Dragan Klaic

As a cultural and literary critic, Michaël Zeeman, who died of brain tumor on July 27, aged 50, was more well known than well liked in the Dutch cultural circles, but such is the fate of critics: creation of enemies is their professional hazard. He was a very tall Dutchman, of intimidating posture and well projected voice. In his writing, he was also often intimidating and ruthless.

As many Dutch public figures of strong convinction, Zeeman was also a son of a Calvinist pastor who moved his family often from one village parish to another, making Michaël detached from boyhood friends and more attached to books. He lost his faith early and when he dared to question it, his father made him leave home. As a 17 years old, he started working in Leeuwarden in a bookstore, his natural habitat, where he begon to amass a personal library of over 20,000 books, later subject of a long courtsuit of the bookshop owner who accused him of theft. He started writing poems and book reviews, worked for the Rottedam Cultural Foundation under the legendary Paul Noorman, then became the editor of the cultural pages of the leading Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 1991, later editor of its Friday book section ”Cicero”. He was an erudite and voracious reader who wrote often about Central and Eastern European letters and helped establish its prominent authors, classics such as Bruno Schultz and Sándor Márai, and contemporaries as Győrgy Konrad and Aleksandar Tišma, in the Dutch book market. For several years he had his television program on books at the Dutch VPRO network. Since 2002 he lived as a free-lance correspondent and cultural commentator in Rome, contributing each week to de Volkskrant a book review, a column and often additional articles. He was also publishing in the German and French press.

By coincidence, my whole immersion in the Dutch culture and language in the last 18 years is much linked from the very beginning to Michaël Zeeman because he was the member of a small search committee, led again by Paul Noorman, that had the audacity to get me from Belgrade in 1991 to take over the Dutch Theater Institute in Amsterdam. I learned a great deal from Michaël in my cultural integration, both from our talks and his articles, which I read regularly and with relish, but with dictionary at hand. Over the years I got often irritated by de Volkskrant, even considered cancelling my subsciption but did not want to miss Michaël’s writing. When we would meet, I’d pull out the last juicy phrase from his recent articles for further exegesis. He introduced me to Multatuli, the maverick critic of Dutch colonialism, by giving me a Pinguin edition of Max Havelaar in English and surprised me with the travelogue of Edmondo de Amicis through the Netherlands at the end of 19^th century, not knowing that De Amicis’ Il Cuore was one of the key books of my childhood.

Our first shared trip was just days after I moved to Amsterdam in December 1991, to Romania, an expedition of the informal cultural network Gulliver, set up by Steve Austen. I described this bizarre journey in more detail in my exilic memoir, how we moved in a freezing winter with the composer Peter Schat, playwright Heiner Mueller, historian Karl Schloegel and others, among the glaciers of the Romanian cutural landscape, left over by Ceausescu, chaperoned by Securitate veterans, now in service of the new regime. Other Gulliver adventures we shared in Istanbul and Paris and later also in Berlin, Belgrade, Vilnius and Skopje, sometimes under the auspices of Soul for Europe cultural initiative, thanks to Steve Austen’s stubborn cultural mapping and connecting strategies.

Even after Michaël moved to Rome, he was several times a month in the Netherlands as a much demanded moderator of public debates. I got used to bumping into him at Schiphol and other airports. Despite his frequent travels across Europe, he kept inserting himself in the Dutch debates and fought vehemently the anti-European sentiments and provincial self-pity about the supposedly endangered Dutch identity that have been plaguing the public life in the country in the last 7-8 years. As a polyglot, Michaël held the Dutch language in high esteem and handled it with much respect. As a cosmopolitan, he took it for his duty to point out with pride the peculiarities and specific values of the Dutch culture and letters to his fellow Europeans. As a public intellectual, he was a vehement critic of cultural nationalism, Dutch or any other. As a convinced European, he followed the twists and hiccups of the European integration process and its cultural aspects with much critical scrutiny and sarcasm. Inevitably, Dutch cultural life will become much more dry without Michaël Zeeman.

GENTRIFICATION FOLLIES

Politicians are turning Istanbul’s year as European Cultural Capital 2010 into a program for promoting real estate and tourism.

Ten days before President Obama’s visit to Istanbul at the beginning of the month, a different kind of cultural invasion swept over the Bosporus. The invader: Black/North SEAS. A 3 year old consortium organising international co-productions and collaborative programming, Black/North SEAS is led by Stockholm’s Intercult with the support of the EU Culture Programme. Starting in May 2008 in Odessa, Black/North SEAS has taken a travelling package of workshops, performances, exhibitions and installations designed for public spaces and, in June, moved it through small towns along the Romanian and Bulgarian Black Sea coast. From there, it descended upon Istanbul in March, and in autumn it will visit Scandinavian harbour cities and East Yorkshire, England. In 2010, more collaborations will follow. The initiative is a continuation of a SEAS program that, since 2003, has been connecting artists and cultural organizations from Baltic and Adriatic harbour cities, seen as gateways of intercultural engagement and laboratories of urban renewal. This month, in Istanbul, Black/North SEAS held a conference on urban mapping and culturally led urban development. It occupied public spaces with processions and installations and ran a series of workshops, exhibitions and performances by Turkish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Dutch and Norwegian artists. The organization is also preparing co-productions for 2010.

