Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

Where Everything is Yet to Happen
(“Can you speak of this? -Yes, I can.”)
When, not long after the opening of the first SpaPort exhibition in Banja Luka in September
2008, we were invited by the project board to be curators of the second version
of this show, the basic question that made us think about whether to accept the invitation,
and if so, in what way, was the issue of the ambivalence of our own position. This
ambivalence stems, on the one hand, from the unease of contributing to the proliferation
of biennials, that occupy spaces of conflict, instability and social and political tensions
in order to offer art as a (more or less self-confident) response to a state of urgency. On
the other hand, our position is particular in that, although invited from outside into a
context that is for us, for all practical purposes, new, it certainly cannot be looked at
separately from the common, post-war and post-Yugoslav experience that all of us, in
the area of the so-called Western Balkans, share.
Such a constellation creates a tension between the position in which one addresses the
“task” from both within and without, through the ambivalence of the question of who is
“speaking” and in whose name, and to whom this “speech” is addressed.
Avoiding an approach which would assume such “messianic” role for workers in culture
who have as their aim the detection of that “state of emergency” and finding an indication
of its “resolution”, we decided - in substance and in the sense of format - not to make
a “monologic” exhibition that would explicitly thematise what seems to us once again an
almost predetermined focus – a representation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a post-war, pre/
post-emergency space of instability, the normalisation of which is now unfolding also via
this cultural project, sponsored by a Swiss foundation. On the other hand, it was impossible
to neglect that same reality.
The basic contours that were thus, ultimately, developed as the framework of the project,
were articulated through the concept of potentiality, the awareness that - in spite of the
uncertainty of the future of the actual project and the future of the actual social and
political context in which it was developing - one could (and one had to), then, get into an
open and long-term process of imagining that which was already in advance constructed
as impossible. It is, moreover, a process that embraces uncertainty as its choice and that,
through the establishment of collaboration and communication at several levels, develops
as a long-term project constantly in the state of “becoming”; a project that is gradually,
by small steps, establishing its presence on the local and the international artistic
scene and with the public, thus waiting for its own articulation, that is - the articulation
of what is yet to happen.
The title Where Everything is Yet to Happen (WEIYTH) 1 , contains references to duration,
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN