Belgrade implicite cultural policies

Community art projects within memory politics mobile theaters

Milena Dragicevic Sesic

BELGRADE
City of multiple interrupted identities
Celtic_____ Roman____ Medieval ______ Oriental city___ CentralEuropean City European bourgeois city Socialist city
a cosmopolitan city

Business Center UE
Former Communist Party Central Committee Headquarters

The Museum of Contemporary Arts

Belgrade, Today

Cosmopolitan Belgrade
Photo exhbition

theater spectacle within politics of remembrance and of forgetting

The city is always a space already constituted and structured by symbolic mechanisms.
James Donald, Imagining the Modern City, 8

Locus memoriae, collective memory of the city

a) b) c) d) e) Theater art production in public spaces Ambiental theater projects In situ projects (site- specific) Invisible theater projects Memory revival dialogue projects Populist-Popular projects in the open space (parcs, squares)

main controversies of public arts policies

Identity construction (from nationalistic to cosmpolitan) Aesthetic challenge (artist statement) or marketing issue Community relation building or neigbourhood aestatization Raising awareness or calming down Political provocation or power representation

public spaces
Space of social interaction mahala Space of identity locus memoriae (monument) Space of debate cafe Space of purchasing, inquiring arija and shopping mall Space of entertainment festivity square, park Space for showing up representation corso (pedestrian street)

politics of memory & musealisation

historical/museological restoration of old centers The festivities as memorialization Ambiguous anniversaries, apologies Past (material and immaterial) as heritage industry Retro became trendy fashion, furniture design, music Nostalgia (Radio Nostalgia as paradigm of the trend for all nostalgic phenomena[) Memory literature, diaries, confessional prose, autobiographies, popular history (feuilletons) Visual art projects incorporated memory practices Marina Abramovic Balkan Baroque, Mrdjan Bajic Yugomuseum media in Belgrade - history live transmitting

Macbeth in front of police midnight January 1997

Listen little man hommage a W.R. (sept. 1997) 10 00

Listen little man In the shopping mall 12 00

Listen little man in the bus 46 15 00

Dalmatian ball game Mirijevo 17 00

Community relationship building

Raising awareness - 2005

Theater in policies of remembrance

Maps of forbidden remembrance, Dah theater, 2004, (memory on Srebrenica)

Belef festival re-creating the city memory

the spaces of BELEF (impressed in the collective memory) Barutana (Powder Storage), Zindan Gate, Kalemegdan throughout, Knez Mihajlova street and Republic square, Shop window on Andricev venac, Brace Jugovica street Courtyard in Proleterskih brigada Corners of New Belgrade River islands (Ada Ciganlija...) Conventional spaces for art productions - the Sava Center, the City Hall, the Belgrade Cultural Center, the Museum of African Art...

Public art challenges

Provocations for: Power authorities Cultural authorities (complaining about low art achievement) Cultural values of population stereotypes

Conclusion
Multicultural city of Belgrade is not only a text, but a palimpsest, a complex multilayered narrative, where we have to incite the best and the most relevant artists to add their narratives to common collective memory and perception of the city. Trying to enable those narratives to use, but also to enter the urban texture, noises, rhythms and dynamism of the city, this imaginary construct such as city identity might become acceptable for the values of all those who describe themselves as urban generation

"The sky above Belgrade is wide and high, unstable but always beautiful; even during winter serenities with their icy splendor; even during summer storms when the whole of it turns into a single gloomy cloud which, driven by the mad wind, carries the rain mixed with the dust of Panonian plain; even in spring when it seems that it also blooms, along with the ground; even in autumn when it grows heavy with the autumn stars in swarms. Always beautiful and rich, as a compensation to this strange town for everything that isn't there, and a consolation because of everything that shouldn't be there. Ivo Andri, Serbian Nobel prize laureate

New Cities
Novi Beograd 2001

Overcoming FEAR

Serbian citizens are giving the last honor to assassinated prime minister Djindjic

on the streets of Belgrade, 2003

Belgrade fortress arsenal - met

1972.

1994.

Belgrade fortress arsenal - met

1994.

1972.

Belgrade fortress arsenal - met

1994.

2004.

Belgrade fortress arsenal - met Today: Cafe Gallery- Andergraund -

1995.
KNEZ MILOSH AMMAM, Belgrade (1835)

club -MONUMENT1996.

The old TRAM DEPOT During transformation to shopping mall

Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra

1996

Important Historic Sites

Belgrade Old Fairground

The Old Fairground, 1938

The Old Fairground, 1938

Belgrade Old Fairground, Italian Pavilion today

The Old Fairground, today


BELGRADE CREATIVE CITY

Web camera on the main Square Labyrinth FACE OF BELGRADE,

Days of Belgrade , April 06.