In spite of its size, the Black/North SEAS project still managed to go largely unnoticed by most people living in Istanbul. In that respect, Black/North SEAS raised—again—the question of how one creates a cultural impact in a city of almost 15 million inhabitants, few of whom attend cultural events. In the expanse of Istanbul neighbourhoods, cultural infrastructure is scarce and terribly inadequate, especially on the Asian side. But even on the European side, most cultural spaces were created by private initiative and are concentrated in the few square kilometres of Beyoglu, a traditional zone of European cultural presence featuring some splendid new museums and cultural centres. Two prominent public locations, the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM) in Taksim, home to the opera and symphonic orchestra, and the nearby Istanbul branch of the National Theater of Ankara have been closed for renovation. Two years after their closing, no renovation is in progress, and, on a sunny Friday afternoon, AKM employees held a benevolent protest in front of their house, once a bastion of secular republicanism, but now – some claim – in danger of losing some of its cultural integrity by serving as a profit-oriented congress centre. Still, in Beyoglu, small venues appear, created by artists who double as cultural entrepreneurs. Spaces such as Garaje, Talimhane Tryatrosu and Tütün Deposu are the most recent additions. The first took over part of a parking garage near Galata Lucée to create a dance space; the second is a former factory converted into a performance venue; the third is a former tobacco warehouse, used in 2005 for the Istanbul Biennial, and serving now as an art exhibition space. All are having difficulties surviving, in spite of enthusiastic audiences.

Santral is a cultural centre on another order of magnitude, ambition and complexity. A former electricity power plant from the beginning of the twentieth century, decommissioned and abandoned decades ago, this immense space at the northernmost part of the Golden Horn has now been leased by the authorities to the private Bilgi University. Bilgi University has created its third campus there, opening a museum of contemporary arts, a Museum of Energy, three restaurants and a splendid hostel that may one day function as a space for artists in residence. Santral is a long term, innovative project on a large scale, integrating higher education, cultural heritage and contemporary creativity in a manner never seen before in Turkey. University classroom blocks are simple but comfortable and well equipped, and the restaurants have become popular hangouts. With its ongoing international orientation, Bilgi is bringing academic and professional conferences to the campus. Hopefully, in due time, it will find ways to engage the poor neighbourhoods surrounding it. A free shuttle bus departs from central Taksim square every 20 minutes, and its journey has been shortened by a new tunnel the municipality opened a few weeks ago. Once again, private capital and especially private universities have reaffirmed their pioneering role in urban development.

In contrast, a public agency created to implement plans for Istanbul’s year as the European Cultural Capital 2010 has been wasting time and suffers from a lack of credibility. Calls for the submission of artistic projects have been delayed, and then stopped; some executives in charge of art grants have resigned; and members of the small and fragile contemporary art community say their attempts at getting any kind of assistance from the agency have proved consistently futile. Foreign colleagues, eager to develop artistic projects with Turkish partners, report frustrating delays, much uncertainty and little sensitivity to their needs. Politicians repeatedly signal in public that for them European Cultural Capital 2010 is not a matter of cultural development and a boost to the arts but rather a real estate improvement project to spur investments, jobs and more tourism. In 2005, when Istanbul’s candidacy was still being mulled over by the European Commission, I reported that many Istanbul cultural professionals perceived the honour as a potential real estate machination, without any cultural objectives. More than three years later, large scale gentrification plans are more extensive than any plausible or coherent cultural program. Immense reconstruction operations are being announced, and some of them appear brutally indifferent to the complex layers of the metropolis and its unique architectural features. For example, in the municipality of Beyoglu, gentrification began 15 years ago along the main pedestrian street and is now fanning out in all directions; a promotional video presents the area as a fancy upper-class residential district—and in so doing, sweeps away two centuries of urban history. But now the economic crisis has visibly slowed construction activity, and shrinking exports have weakened the Turkish currency.

Municipal elections the day after the end of the Black/North SEAS program weakened the predominance of the ruling AKP, confirming the steady position of the traditional secularist and now quite nationalist CHP party in Izmir and coastal towns. The DKP Kurdish party in eastern Anatolia also registered gains. The press has speculated that after these elections and Obama’s visit, AKP Prime Minister Erdogan will reshuffle his cabinet and split the present Ministry of Tourism and Culture in two, thus ending the longstanding subservience of culture to the promotion of tourism and spurring cultural development and cultural policy innovation. Another positive signal comes from Strasbourg, where Council of Europe experts will finally be allowed to evaluate Turkish cultural policy and to compare their evaluation with a comprehensive report prepared by the Turkish government itself. Greater Istanbul and most of its local municipalities remain in AKP hands, which could mean the continuation of benign neglect of contemporary cultural production, with sporadic invocations of the traditional, rural and religiously inspired aspects of culture in local, small scale events and programs.

