Gazela from Artists and Friends on Vimeo.

Gazela names an illegal slum in Belgrade, inhabited by members of the Roma minority. It is situated under the highly frequented motorway bridge called Gazela that connects Belgrade with Germany and Turkey. It is separated from the city centre only by the river Sava and it is located in the vicinity of Belgrade’s biggest sports hall as well as in close proximity to the luxury hotels Hyatt Regency and Intercontinental. Despite this representative surrounding up to 900 people are living in the invisibility of a slum that consists of provisorily built barracks. Due to its prominent location, it is the most exposed of Belgrade’s approximated 140 slums. The existence of such slums and their inhabitant’s way of life are unknown to most people abroad and extensively ignored in Serbia itself.

By adapting the concept of a travel guidebook, hereby documenting, processing and literally spreading the settlement’s social reality, we aim to integrate that very “non-place” into the city’s topology and to entitle the white spot on the map to redefine its significance in public perception. We release the medium from its consumption orientated expedience and turn it to account as an information carrier in a socio-cultural context. But the travel guidebook should not just be read, it should also animate the reader to visit that certain or similar settlements: We believe, that the personal getting-together with parallel societies can lead to a decrease of widely spread prejudices and fears of contact.

The publication will be released in two bilingual editions, namely in Serbian and Romani in Serbia and other republics of former Yugoslavia and accordingly in German and English in other European countries. Its intended date of publication is autumn 2007.

A project by
Kraja – Association for the Advancement of Art, Culture and Communication
Eduard Freudmann & Can Gülcü

————> Subscribe the project’s newsletter: http://kraja.org

Under The Bridge – A derivé to a topos of social relevance or „…a visit to the zoo“?
by David Rych

A dry December day was the setting of an emerging situation in a rather unusual scenography: besides a cluster of improvised shelters under the concrete ceiling of the Gazella bridge in Belgrade, a Roma woman is singing Ederlezi into a banana while facing a digi-cam.
Once aware of the danger of marginalisation through the consumerist spectacle, this scenario might come across nothing but politically wrong.
Thus it is less a justification than a clarification to point out that whoever would see no more than documenting materials of this very event during the ‘festival’ as the only impression of the latter, misses an important aspect – the one of being part of a transitional twist between social realities, even briefly.
This brings me to the point of direct participation. Discourses around the distinct zone of artistic activity are manifold on top of several decades and there are footprints leading into various contrary directions.

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Even nowadays an artist operating in public spheres became gradually more conventional, entirely deserting from the safe sector of a visual representation within the designated space seems to be still a daring act. Now the concept of ‘under the bridge’ made that very move a principle, freed from the obsession for a final product, giving nothing than a casual pattern: a selection of people that were connected through artistic practices by possibly two degrees of separation, the scope of the city of Belgrade and a schedule of walks.

As the desire to step beyond institutions concludes in a flexible methodology, several proposed projects resembled a derivé in progress. The city-walks were passing numerous sites of ambiguous historical significance to contemporary views, which also explains why the project of the ‘biro’ with unpretentious vulnerability finally lead to one of several no-go-zones of the city -

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The choice for the last event fell to a location that is central and nevertheless inaccessibly remote from the regular traffic, populated by three generations of Roma families. Blinding out any stereotypical romanticism of a nomadic life, the sight resembles a modern metropolitan slum.
On the lower steps of the social ladder, experience shows another aspect: poverty is a massive problem; still people living under such conditions are familiar with alternative modes of existence. Concepts of recycling and transformation witness people’s ability to challenge a hostile environment within organic communities.
Seemingly none of the Roma inhabitants on spot expressed estrangement by the entering group of people – artists and cultural workers with undoubtedly differing backgrounds and vocabulary of cultural and political practice.

