Fw: reviving and reliving and remembering (in) attempts at Understanding the Balkans

[Misko]

Forwarded by Misko <mpandil at soros.org.mk>
----------------------- Original Message -----------------------
 From:    "Sally Jane NORMAN" <norman at wanadoo.fr>
 To:      <spectre at mikrolisten.de>
 Cc:      "Misko" <mpandil at soros.org.mk>
 Date:    Wed, 26 Dec 2001 00:51:52 +0100
 Subject: reviving and reliving and remembering (in) attempts at Understanding the Balkans
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Dear Spectres, dear Misko,

Was in the throes of writing this when Misko's photos arrived on my screen. This must be one of Stevan Vukovic's Balkan ghost phenomena!

Anyway, at last a little time today to stir and revisit memories. Understanding the Balkans. A region physically totally foreign to me. Essentially known via Syndicate exchanges and encounters in the eye of the storm, i.e. more or less permanently since the list first emerged in 96.

Landing at Skopje airport late afternoon, Thursday November 29th : a large part of the tarmac traversed after touchdown is invested by military air and ground craft, temporary barracks. Black and green camouflage vehicles standing out starkly against a cold grey landscape. Picked up by my Skopje host from the French Cultural Centre, official cultural offshoot of the Embassy. Occasional military presence stationed on the road into town. Ghostly reminders surging out of the mist. First stop the Cultural Centre, an odd set up : one part of the locale is the typical library, reading room, television and classroom encountered in any Alliance Française or French Institute, and the office occupied by the Centre's dedicated director. Another office, where links with Macedonian schools and education activites are upheld, is separated from the first by an arms retailer with Smith and Wesson blazoned on his window. 

On my first evening, I'm escorted to a concert at a hall designated " Maison des armées " - that's how my hosts name it ; there seem to be lots of relaxed soldiers and many young people hanging out there. A wooden auditorium with warm acoustics and a highly attentive public, a mixture of apparently relatively well-to-do music lovers and a large bunch of younger people who would pass as students anywhere in Europe. The French cellist heralded as this century's Rostropovich is applauded enthusiastically. We meet later and he explains that he comes as often as possible to Skopje and elsewhere in the Balkans, because of the quality of the audience. He plays Elgar, the Philharmonic serves the usual dose of Mozart, and a short orchestral composition by a young Macedonian composer who's name nobody can translate for me. Spectral overtones (Giacinto Scelsi, Tristan Murail. any other Spectres into the spectral music movement ?), unidentifiable yet disturbingly familiar subtleties with timbre. Have to chase the illegible name on my programme (Mozart and Elgar are irritatingly easy to make out). One huge regret was not getting to a music shop, though purchased music could only partially have met my needs. Skopje was a permanent, exhilarating sound trip.

Next day, a round of appointments with cultural organisations. Art schools and centres, galleries, museums. Everybody seems to know everybody. A refurbished hammam in the centre of town, next to the bazar, has become a contemporary art gallery. The temporary exhibits are works of German and Macedonian artists. Ismet Ramicevic's piece overwhelms : an avenue of a dozen or so (sorry, didn't count - they're regularly spaced and stake out a walkway of several meters) approximately three foot high golden rods sheathed with brown velvet tips evocative of reeds, the two lines of these reeds/ rods being spaced about a meter or so apart, just the right distance to feel drawn into the path (two golden footprints at the outermost point of the walkway clearly solicit this incursion). At the innermost extremity of the path is a glass box on a pedestal, about a meter from the ground, overtones of a reliquary. Within which is ritualistically placed, cover uppermost displaying arms and name of state and dispelling all ambiguity, a Yugloslavian passport. One of the many points of my journey where understanding the Balkans falteringly begins. In this austerely simple, finely gauged play of space and symbol and material that grips the mind's eye and tugs at foot and heart. It is good to meet Ismet later - on Monday - at Melentie's Contemporary Art Centre, his work having meanwhile cropped up in several places, including traces of the labyrinth piece, tightly coiled newspapers, wrung into randomly decorative patterns in a weaving of information to be walked on, a magic media carpet (as at the Contemporary Arts Centre display), or exhibited vertically like a painting (as at the Modern Art Museum on the hilltop). Numerous Macedonian and Balkanian works at the hammam-come-gallery are packed into an end room to make space for temporary exhibits. It is good to view them under the harsh noon illumination of the domed glass skylights. A physicality about many of them, a " hands-on " tactile quality exploding powerfully from the surfaces of paintings, relief and bas-relief works, a strange interplay and tension between surface and volumic protrusion. Encountered again and again. Perhaps partly attributable to my own art historical obsessions, but there seems to be a grappling with matter and senses here that erupts through the veneer of many carefully contained West European pictorial and sculptural practices. 