In the past 25 years many European cities made poor use of their European Cultural Capital year, getting entangled in political fights, missing creative and networking opportunities and completing infrastructure projects only after significant delays. With a unique resilience fostered over millennia, Istanbul will survive this “special year,” as disappointing as it might turn out to be. Istanbul cultural professionals already have low expectations of public authorities and are concentrating on private support and foreign partners. Master’s programs in cultural management and policy at Bilgi and other universities are schooling a new generation of competent, resolute professionals who will hopefully grasp the advantages of multiple partnerships and joint advocacy. And admirers of Istanbul from all over the world will come back, eager to trade the follies of gentrification for the remains of the chaotic, topsy-turvy, irresistible Istanbul, full of the idiosyncratic mixtures, traditions and enterprising adaptability that have always fascinated travellers.

Read more of Klaic articles at signandsight.com heresignandsight.com – let’s talk european

The ASSITEJ yearbook for 2008-9 is Theater Festivals. Celebration of Cultural Diversity, edited by Wolfgang Schneider and Ivica Simic, published in Zagreb at the beginning of 2009 (ISBN 978 953 7208 1 by the Secretarian of the ASSITEJ Inernational. The leading block of contributions (over 100 pages) adresses the festivals of theater for children and youth. The book has been realized in cooperation with the European Festival Research Project and contains several contributions, developed from the EFRP research workshop on festivasl for children and youth, held in Moscow Praktika Theater at the end of 2008. The introduction essay by Dragan Klaic, “Shared Strategies of Resistence”, pleas for more research of festivals and for the international cooperation in this specific realm of the performing arts. Other festival related contributions are by Carsten Jansen, Boomer Stacy, Ellen Bianchini, Brigitte Dethier, Hishasi Simoyama, Marisa Gimenes Cacho and Thomas Frank. Preface by Wolfgang Schneider, President of teh World ASSITEJ. See: www.assitej-international.org

Cultural Leadership Program (UK) is publishing an essay by Naseem Khan:Equality, Ledership, Possibilities: addressing social changewith supplementary essays by Robert Palmer, Kiril Razlogov, Dragan Klaic and few other authors. Seewww.culuralleadership.org.uk

I am back in Budapest, again as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Public Policy  of the Central European  University. I am teaching a  course on European cultural policies and systems in the MA program from February 16 to March 25, continuing to Istanbul on March 26 to give a 3 days seminar in the master program at the Bilgi University and take part in the Black Sea/North Sea program (see www.intercult.se).

The Public Policy Master Program  at the CEU will be adding a cultural policy stream from fall 2009, admiting 5 students who will specialize in cultural policy, take a package of courses in this field and write their master thesis under my supervision. The deadline for application is March 16, see

http://www.dpp.ceu.hu/admiss/aid.htm

and financial aid is available.

I am  taking leave from the year 2008 on the fifth day of Israeli pounding of Gaza, remembering how in 1999 my mother and my friends in Belgrade and Novi Sad – all of them resolute opponents of Milosevic regime, nationalism and the war – suffered from the NATO bombing that was supposed to curb Milosevic’ repression of the Kosovo Albanians. How many residents of Gaza oppose Hamas but cannot voice their revolt nor escape through the blockades at the Israeli and Egyptian borders? An instinctive sympathy with these most recent victims of what Israeli military spokesman announced to be a “weeks long action” dispels the last residua of my always weak celebratory spirit. Once again I opt out from the widespread merriment at the transition of the Old into the New Year and prefer to cultivate my morose and solitary mood. I am seeking solace in two thick books that I am reading in parallel and they in turn reinforce my somber temper.

A family historian fails

One is Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn, an exhaustive chronicle of an obsessive and extensive quest to put together dispersed tidbits of information and reconstruct the Holocaust murder of 6 relatives from a Galician shtetl, now belonging to Ukraine. From New York to Ukraine and then to Australia, Israel, across Europe and Latin America, Mendelsohn pursues tiny traces from several specialized Internet sites, questions rare survivors, de-constructs official Yad Vashem Holocaust archives and stubbornly assembles a plausible version of truth against the vague and contradictory family mythologies he imbibed as a child. His twisted narrative, overloaded with interspersed exegesis of Pentateuch, reminds me painfully about all those superficial chunks of information I received in my childhood about almost hundred relatives, killed in the Holocaust. I made a lasting mental footnote about what I was told but pursued it further in no way. 3 generations of victims from Poland, Germany, Hungary and former Yugoslavia, whose name and exact relationship I ignore in most cases, remind me of my own failure in the role of a family historian, especially if compared with Mendelsohn’s diligence and stamina. I haven’t posed all those crucial questions he has posed and now it is too late since there is hardly anyone left to pose them to and no one to answer them. The complex Internet search engines that Mendelsohn used and whose existence I completely ignored until now discourage me at the very beginning of a quest and I realize that I have no affinity for the build up of genealogy trees and thus must accept the proportions of my ignorance, live with this mass loss that stays abstract, faceless, unnamed and deprived of historic and family detail. In her book After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004) that I read some months ago, Eva Hoffman reflects on the twists and challenges of us, the second generation of Holocaust survivors, and the burden of knowledge, information, confusing signals, attitudes and stubborn silences that we received from our parents and grandparents; Mendelsohn’s quest for the fullness of the detail and the precision of the minutiae about 6 persons out of 6 million is one personal coping strategy. Mine is to superimpose the intellectual knowledge of the Holocaust on the daily rampage in Gaza and elsewhere in this wretched world, to carry the Holocaust outrage with me in the contemporary world as a steady benchmark of horror and a measure for collective indifference to suffering.

