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

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
location and variables of the expected event, all of which are united by a conscious
assumptionof a position of radical uncertainty, a position of “not knowing”, of being
caught in a breach between a past that does not provide support and a future that does
not come, a past that does not offer (or in the best case clouds the view of) an event to
which we would, in Badiou’s terms, bind ourselves to fidelity, and a future from which
one expects precisely that - the “miracle” of event.
And then, the place of expectation is in no way just Bosnia-Herzegovina, or the region.
On the contrary, the intention is to subvert the view of the Balkans as a symptom, an antithetical
periphery of Europe, the heart of its “unconscious”, and establish the Balkans
rather as originating point of the gaze, a mirror that turns the perspective upside down
and reflects a new moment and the paradoxes of the social and political constellation in
the European Union and the western neo-liberal democracies in general; redefinition of
the concept of community, the crisis of capitalism, of the nation states, the national identities
but also a new global moment of the west, in which for example Barack Obama proclaims
“Yes, We Can”, and promotes “the audacity of hope”. However, even if we direct
the gaze only at Bosnia-Herzegovina, in an ironic turn, in itself it already brings together
the whole of the “international community” under whose constant protectorate it is, and
which has at no single moment had the role just of an innocent observer - but is on the
contrary a leading figure and accomplice.
It is from these points of departure that the format of the project derives, which instead
of representativeness, privileges processuality and research, critical and intellectual
reflection, discursivity and modularity. Conceived as a long-lasting, “divergent and convergent”
process, WEIYTH is developing through several modules: a series of “lectures/
talks/divans” (with artists, theorists, political scientists, writers and activists); an educational
module in workshop form; the exhibition presented in this publication, a series of
new artistic productions during 2010, and finally a publishing project in 2011. Similarly,
segments of the project will take place in other cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as
through the creation of collaboration with partner organisations across the “international
community”.
“Can you speak of this? - Yes, I can” is the exhibition belonging to the first chapter of the
project, developing on the basis of curatorial “complicity” in an attempt at critical articulation
and reflection of a number of problems that the basic conception of the project
started up: the issues of community, co-existence, the future, potentiality, etc. - and for
which Bosnia-Herzegovina is in many ways just a metonym. Precisely because of the
“parallax” of our own view of Bosnia-Herzegovina, we decided to “destabilise” our own
position of those who “speak” by including into the project a group of associates - curators
whose contributions and collaboration on the project formulate points of departure
for crisscrossing and parallel, but also a(nta)gonistic views. This methodological step was
motivated first of all by a need to create a polyphonic structure and open up different
niches for the consideration of the joint framework of the project set only by its underlying
prospectiveness and the very broad issue about the future of the community. Already
the first meeting of the curatorial team that was brought together in Sarajevo and Banja
Luka, however, showed that, for all of us, consideration of the future is an “impossible”