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This temporary social climate was one experiment to test a variety of interfaces among all participants on spot. Cooking was a group phenomenon, not mentioning the request for a warm meal once finished. Plastic bags were improvised to cover feet.
I was stunned by children of not more than six years singing a repertoire of oral history into megaphones, in attempts to break the sound barrier from underneath the heavy traffic on Gazella Bridge.
Whilst the event culminated in a range of spontaneity, unconstrained curiosity and apparent social commitment, some of the visitors could not help but consider themselves intruders, when facing the unjust gap of the class system. But is any disturbing side of reality exclusively reserved to its genuine partakers and to be perceived from an “outside” through the goggles of exotism alone?
Yet being afraid of “…looking-at them like in a zoo” and thus creating hierarchies, everyone took their images – a contemporary reflex.
Agreed, it’s a sensitive matter. An un-preconceived approach risks a focus on ‘otherness’ and run danger of an anthropological investigation*. Equally one has to stay realistically critical towards a humanitarian aim either – an “artist as Mother Theresa“ can only be a misconception, unless the quest for relevant support will necessarily lead to approved models of inclusive community work – what would require time and commitment for the single case.
There are a number of issues that have been clearly addressed as problems by representatives of the mentioned Roma community.
One more aim of entering unfamiliar hardship for the sake of cultural work, could be to translate these transitions to a more comprehensible image of the “real“.

Clearly we’ll have to acknowledge an incompatibility of realities as lived by individuals and groups on opposite synapses of our societies, nations or other categories of distinction and dissolve the reality of „the other“ as one more component of a mutually shared entity and investigate and visualize the mechanisms of exclusion the dominant system applies towards marginalized positions only.

Some of the visitors might have been introduced to a local situation in order to initiate contributions to that very common reality. A few others might continue similar work in different locations. And of course some might never come back. Not there, not elsewhere where the most subaltern lives. Sometimes the frontier is your doorstep.

* Due to Hal Foster, an „artist as ethnographer“ as a researcher mostly originating from the dominant culture, assumes an ‘other’ as culturally different from her/himself and caught in a pretext of „struggle“ due to sheer circumstances – what bears a series of problems within.

UTB: cooking event by Alexander Nikolic/ Tanja Ostojic/ David Rych -

concert by the Postnation Megafon Bigband – 10 megaphons kindly provided by the Belgrade police

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Under the Bridge brought together around 20 people – both locals as well as from around Europe – with the goal to walk around Belgrade by using artistic methods and to visit locations in the city and open these from another perspective for its inhabitants and visitors. The last day involved a manifestation under the Gazela-bridge in New Belgrade. Under the Bridge was the first in a series of meetings in the region and was organized and hosted by Biro – an artist collective that comprises Rena + Vladan Jeremic and Alexander Nikolic.

The participants were mostly artists working in the field of the visual arts: Nenad Andric, Anna Balint, Sezgin Boynik, Maja Ciric, Thom Crane, Dragan Ignjatov, Peter Jap Lim, Zorica Jovanovic, Stephan Kurr, Karin Laansoo, Milica Lapcevic, Erika Margelyte, Sasa Markovic, Mikrob, Predrag Miladinovic, Tanja Ostojic, Dragan Papic, Ivana Rankovic, Matthias Roth, David Rych, Selena Savic, Hanno Soans, Aleksandar Stanojlovic, Ricarda Wallhäuser and myself.

The aims of the meeting were very loose. As Biro stated: “There exists neither an aim in the sense, that it would be known already, nor a product, for which a user could be found already in advance”. The great thing about this meeting was precisely this: it did not even pretend to serve any big ideas, but instead kept the structure open and undefined and left it to us to give it a shape. There was not even any pressure to produce anything, merely to participate. Such a free programme is in itself a radical stance against those projects in the region that always demand some kind of end result – whether it be an exhibition or publication – in order to justify the importance and value of the cultural exchange regardless of the superficiality of the gained knowledge of the place and the artificiality of the contribution to and involvement in it.