Remembering 1968

My other reading guides me through 80 testimonies on the student demonstrations in Belgrade in June 1968, collected for a documentary series of Radio Belgrade in the course of this year and produced from the authorized transcripts into a 800 pages thick book. Here are the remembrances of many friends, former colleagues and acquaintances, some of whom I remember and recognize only because at the end there are photos of them 40 years ago and now. The editors traced quite a few of us living abroad and we gave our 40 minutes long depositories on the phone. The book is overloaded with the repetitious description of that iconic June week in 1968 and its painful aftermath of repression and serial political defeat, too much of the same to be read in sequence but remarkably not so radically dissonant in the assessment of this collective experience that lastingly marked an entire generation of us, the baby boomers. We lost then some illusions about the nature of the specific Yugoslav self-management socialism, accosted by its repressive impulses of the state, its sophisticated orchestration of the media and harsh police surveillance, but at the same time the pathos of this emblematic challenge to the authorities shaped some ethical standards, feed new political ideas of freedom and democracy, advanced the political discourse of pluralism and initiated a long lasting flow of critical ideas that permeated subsequent academic and cultural productions. After a few days of tumult, Tito cleverly expressed his solidarity with the students who promptly terminated their strike, but afterwards the authorities never could maintain a harmonious and idyllic ideological facade of the regime. New cracks appeared repeatedly despite all the intimidation, arrests, trials, prohibitions and party campaigns. After 40 years of political maturity, engagement and disillusionment and ideological stratification between some radical leftist variants and militant nationalism, it is a small miracle that the patient editor Djordje Malavrazic – who himself came out from this time with much moral credit – succeeded to put us all together between the covers of this book and piece together our reminiscences and interpretations. The book is a painful reminder of those 40 years during which each of us wasted some time and energy, struggled with some windmills, lost friends and allies, felt lonely and betrayed – against the remembrance of that radiating community of protest that exploded for a few days in June 1968 and inspired many of us for the rest of our lives as some special cathartic moment.

India in my dreams

Intensive reading and some writing is on my daily program in these dark days at the end of the year. At night I am regularly back in the chaos of India from which I returned a week ago and which overwhelms me in my dreams with much more intensity than it did in those 4 conference days in Bangalore and subsequent 6 days of travel with a few friends through the state of Karnataka. I was quite reluctant to undertake this first trip to India, discomforted by all sorts of anxieties, mainly fears of getting sick as tourists often do, but at the same time I was quite motivated by professional reasons and cultural curiosities. Once there, exposed to the lavish Infosys corporate campus where the conference was held and then to temples and maharajah palaces, villages and small towns and a hellish traffic on the road, I realized that no new travel experience can cause a profound culture shock comparable to the one I once experienced in West Africa, upon my first visit there 30 years ago, and that consequently the encounter with India can be processed, ordered, and neatly stored in hundreds of digital photos. That is at least the rational, daily attitude where I feel as if I were in charge. At night, India strikes back with the intensity of noise, color and smells, with the harsh beat of quickly changing situations of menace and confrontation, crisis or confusion, or at least unbearable fullness, sensational saturation and spatial disorientation. I cannot retell any of those dreams but I know they pulsate with statues of gods, silk saris of beautiful women, tropical landscape, crowded village markets, clogged avenues, animals and more animals (cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, monkeys, elephants, donkeys, birds…) and endless onslaught of vividly painted trucks and overcrowded motor rickshaws.

Malbec and opera

Those intensive sensations push aside many other excitements and rich experiences of this year, such as the joys of being a flaneur in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Montevideo, immersed in the intricacies of tango, breathing the smog of this big cities with joy and curiosity for the rich street life and architecture, wash it away with Malbec or Chilean Sauvignon. The markets and bookshops, parks and cemeteries, steakhouses and sea food bars, antique shops, crafts villages, Tigre delta and the immensity of La Plata, a Pacific sunset at the Neruda’s house at Isola Negra, Andian ski pistes, and the joy of embarking finally to master the Spanish language …those are the better memories of this year. Before and after this mild Latin American winter, superimposed on the European summer months, are those already fading memories of lectures, seminars, workshops, conference sessions and round table debates in various European cities, the attributes of a peripatetic teaching career… Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, The Hague, Paris, Budapest, Bologna, Belgrade, Skopje, Lyon, Moscow, Lecce, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Leeds, Dublin, Barcelona, Brussels, Nantes, Montreal….a pedagogic and deliberative topography, highlighted by Bill Viola video works in Rome, Kovalik’s staging of Strauss Elektra in Budapest, Lavaudant’s La Clemenza di Tito in Lyon and Fura dels Baus Magic Flute at Bastille, Boris Godunov and Un ballo in maschera in the Opera in Amsterdam, my performing arts highlights being this year definitively in the opera column.

What crisis?

And then there was … there is the crisis. The financial meltdown of this past fall, the world economy grinding to a halt and state capitalism returning with force to seek to salvage what is still left in the ruins of neo-liberal ideology and reckless capitalism of deregulated greed and opaque speculation – this is the new world stage of unprecedented dangers and hardship. Most economists stand against this disaster with unconvincing a posteriori-knowledge explanations, bankers and corporate managers are humiliated in public and politicians act firmly as rescuers, pumping borrowed public money in the salvaging of banks, insurers and factories. The menaces of angry, frustrated and dispossessed victims of this turmoil, made jobless and even homeless, deprived of their savings and pension plans, spells a warning on the wall, of social revolts and political upheavals that will alter the nature of our societies, even in Europe, under the parachute of euro stability. The protracted rampage of Greek highs school students, joined by a small tribe of hard-core anarchists, left over in their reservation near Technical University in Athens, directed against banks, foreign companies but also stores of own relatives and neighbors, is a first sign of a puzzling political shift, an outburst of anger of those who know that they have been made losers of globalization by the inferior education Greek dynastic politics provides, by xenophobia, narcissistic self-centredness and pervasive corruption marking this closed society. Another collective outburst of anger comes from Russia, where a thin middle class has emerged on the petrodollar surplus. But nowadays, tentative car owners resent government imposition of a high duty charge on imported cars, invented to protect Russian feeble car industry, while the ruble course sinks and capital flies away abroad. These angry would-be consumers dismantle Putin’s success of the last 8 years, built on a systematic corruption of the elites and ordinary people, but made suddenly unsustainable with oil at 40 dollars a barrel and gas and metal export income decimated. More is to come for sure, despite the worldwide enthusiasm for Obama and chiliastic hopes his election provoked, but it is difficult to predict where. In China, where 8% growth instead of 11% wont be enough to guarantee social stability? Or in the slams of Caracas, where Chavez ideological blackmail of masses also might fail? In Baltic, where pauperized Russian minority might be most affected by the economic failure, so as to solicit Russia’s protection? If this crises turns out to be a depression, protracted for 3 to 5 years, it is due to cause multiple political realignments that will affect the cultural production more than a few seasons of shrunk subsidy, shy donors and purse-stingy sponsors. If rampant consumerism is being replaced by a new austerity in life styles, cultural output might become more substance and less fluff. There might be some precious cultural opportunities hidden in this crisis. And if this is not just a liquidity crisis and solvency crisis but a crisis of trust, culture might have a major restorative role to play. My hunch is we wont be able to see these shifts fully in 2009 but only in 2010. Stay tuned and brace up!

My obituary for Ristaert ten Cate who died on 5 September 2008, has finally been published by The Guardian (London) on 31 October 2008. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/oct/31/ritsaert-ten-cate-obituary

Dragan Klaic was in Moscow to run a theatre workshop. He was overwhelmed by the sense of impending financial disaster and nearly missed his plane home.From www.signandsight.comSpecial feature, published 11 November 2008 

My Moscow hosts had assured me that I would be at the airport in no time at all – it was not only a Sunday but most of the population would be out of town for the  four-day holiday, they said. The weekend was connected with the public holiday on Tuesday 4 November, the Day of People‘s Unity, which had been introduced some years ago to replace the October Revolution Day, traditionally celebrated on 7 November. And yet, half way to the airport we hit a horrendous traffic jam. Sasha, the driver, inched off the Leningradski Shose and, passing the Perseus shoes megastore, started on a long detour through the faceless Golovinski Reon, which was jammed by other cars abandoning the highway or hopelessly seeking to join it.In agonising slow motion, we passed Avangardnaya Street and I started to feel like a character in an absurdist Daniel Harms play, wondering what irony had inspired Brezhnev’s urban planners to give such a promising name to this drab street of prefab high rises. The Avant-garde project, whatever it was – artistic, political or urbanist – ground to a halt at the Moscow periphery and so did I, condemned to miss my flight to Amsterdam. Then, a second splash of irony hit me when we crawled past Festivalskaya Street. I felt like the butt of a cruel joke because the reason I had come to Moscow was to run a research workshop on arts festivals. The two-day workshop had gone well, with much discussion between Russian and foreign festival organisers and experts, but here, on this public holiday in Festivalskaya Street, there was nothing festive in sight and nothing to celebrate. I was overwhelmed by gloom and despair.Always when in Moscow I think of Walter Benjamin and his “Moscow Diary”, a record of love, pain and misery in a shabby city. In the past weeks I had been reading his “Memories of a Berlin Childhood” and the evening before I had eaten in a cafe Dona Clara in Maloya Bronya, decorated with 1920 Berlin photos. So I imagined how I would explain present-day Moscow to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, were he to come down and sit with me here in the back seat of the Mitsubishi 4×4.What would Benjamin want to know and how would he analyse the latest twists of the post-communist transition? When Benjamin came to Russia in December 1926, pursing his erotic fascination for the Latvian poetess Asja Lacis, Russia had abandoned its New Economic Policy, a brief flirt with small-scale capitalism, and was sliding into the long, cruel night of cultural destruction and terror. Benjamin’s peregrinations through Moscow’s streets and courtyards mark the traces of an old city, soon to be erased to make place for the huge edifices of Stalinist architecture. The Berlin writer saw that the communist project was hopelessly stuck, just like the Mitsubishi in traffic.Now, 82 years later, Russia is about to take leave of the Putin-era prosperity, shored up by high energy prices, and to slide, with the rest of the world, into the turmoil of protracted economic recession. Stability, prosperity and the 7% annual rise of the GNP has brought little progress to this distant Moscow periphery other than a few Western cars, some small-scale consumerism, patched up kiosks, countless construction sites and street repairs that only exacerbate traffic congestion.Back in the city centre, just 10 km away, the ostentatious display of wealth, haughty office towers, luxury apartment houses, streets clogged with huge limousines set the urban scene. The barrage of advertising schlock and neon, billboards offering brand new taunhauzi and kotedzi, sushi joints and elegant restaurants, strip clubs and cigar bars, is as overwhelming as it was on my previous visits. When I was last here, in April 2005, I noticed that this capitalist explosion was accompanied by a certain unease and anxiety. Many of my friends felt that the price of this growing prosperity would be arrogant governmental interventionism, increased control of the NGOs, rampant corruption and pumped-up nationalism. Khodorkovsky was already in jail but had yet to be condemned to 9 years in Sibiria. So I was unable to gauge the full impact of the Khodorkovsky effect, which the Putin regime meticulously stage-managed to tame the oligarchs, sidetrack philanthropy in the innocent, apolitical cultural and social spheres and reign in critical and activist NGOs.The dismantling and re-establishment of the Yukos empire and the grand gignol trial of its boss, symbolically re-arranged the balance of power, drew clear lines of what was permissible and tolerable, and extinguished all illusions of pluralism and the civil society movement that budded in the turbulent Yeltsin era. The gushing oil, gas and precious metal export profits corrupted large swathes of the intelligentsia, distributed more subsidies to public cultural institutions and renovated much of the decaying infrastructure. It created a class of wealthy consumers, fixated on culture as glamour and fancy entertainment – partly in the style of Hollywood glitz and partly along the lines of the super-patriotic, traditional iconography of nationalism and superpower nostalgia.But the loudly trumpeted reforms of cultural and social systems never happened, much of the state income has been squandered, the stock market has been plummeting for months, Russian and foreign capital is fleeing the country, the government stability fund – once a solild 500 billion dollars – has been dented to salvage the failing ruble and secure liquidity for the major banks. The tycoons have taken a severe beating and the crisis is only just beginning. With the worldwide economic recession exploding, Russian exports, consisting for 80% of energy and raw materials, will generate much less money for the state budget and inevitably put the brakes on small-scale consumerism and the small and medium business economy created to sustain it.The brights lights are starting to flicker in central Moscow. Only the night before, I saw a line of people in front of a travel agency: Aeroflot had stopped taking credit card payments, an ominous sign that the party’s over. I was not only going to have to explain credit cards to Walter Benjamin, I would have to tell him that this crisis of globalized capitalism wasn’t just a liquidity crisis and a solvency crisis but a crisis of trust, involving the depletion of social capital by reckless speculation in derivatives, subprime mortgages and insured security swaps. This is not the fate of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.Admittedly, international stars are still Moscow regulars, festivals of all sorts abound, a publishing boom is spilling forth domestic and translated books as never before, former factories are being converted into creative hubs where small-scale cultural industry coexists with non-profit experimental art, internet use is rocketing. And affluent Moscovites are fighting the traffic on the way to the airport to take off for foreign destinations. But there is also a growing fear that the binge might soon be over – and then what? Benjamin’s experience with the 1929 crisis and its aftermath could offer some painful analogies, but I am not sure that they are applicable. My Moscow interlocutors cannot see the future as a mere extension of the dynamics of recent years. Some major-scale discontinuity seems inevitable. The regime, impoverished and unable to bribe clients and pamper consumers, could well take a paranoid turn, and seek to assert itself through nationalist mobilisation at home and aggressive posturing abroad.On the other hand Russian power holders, fearing social unrest and aware of the country’s economic, institutional and demographic weak points, could also seek domestic and international appeasement. They might embrace initiative and nascent pluralism, seek to strengthen rule of law and respect of private property, in the hope that such measures might secure some goodwill abroad, and provide the stability and international support necessary to survive economic hardship. That a few weeks ago a Moscow court overruled the tax evasion charges against the British Council, might be an early signal of this second scenario.If this is a window of opportunity (even it’s just a fortochka, the tiny window that is occasionally opened in the long Russian winter to let in some fresh air), then European cultural networks, foundations, organisations and associations should not ignore it, nor should culture ministries, regions, cities and EU institutions. After all the West’s arrogant and humiliating gestures towards Russia, now is the moment to reach out to Russian public cultural organisations, in particular to the small and weak world of informal and autonomous culture, to the radical and critical artists and intellectuals who bravely resisted corruption and authoritarianism. It is time to organise cultural exchanges, it is time for engagement, support and encouragement. With this Katrina of global capitalism bearing down on us, it is time to recognise that we are all in the same boat. There will undoubtedly be less public and private money for culture, fewer sponsors, donors and perhaps even audiences, but what really matters is to buttress cultural production against the social and political consequences of this crisis and oppose a radical shift to populism and xenophobia that threatens Russia and rest of Europe.In the back seat of the Mitsubishi, Benjamin’s shadow grew silent. It was visibly confused by my explanations and wild speculations and perhaps, too, by the depressingly monotonous periphery through which we we continued to crawl. He looked old and tired and I felt embarrassed and tired too, from all the stress and frantic speculation about what I would do if I missed my flight. My Russian visa would expire at midnight, it was a pre-holiday Sunday which made it difficult to come up with contingency plans and I did not cherish the idea of spending the night in the Shermetyevo 2 transit zone, waiting for some early morning flight to anywhere westwards.I slipped into a self-protective nap and when I awoke, perhaps only minutes later, Sacha had managed to break free of the traffic and we were hurtling towards the airport, 2 hours and 20 minutes after setting off from the centre of Moscow. I only managed to catch my flight because KLM had extended the check-in time to wait for two-thirds of its passengers who, like me, were trapped in the traffic. I did not have to stay to celebrate the Day of People’s Unity, I could be home for dinner. Benjamin’s ghost had its own flying arrangements, away from Avangardnaya and Festivalskaya, away from Moscow.

