PERTEJ/BEYOND/PREKO 20 YEARS project opening

The partners in this project, Center for Cultural Decontamination from Belgrade and Kosovo Glocal from Priština, invite you to the opening of the public programs of the project “Pertej/Beyond/Preko 20 years”.

The partners in this project, CZKD and Kosovo Glocal, the curators Vida Knežević and Marko Miletić (Context collective), as well as a wide network of associates, lecturers, mentors and twenty participants from the region will organize the production of art and knowledge and share with the audience the process and the results of their work in 2017 and 2018. The seminars will enable the participants, together with the lecturers and mentors, to think up a specific collective educational work, and the audience will be engaged in public programs, new topics will be opened as well as forums from the seminar program in the process of learning in public.

The seminars for the participants and the public programs will be organized in October and December 2017.

October 18th 2017, 10am
Workshop for the participants of the seminar:
Socialism in Yugoslavia and the question of social reproduction,
mentors: Tanja Vukša and Vladimir Simović (Center for Politics of Emancipation)

When analyzing a specific system, we will have to start with the question of social reproduction and the ways in which a system reproduces its own reproductions. Socialism in Yugoslavia was a specific historical system which authors often understood in various ways. Some interpret socialism as state capitalism, some approach it through the question of consumer society, while other authors remain stuck in the frameworks of totalitarian theories. Contrary to these interpretations, we can advocate for a more layered approach to understanding the socialist past, and the concept of contradictory reproduction, developed by the Canadian economist Michael A. Lebowitz, can assist us in this attempt. Using this apparatus, we can better understand and point out the various contradictions which used to permeate and greatly influence the development of SFRY.

October 18th 2017, 7pm
Public program: „Case Study Pertej“
exhibition and discussion Twenty Years of the Regional and Art Scene

Case Study Pertej, a special research and production program devised by Borka Pavićević, Shkelzen Maliqi, Luna Đorđević and Majlinda Hoxa, is dedicated to shedding light on the collaboration and communication in contemporary art and culture between artists, writers, institutions and collectives, from the Pertej exhibition in 1997 until today. In comparing the official historiography and memory of individuals, the exhibition Case Study Pertej will be a demonstration of the research method of a less covered, suppressed, disregarded history of artistic collaboration and communication, as well as collective productions of knowledge between Serbia and Kosovo. Borka Pavićević and Shkelzen Maliqi will, in a public discussion, gather participants and witnesses of this collaboration in the past twenty years, and enable the public to contribute with their knowledge and memory to a collective archive in the making, as well as to confront their own views and experiences.

Lecture-performance: Borka Pavićević and Shkelzen Maliqi, Luna Đorđević, Majlinda Hodža.

Speakers: Dunja Blažević, Jelena Vesić, Branislav Dimitrijević, Branimir Stojanović, Vida Knežević, Marko Miletić, Svebor Midžić, Maksut Vezgishi (Pertej 97), Alban Muja, Jakup Ferri

Research cooperative: Velimir Ćurguz Kazimir

October 19th 2017, 10am
Workshop for the participants of the seminar: Political and economic contradictions of the Yugoslav system
mentor: Domogoj Mihaljević

The topic of discussion is directed at the critical reconstruction of political and economic events in Yugoslavia between 1950. and 1990. with a focus on the crucial impact of market factors and international economic relations. The goal is to emphasize the integrational journey of the Yugoslav system and global flows of capitalism, and point out the social consequences of those integrations on the internal and external levels. The aim is especially to contribute to the understanding of the interpretative framework in which political and economic contradictions of the Yugoslav system can be more clearly explained.

October 19th 2017, 7pm
Public lecture: Long Strides into Capitalism: The Phenomenology of (over)ruling the middle class or the quasi/citizenship of Yugoslavia
Lecturer: Dragomir Olujić Oluja

The key/crucial/fundamental/starting point for understanding both the socialist Yugoslavia and its demise, lies in the 60ies – the first post-war recession of capitalism to the first energy crisis, and the second crisis of real (soviet) socialism, and the final stages of anticolonial revolutions and the rise of the first post-war generation (baby boomers and ‘68-ers) on the public scene with a bunch of emancipatory ideas (and practices), “small” (financial) and “large” (social and economic) reform in Yugoslavia followed by (not just) worker strikes. Everything after that is “development!” The lectures will offer, first, a political-economic framework for understanding the problem, the “place of discussion” and the actors (in Yugoslavia) – the workers and leftist students, Maspok, Kosovo (’68 and ’81) and others, primarily the (“new”) middle class.

Discussion after the lecture:
Dragomir Olujić Oluja, Domogoj Mihaljević, Krunoslav Stojaković
moderator: Context collective

About the project
The project Pertej/Beyond/Preko 20 years was started with the idea to encourage and call to a collective public program of a new generation in the region of former Yugoslavia, as well as a call for a collective production of knowledge in the region and in contemporary art, critique and theory, which is the most dynamic field of new ideas and overcoming given frameworks of the politics of division. In a time of an alarming process of migrations, which includes young people leaving the region of former Yugoslavia for more developed countries in search of new perspective, we believe that it is of utmost importance to provide the generation facing ever fewer chances for its own public speech and artistic articulation to express its own views of contemporary and possible future life in the region, and knowledge about the historical resources for creating new horizons. Motivated by an impressive continuity of collaboration and exchange in the region, in the field of contemporary art which doesn’t have enough exposure and support for including the younger generation in the production, the project „Pertej/Beyond/Preko 20 years“ will gather not only young participants, but also artists, historians, theorists, sociologists in a specific transfer of knowledge, an experimental educational program through which the intergenerational collaboration will lead to the production of new artwork and texts. The project will thus further develop the idea of participative education, artistic production and critical thinking, which has been developing for decades in the independent culture and media, and has for a long time been influencing the emancipation of educational and cultural systems in Europe.

The exhibition of contemporary art: Pertej, which took place in CZKD in 1997 will serve as the starting point of the research “Case Study Pertej” of less known continuities of collaboration, exchange and critique, but the field of research of the entire project will be widened to the temporal and spatial whole which today’s generations recognize as their pretext and context of their activities. The support for the contemporary artistic production and critique, and providing a wider context to this production (of culture and humanities, academic community and the civil society) is of the greatest importance for the post-Yugoslav societies, in order to provide a reflection of direct social issues, but also to ease the road toward a new horizon for the generations that do not have a stable production infrastructure or a wider space in the media at their disposal.

The team of the project:

CZKD: Borka Pavićević, Luna Đorđević, Aleksandra Sekulić, Ana Ćosić, Ana Isaković, Slavica Vučetić, Ivica Đorđević, Ljubica Slavković, Adam Ranđelović, Dejan Pantić, Dragan Škorić, Vanja Banković, Velimir Ćurguz Kazimir
Kosovo Glocal: Shkelzen Maliqi, Majlinda Hoxha, Besa Luci, Qendreza Kastrati, Genta Sylejmani, Jack Butcher
Mašina: Vida Knežević i Marko Miletić

The project is supported by The EU Delegation – EU/IPA (Support for Civil Society),
This publication has been produced  with the assistance of the European  Union – IPA. The contents of this publication  are the sole responsibility of Center for Cultural Decontamination and can in no way be taken to refect the views of the European Union.

The Embassy of Switzerland in Belgrade.
The projected was supported by the Embassy of Switzerland to the Republic of Serbia and to Montenegro. The views herein expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy of Switzerland to the Republic of Serbia and to Montenegro .

Kosovo Foundation for Open Society (KFOS)

The programs of CZKD are realized with the support of the Open Society Foundation.