The program of the first three days involved walks and visits to places in the city hosted by some of the participants. Most of them were open to everyone; others were private. The Situationists’ mapping of the city influenced some of the walks and others were a direct continuation of art projects in which the participants were involved in their own cities. I took part in Nenad Andric’s project ‘Strictly Baltic’, which was only for people from around the Baltic Sea region. It was both a critique of the policies of many recent exhibition projects that focused on the Balkans and of the geo-politics that define the region. Andric’s definition of the Baltic region was ‘suspicious’ in including Iceland and Greenland as special guests. Another unusual aspect of Andric’s project was that he as a Serb from the Balkans, usually the one who is categorized by the centre – turned the hierarchies around and set the rules and defined us. In his project it was not important where we as Baltic people went and what we did, but that we had a good time and were included when everyone else was excluded. He took us on guided walks to different locations in Belgrade – either as a group or as individuals – gave us catalogues of exhibitions and arranged meetings with directors of art institutions (using the word ‘exclusive’ in a double sense).

Under the Bridge culminated in the last day’s event under the Gazela-bridge in the heart of Belgrade. It is on the riverbank next to the Intercontinental and Hyatt hotels, facing the historical areas and the shopping streets. The international highway that runs from Germany all the way to Istanbul is located above it. Regardless of this splendid location, there are approximately three thousand gypsies living in the area in small self-built fragile looking houses, which are made of pieces of cardboard, wood and aluminium sheets. On a cold winter’s day from each hut, next to the satellite antenna, a little chimney sticks out of the roof and joyfully puffs smoke in the air, which makes the huts look deceivingly idyllic, while the kids are running around outside on land covered with mud and garbage. Their living conditions are, however, very basic. There is no running water in the area, most of them live by collecting sellable or usable items from the garbage and decent medical care and education is out of reach for most.

We spent an afternoon there with series of performances, brought along some musical instruments (which the kids immediately started playing), cooked Thai noodle soup and drank heated wine, were invited to people’s houses and communicated in various languages. Our main fear was to engage in a form of exoticism and hierarchical positioning as we went about with our digital cameras and artistic ideas. But it soon changed into something different as we were in fact very positively received by the inhabitants. It became an evening of singing, eating and being cold together. Nobody was in control of the situation or knew what to expect. Although it was widely advertised, not many people except for the gypsies joined us. It is a place not discussed nor visited, a sort of blind spot in the middle of Belgrade. Through this action we hope to have given some attention to the area and to have momentarily overcome the gap between them and us. Some of us want to continue working with representatives of this area and to raise funds. Biro itself will be moving to another location in the region. The next meeting should be somewhere in 2005.

By: Minna Henriksson

text published:

http://www.cut-up.com/reviews/detail.php?id=167

Der Roma Roux, sagt zu Caroline Claimont: “Wer uns als Freunde hat, bekommt eine Menge Feinde mit dazu”.
Die Szene spielt in einem kleinen idyllischen französischen Dorf, wo Caroline Claimont sich mit ihrer Tochter niedergelassen hat, und ein kleines Süsswarengeschäft mit eingener Schokoladenproduktion betreibt. Als Fremdkörper in diesem Provinzkaff, und mit den lokal vorherrschenden Geschmacksprimat nicht sehr vertraut, bringt sie den, vom wahnsinnigen Bürgermeister dirigierten Volkszorn zum Überkochen. Die aufgestaute Frustration diverser Bürger, entlädt sich organisiert an Roux und seiner Sippe in Form von Brandstiftung, und in Form von Ächtung an Caroline und ihrer Tochter. Aber am Ende siegt das Gute und Intelligente über das Dumme und Böse. Fast wie im richtigen Leben, aber nur fast.

Im richtigen Leben, in diesem Fall den Vorbereitungen für “under the brigde” sah etliches anders aus. Snezana, eine 18jährige Verkäuferin in einem chinesischen Geschäft im Chinatown Neu Belgrads, spricht sechs Sprachen. Roma ihre Muttersprache, serbisch, deutsch, englisch, französisch und mandarin. Auf mein lautes Staunen und öffentliches Fragen, wo den in diesem Land die intelligenten Leute arbeiten, drehten sich mehrere im Geschäft anwesende Personen um, und nicken mir depremiert zu, beginnen aber eine Diskussion. Einer sieht das wir Snezana zu “under the brigde” eingeladen haben, und möchte auch einen Flyer. Snezana kann nicht kommen, weil sie jeden Tag von 06:00 bis 20:00 Uhr arbeitet. Sechsmal in der Woche.

Gäbe es nicht eine fünfzig Prozentige Arbeitlosenquote in Serbien, wäre unsere Zielgruppe für Kunst und Diskurs im öffentlichen Raum, ziemlich eingeschränkt, das es bekanntlich mehr Taubenzüchter als Kunstinteressierte gibt.
Neben den teilweise inferioren Ausstellungsräumen und -möglichkeiten, ein wichtiger Grund mit künstlerischen Aktivitäten in den öffentlichen Raum vorzudringen, oder ihn zu produzieren. Überraschend war, wie viele lokale Kreative, aus unterschiedlichsten Bereichen sich den Aktivitäten anschlossen. Hungrig nach interdisziplinären Aktionen, wurden wir von den Schwestern Bogavac, eine ist Schriftstellerin die andere Regieseurin, eingeladen zu ihrer Performance im Bitef Theater.

Der Text ihrer Performance wurde für unsere ausländischen Gäste im Eiltempo übersetzt, und das Bühnenbild gemeinsam mit der Szenographin und Modedesignerin Ana Z minimalistisch in Szene gesetzt. Von ihr und Zizi Kunst stammen auch die vielen Schürzen und die Kochhaube, die wir bei unserem Kochen am letzten Tag unter der Brücke benutzten und danach den Kindern schenkten. Die Kinder unter der Brücke, waren für mich, das beste Performancepublikum das ich je traf. Beispiel? Als einige unserer Deutschen Gäste, begannen ihre Schuhe mit Zeitungspapier einzuwickeln und dann noch Einkaufssäcke darüber zu ziehen, wurde ich gefragt, ob die Deutschen Angst hätten ihre Schuhe dreckig zu machen.

Fünf Minuten später kamen die Kinder zu mir gelaufen, und hatten ebensolche “Schuhe”. Sie waren begeistert, wie ausserordentlich warm, diese Schuhe ihre Füsse hielten. Diese witzige Reaktion, die etliche Vorurteile und auch gesellschaftliche Teilwahrheiten transportiert, in Kombination mit dem Willen Neues sofort Auszuprobieren, und an den Performances aktiv teilzunehmen, habe ich sonst selten erlebt. Auch die “klassischen Fragen” was für Künstler wir seinen und was wir so machen; Performances, Interventionen und Kommunikation, wurden verstanden oder akzeptiert. Es wurde uns hoch angerechnet, das wir zu ihnen unter die Brücke kamen. Nicht um Leid oder die Grausamkeiten des Lebens zu dokumentieren, sondern einfach um Gäste zu haben,mit Fremden zu kommunizieren die sich in “ihr Viertel verirrt haben”. Bei diesen Gesprächen ging es aber hoch her, die sozialen und politischen Umstände ihrer Situation wurden ihrerseits artikuliert. Einladungen ausgesprochen, wieder zu kommen.

Diese Aktion nicht als Einmalaktion zu belassen. Von Sinisa Cvetkovic, dem Roma Pfarrer, gleichzeitig der erste Roma der einen Hochschulabschluss schaffte, waren die Einladungen fast schon Apelle. Gemeinsam begonnenes, von uns initiertes Handeln und Agieren fortzusetzen. Er bot uns an mit seinem Verein, KUD Mladenovac, gemeinsam zukünftige Projekte zu konzipieren und zu realisieren. Es beweist wie wirkungsvoll unsere Intervention unter der Brücke war, und wenn ein Verein, der sich bisher nur mit Folklore befasste, nun mit konzeptuellen KünstlerInnen gemeinsam Projekte konzipiert, dann lässt das eine spannende Zusammenarbeit erwarten.
In diesem Sinne, möchte ich mit einem Zitat auch wieder abschliessen.
DZEJ: Ko se sa nama druzi, zivot mu je duzi…
Ko sa nama pije, dosadno mu nije…