Will You Ever Be Happy Again? – Sanja Mitrović

hetveem coproduction with CZKD Belgrade, in collaboration with Pact Zollverein Essen, supported by BITEF festival, Belgrade.

Will You Ever Be Happy Again? is the newest mime/documentary production by the young theater maker Sanja Mitrović. It has its Dutch premiere at hetveem theatre, Amsterdam, on Thursday 23 October; the international premiere was on 27 September 2008 during the BITEF Festival in Belgrade, as a part of the special program of the 42^nd BITEF festival “Truth in theatre”. This production was preceded by a hetveem research project, culminating in a presentation at hetveem theater in March 2008.

After the premiere: DJ’s Sinisa Mitrovic and Vladimir Tupanjac with their eclectic electric & bastard disco & special guests.

There will be a post-performance debate IN/BETWEEN mirrors of collective history.

Thought experiments for Holland, Serbia and Germany, moderated by Dragan Klaic on Friday 24 October.

‘Will we ever be happy again?’, the German population asked itself at the end of the Second World War. More than sixty years later, a significant part of the Serbian population is now posing itself the same question. Germans called it a ‘zero hour’, expressing their desire for a fresh start. But it was an illusion. One cannot escape one’s own history; only hope to survive it. Will You Ever Be Happy Again? uses documentary strategies to examine the influence of nationality on personal identity. The production’s ingredients are autobiographical stories related by the performers – one Serbian, one German. These stories are based on a series of events from their childhood: games, primary school, sports days, etc. Through the sketched stories about good against evil (about a victim against a perpetrator and about how easily roles can switch) the performance wanders between research and a ritual game that creates imaginary parallels between the two countries, repeating History just like History always seems to repeat itself.

Language: Serbian and German spoken, Thu 23 and Fri 24 Oct Dutch subtitles, Sat 25 and Sun 26 Oct English subtitles.

Concept, directed by Sanja Mitrović. Performers Jochen Stechmann, Sanja Mitrović, dramaturgy Felix Ritter, light design Erik Gramberg, sound design Vladimir Rakić, costume design Dejan Došljak, artistic advice Vladimir Tupanjac

Sanja Mitrović (RS) graduated from the Mime school at the AHK with Dhanu, which was also performed at the ITS! Festival. The choreographers she has worked with as a performer include Montažstroj, Nicole Beutler and Olivier Provily. She made her most recent solo project Shame (2006) and Books Once Read Make a Good Bullet Proofing (2007) at Gasthuis theatre, Amsterdam.Will You Ever Be Happy Again? is a part of the “Community of Memory” project produced by Center for Cultural Decontamination (Belgrade) and supported by Erste Foundation, Ministry of Culture of Serbia and , Republic of Serbia, Belgrade City Council – Department for Culture, and the Swiss Embassy in Belgrade.

Dragan Klaic arrived in Skopje on the day that Greece vetoed Macedonia’s bid to join NATO at the summit in Bucharest.

