1.december 2010.

About seminar:

Taking its inspiration from the 6,500+ square meter bunker built for the Tito-era Atomic War Command, acronym "ARK" (Atomska ratna komanda), in the mountains outside Konjic in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina1  this series is also about the architecture and engineering of war and peace. The massive underground structure was built during the Cold War to shelter then-Yugoslavia's leadership cadre, headed by President Josip Broz Tito. The ARK serves as a virtual and real-world space for considering what has happened after the end of World War II:  the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of global superpower politics into blocks; the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany; the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent states and spheres of common interest; balance of power; the politics of fear and apocalypse; the concept of "mutually assured destruction".

Researching the relations (and mutual conditioning) between the divided global society in times of imposed peace, balance of blocks that in the same time meant division into the sphere of interests (sphere of influence, common identities, joint political systems...) and strategy of maintaining the balance conditioned by the imaginary scenarios of possible conflicts and new end of the world, and today’s' world defined by global market logic, media society and generally accepted cultural patterns and identity, brings us to a whole range of interesting questions and dilemmas.


The project  “Cold war – past, present, future” is not just about the events that characterized this period, but an attempt to establish framework for understanding its political concept, social and cultural  effects and its influence on our everyday life – in other words, we will look into the Cold War legacy. The ARK survived a different catastrophe than the one for which it was intended.  It is a means to explore, inter alia, the contemporary interpretation of spheres of influence, balance of power, the politics of fear and "mutually assured destruction." In order to understand the contemporary world and our position in it, like the Cold War itself, the envisaged actions target whole populations, regardless of age, gender or any self-defined or externally-imposed affiliation.

The series of seminars  “Cold war – past, present, future” will take place in the period of December 2010 – May 2011 as a part of the project D-0 ARK UNDERGROUND (1st Biennial of the Contemporary art  “TIME MACHINE” – NO NETWORK!, Konjic, BiH, in May  2011)