywhere on this planet, but the way art spaces are set up would look consistently the same – if affordable, everyone cuts into this long chain of copies of copies of white cubes. And Stacion could afford it, it seemed.

When I was looking for a public toilet in the streets around Stacion, I entered two or three coffee places until I found one. There was one opposite the art space, in the building of a former museum or academia, but Albert didn’t want me to go there. His male guests he warned too, but without the same perseverance. I also came by what must have been a traditional, old-fashioned looking cafe, for men only, which was located at the main street. I knew these generous and often beautifully decorated spaces from Morocco and Casablanca, especially. Although there they usually have been stuffed. I was lured closer by the colorful walls and the enticing windows that went all the way from the ceiling down to the floor. Whenever I passed there I could make out a handful of men lying and sitting on long benches, casually, with their backs to the street, or not, smoking the pipe, drinking tea, looking lazy and important. I wished I could hang among them; it sure seemed like a world of its own worth being part of, zoomed off from the rest, from stink and noise, and anything that could trouble humankind.

After having inspected Stacion, Albert and I were browsing several streets in the center trying to find this one special coffee place he wanted to take me to. A little path led us through a housing complex in the back yard of a smaller row of houses. We passed parked cars and jumped over puddles of rainwater. When we finally found the place and stepped inside, we were hit by an impenetrable wall of cigarette smoke. We turned on our heels and jumped back out of it. (In Skopje a law against spitting in public had been implemented – to comply with European standards a bit more, someone suggested to me, while Macedonia was still waiting to become a full EU-member. When would Kosovo be pushed to introduce the smoking ban on public spaces?) I only got a quick glance at the flowery wallpaper and second-hand wooden furniture. Although, “second-hand” might not be the right term to apply here. The next place we entered was a more conventional bar; the interior was hard to make out, as the room was stacked with people, a youngish and middle-aged crowd, well dressed and expressive. Albert and I sat down on a couch, squeezed in between a group of people he knew. For a moment we could talk, about our expectations of the workshop, about Albert in Kosovo, who I saw for the first time again after the Albert I got to know in New York. About him as a dad, and as an arts organizer and artist. I tried to invite him for a talk at the Kunsthalle Luzern just a few weeks before, but the visum didn’t get through in time. We had worked on both sides, Prishtina and Luzern to advance things, but the Swiss Embassy in Pristina had been unimpressed by my phone calls and Albert’s many visits there. How easy it was for me, a Swiss person, to travel almost anywhere, and how different it was for a Kosovar, a EU-citizen, by all means. He depended fully on official invitations. I even had to sign a statement saying that I would cover all unruly costs created by my guest during his stay in Switzerland. We were laughing about it now. I told him that I was sitting here with him realizing that for the first time I consciously shared a room with people who have fought in a war. Of course I knew people in New York and Los Angeles who had done the same, but this was the first time I was physically present in that very war zone. I told Albert that this knowledge made me itchy, and insecure. I had so many questions but thought that I should not pose them; that I had no right to ask or to know. War, in the end, is something very intimate. I was ashamed of my curiosity but also didn’t want to repress it. What happened to the art scene during the war? Albert said that some stopped doing art, for others it became existential. He had stopped. Albert fled to Skopje. How can we talk together, you and me, with such different backgrounds informing our lives? Just don’t talk about the war, if you want to achieve for us to exchange something, or produce something together. Start here and now. It was not what I wanted to hear. Again I was told that dwelling on differences doesn’t bring people closer. But how can we understand what we’re saying to each other when we don’t know where we’re coming from? A few hours later I would stumble over this exact mental hurdle, and I would have no means at hand to save me.

4

The next morning Martin, Sixten and I met up at the Grand Hotel coffee bar. The weather was sunny and we sat outside on the luscious black leather sofas. We had another round of cappuccinos, chatting along with the one waiter who kept saying “it’s all right” at the most improper moments. Mistaking the phrase for a synonym to say thank you, we were guessing. We tried to prepare for the workshop at Stacion where we were invited to introduce *"The Sahara Project: West, where is that?" The three of us together had only started to contemplate the issue of the West a good week ago at a curatorial residency in Skopje. Before that it had been I, alone, who had been concerned with the topic. It was the first time Wooloo Productions and internationalcoffeeshop.org worked together. As a consequence, these past days had evoked a million questions in our heads, which already had resulted in a handful of decisive experiences during our stay in Macedonia. We still felt very new – not just to the subject matter – but also to each other, we were not entirely sure how the other ticked and tripped. In that sense, we experienced a methodological caught-up. We had too little time to find a common language, at the same time we didn’t want to let just one of us talk, and decided to intensify our exchange over the coming days in “the East”. The topic was huge, our ambition remarkable, or insane. We enjoyed listening to each other’s uncertainties and sensitivities. It all made sense, and it all seemed to matter but we were realistic enough to know that we wouldn’t have the chance to mould these many ends and gaps together into one whole within the next four hours. In the end, we decided to not report on our project but to cut into the matter at hand directly instead of talking about it. No detour through the area of niceties and academic gepflogenheiten. After a long discussion we decided to sum our quest up as briefly as possible and thereby create a space for a potential discussion. We got rid of a large catalogue of questions, and reduced our list to one sentence: “How can we be of service to you?” We didn’t want to do something for them, but with or even to them. In the hope that we would learn to understand better where we were, and who they were in that presumed place.