You have arrived on the worst day for our people, I was repeatedly told in Skopje. Some talked somberly about the worst day in the history of the Macedonian nation and the Macedonian state. These depressed and anxious reactions followed the Greek veto on Macedonia’s NATO membership at the summit in Bucharest. People everywhere were glued to the television where journalists were reporting on the summit, Macedonian politicians were issuing reassurances after returning home early “to be with the people at this difficult time,” as President Crvenkovski put it, and commentators were debating the consequences of this humiliating and infuriating slap in the face.
View of Skopje by Mister FI was quite puzzled by this mass eagerness to belong to NATO, projecting some of my own reservations about this organization and remembering its passivity in Bosnia and ill-fated bombing of Serbia in 1999. But the Macedonian public has been persuaded for years that NATO membership will stabilize domestic tensions between political parties and between the Macedonians and Albanians, that it will consolidate the implementation of the Ohrid Agreement on the inclusion of the Albanian minority in the government system, and increase respect for the Macedonian independence among its neighbours. Moreover, entering NATO has been packaged as a shortcut to EU membership when in fact Macedonia, an official EU candidate, has done little to pave the way for accession talks with Brussels. But in order to boost its NATO credentials, the Macedonian government has sent 130 soldiers to Afghanistan, 30 to Bosnia and Herzegovina and 40 to Iraq, a symbolic presence but a significant gesture for a country of 2 million inhabitants and a tiny army.The Greek veto was less of a surprise. Since Macedonian independence in 1992, Greece has contested the name, claiming that ‘Macedonia’ belongs exclusively to its own northern province and that a neighboring state with the same name will have dangerous territorial revendications. Under pressure from the US and EU Greece accepted Macedonian membership in the UN as FYROM (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) but relations between the two countries have remained strained and small provocations do have a cumulative effect. The fact that the Skopje airport is called Alexander the Great probably does little to mellow Greek intransigence. When I mention this to my Skopje interlocutors, most are quick to agree. They know that NATO entry is dependent on some form of compromise with Greece and that US envoy Matthew Nimetz has allegedly composed a list of 20 possible names for the country that reads like a Gertrude Stein poem, probing the limits of semantics in order to appease the Greeks and give the Macedonians a constitutional name which matches the one they use for themselves. The Macedonian president and prime minister set off for Bucharest with a certain optimism having finally settled on the official name of “Republic of Macedonia (Skopje),” the one proposed some years ago by the Greeks to the widespread disapproval of the Macedonians. In Bucharest the Greeks decided to play what they saw as their trump card in a display of obsessive nationalism that Greek politicians of all stripes cherish because they know it guarantees enthusiastic support at home.The veto provoked much anti-Greek sentiment in Skopje but behind the anger lie anxieties about the country’s future. There is a fear that with Kosovo’s recent self-declared independence and Albania’s (and Croatia’s) NATO entry, Albanians in Macedonia will further radicalize their position and come with new demands about the regionalisation of Western Macedonia where they have a compact presence. Moreover, Bulgaria refuses to recognise Macedonian as a language in its own right but sees it as a Bulgarian dialect; borders with Kosovo need confirming, and relations with Serbia will be further strained if nationalists win in the forthcoming elections in Belgrade.The cabinet of the nationalist Nikola Gruevski (VMRO-DPMNE) has collapsed having lost the support of its partner – one of the 2 Albanian parties – over the recognition of Kosovo’s independence. Some observe that Gruevski and President Crvenkovski of the center-left Social Democratic Union have put their personal differences behind them and moved towards one another in order to pacify Albanian parties and strengthen the international position of the country. New elections are likely to involve coalition-building arithmetic rather than any significant power reshuffle.As a side show in the midst of all this national disappointment, the Macedonian Parliament is hosting the Forum Europe, a spin-off of the Berlin Soul for Europe initiative that promotes the role of culture in European integration. Foreign officials lecture on civil society, a few Macedonian culture workers air their frustrations with the government and, obviously consumed by worries about NATO and losing their jobs, government officials on the panel slide into a rhetoric of self-defence.Seeking an escape from this predictable jargon I wander to the real space of intercultural dialogue, the huge market on the northern, predominantly Albanian side of the Vardar river. There, in the immediate vicinity of the former Theater of Ethnic Minorities, now split into separate Albanian and Turkish drama ensembles, brisk business is conducted in several languages, cheap goods from round the world are on display, bartering is good humored and compromises are easier to reach than in politics. The old bazaar resists gentrification, old Turkish hamams and caravan sarais converted into cultural facilities are locked or neglected, as is the ugly colossus of the Macedonian Opera. Persistent shabbiness mixes with improvised renovation, the kitsch opulence of a new hotel and heavily neglected public space.Skopje’s skyline suffers from the aggressive, crude architecture of the 1970s and 80s, heavy improvisation after the earthquake and the old Turkish-era small dwellings which resist modernity with surprising tenacity. Monuments to the nationalist and communist heroes scattered around the city centre have recently been joined by a number of Roman sculptures that have been taken from the museums and placed at the entrance of the Macedonian government complex in a move whose ideological underpinnings are difficult to decipher. A new National Theatre is being erected where it once stood before the 1963 earthquake and a Holocaust memorial for the Skopje Jews is being built next to it. A symbol of Albanian assertiveness, the statue of Skanderbeg on his steed makes a militant posture near the bazaar, and contrasts with the humble pose of the Mother Theresa monument in the city centre. Her fame is linked to Calcutta but she was born here in 1910 as a Catholic Albanian and the perimeters of her former house are clearly marked. Nearby, hordes of trendy young people inspect the newly-opened City Gallery shopping mall with its expensive foreign stores. If you can’t join NATO, you can always join the Western tribe of shoppers in the old bazaar or a fancy mall.A careful inspection of the city from the old Stone Bridge reveals what’s on the cards for Macedonia, with or with NATO: further up the Vardar on the top of a hill on the northern side, the enormous edifice of the future US embassy is growing by the day, dwarfing all the wasted and crumbling symbolic architecture of Macedonian statehood, a domineering building overlooking all the local twists and tensions and emanating superiority, power and control. This is to become the political arm of the strong US military presence at Camp Bondsteel less than 50 km further north in Kosovo. Behind the name dispute and the accumulating nationalist rivalries, the new masters are securely entrenched while the EU is being allowed to deal with the civil society issues.  (published on www.signandsight.com on 14 April 2008)