The generation of people born around 1970 in the West and in the Balkans differed vastly in the way they experienced the world in their twenties. We wanted to, painfully, widen that gap between us and them to get a better viewpoint of one another. The global art world, although functioning internationally, has a way of flattening out all edges of difference through its rigid system of representation – of people, ideas, and products. It is a dangerous place in that it emphasizes on sameness, it drastically wants it, needs it, produces it in order to “draw numbers”, be sellable and attractive for a lot and in one glance. We knew enough about that; we played that card daily in our jobs. We wanted to get a chance to see, hear something else by giving something else. Something un-reflected, something that doesn’t fit. That was what we wanted and that was what we didn’t get. Maybe it was our fault, mistaking geography for reality. We were east of our west, but the east on-site had long caught up with the west, while the west (or we) still felt the need to hang on, to dwell, and to essentially analyze something that it could place outside of itself. It’s a narcissistic trait we wanted to break with but showed little talent in doing so.

There is always an after (traveling)

When we were back on the bus it felt like we had never left it. And everything that had happened was a bad and wonderful dream. We tried something imperfect. It sat in our silence, it sat in our bones. We were happy to be understood by a few, that was not the most sincere thing to happen, to get through to some, even to just one? I couldn’t say. Maybe not. What we tried would leave a mark. I would chew on this for a long time; in fact, a part of me would never really get out of this bus.

*In an article issued last year in the culture magazine La Lettre, the Russian, Germany-based philosopher Boris Groys puts his finger on a crucial cultural-historical landmark in order to explain the European understanding of the arts and its factual domination. Groys claims that the adoration of the art object in the Western hemisphere is directly linked with the idea of dignity with regard to the human being, in the humanistic traditional sense. In the arts as well as in the humanistic tradition, the object as well as the human body is considered untouchable – they can both be used as means but mustn’t be functionalized. This ideal is defined – and here lies the risk – as a genuinely European value, and the humanistic thought considered equivalent with European thought per se, states Boris Groys. Resulting from this conviction is the denial of the ability of dignity, humanity, democracy and tolerance to everything and everyone non-European, quasi per definitionem.

For a few decades now, a new order is rendering itself visible or audible in Europe, which is going beyond the separation into West, East, Central and Middle Europe, to name just a few “Europes”. It seems that the “West” moves steadily towards the “East” on the map and in people’s self-perception. Formerly set agreements seem to shift and stir, while one thought still stands there solidly: The idea of one real Europe within Europe. An idea, which is based on the European ideal – the Humanistic tradition itself being located in the West, the West of Europe, while the East (reaching beyond Europe) is planned to be ”converted” through economical and cultural funding and sponsoring. At the same time, more and more investors from the European and Asian East invest in mammoth culture projects in the West. The question resulting from all these observations and economical, cultural and political interdependences is: Where is the West, today, and what is its connection with a place formerly defined as “Europe”? The Sahara Project wants to discuss the “repressed part” (verfemter Teil, Groys) of the Western tradition of thought, that fraction of the humanistic tradition, which questions and always has self-critically interrogated the European hegemony and geographical position.

Crucial questions include the following:

– Where does the West end, where does the East start and based on what historical and present-day consciousness within the arts?

– Can the terms “East” and “West” still be applied in any illuminating way, especially with regard to an internationally connected and globally communicating art world? If it is, what and who profits from it and what does it mean to be from the “East” or the “West”?  If the terms “East” and “West” cannot satisfactorily be applied for a political, personal and artistic state of being – what terms or concepts could we replace them with?

– Is there a border-free/transgressing art (practice) and who is receiving it?

– Central questions are: Does this “we” even exist, in the West, or the East, and whom would it include?

The Sahara Project attests: We stand in the desert, and we stand there together. Paralyzed between how to overcome cultural stereotypes and an art terminology that needs further distinction and accuracy, feeling estranged, not at home within one’s own geographical accountings and (second-hand) reflections in the world. The Sahara Project wants to attempt to step across this polarity of East and West with the question “West, where is that?” and gather representatives of both sides researching mutual fantasies, visions, as well as images of envy and disgust.

Lillian Fellmann, 2010

This article is part of a publication issued by Vision Forum called "Travels – placeless place", edited by Louise Nilsson and Lisa Boström.