Another memorable image at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with its huge glass walls overlooking the Skopje basin city, and its ghost galleries of condemned exhibition space with permanently leaking rooves, is the hallucinatory vision of an unbridled horse, dragging its bit, peacefully grazing hard up against one of the panorama windows. Roll over Damien Hirst. This is for real. The museum director says he doesn't have the heart to have the horse taken back to its probable home, down the road, where the grass isn't as good.

Friday night convoys of " Understanding the Balkans " attendees gather together in a bar. People compare means of transport and durations of their journeys, which seem excruciatingly long for such short distances. A few hundred kilometers, from Zagreb or Sofia or Belgrade, has in most cases taken longer than my trip from Paris. Acrobatics with itineraries, interminable waits at borders, bad road conditions. Understanding the Balkans begins with trying to understand how tortuous and precarious face-to-face communication is for people in the region, in terms of sheer logistics. The risk of too easily and systematically looking further afield for kinship and collaboration being aggravated, condoned, by physical difficulties meeting up with one's neighbours. Though it's not that simple either, as the two days of discussion tell us. In the bar, there are moments when the entire group converses in what is seemingly the same language. It's somehow reassuring to run up against these incomprehensible sounds, to listen to the music of words and syntax that occasionally my neighbours describe for me as a sort of pidgin Balkan language. A relief to escape the all-too dominant situation of English as linguistic currency. Perhaps this point hits home even harder after a day with my French-Macedonian entourage. 

Next day I arrive insanely early at the Museum of Macedonia for the 11 a.m. start to the conference. Winding up the hill in icy winds that cut across the museum esplanade. I wander through rooms full of history that spans thousands of years, stone, bronze artefacts and utensils and vestiges of architectures that represent several civilisations - Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman. Breath-taking for the native of a country whose inhabited history barely exceeds a thousand years. Upstairs there's a Unesco-patronised exhibition of icons. The museum custodian turns on the lights for me and I have the space to myself. Once more, centuries of history surge up from retables and portative and votive images and early woodcut prints. Centuries marked by pendulum swings from hyper-realism to heavily abstract decorativism. Cyril and Methodius as Slavic saints feature heavily in the Balkan pantheon. Nicephore looms large and invisible. In an adjoining room, less prestigious icons deployed across a wide array of formats provide insights into narrative graphics, something my school specialises in (we call it comics). I try to drink up the visual deambulations, the ocular architectures, by proxy, through the eyes of my students. Next door again, a room full of photographs and documents from the turn of the twentieth century. Images from the first World War hit strangely. I've seen them before. My grandfather was a teenager from a little town on the West Coast of New Zealand when Commonwealth troops were requisitioned. He served in the infantry in Gallipoli. And survived (NZ losses in both wars were rated highest per capita of population). Never wanted to talk about it much. Particularly to his pacifist grandchildren who were regularly demonstrating against involvement in Vietnam, and against ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corps) celebrations. Suddenly here he is, or others who look very much like him. Blood links. Sullen pain of not having really known him and encountering his fantom in this unglorious context, viewed from the other side of the trenches. Understanding the Balkans?

The conference starts up. Presentations that provide slants on the issues of Balkanisation and globalisation, permeated with identities of speakers from a host of countries in the region - includingMacedonia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bulgaria. Trying to understand the Balkans by listening to this crossover of discourse. The conference takes place in English, something that distresses me though obviously serves me well under the circumstances. But Melentie and others explain that the pidgin language of last night's bar suffices for informal exchange at most, and that several of the speakers would be unable to follow in-depth discussion in this medium. Lines of thought and argument strike the total foreigner that I am as unfamiliar and accessible at the same time, couched in a mix of "world-culture", of social theoretical and cultural and historical references that most of us are familiar with, and yet steeped in a heady brew of local references, of more or less voluntarily assumed inside stories. Globalisation being discussed against a backdrop of insistence on the need for more intense, "up-front" local and regional communication. A need the conference illustrates and serves. 

Certain questions arise again and again: how can motivation and mindsets be determined and recognised and valued in their regional, local, balkanised specificity, when the reference point(s) remain(s) so adamantly westernised? Or, in Ventsislav Zankov's words, how can an ideological "underground" be constituted that is not dependent on the institutional stamp of the west but doesn't emerge as just another mafia, in this region where it's easier to hang out with e.g. one's German than with one's Balkan neighbours. Bojan Ivanov plays on words to come up with the metaphor of "globulisation", the globule being the neoclassical ideal of the sphere as the smallest surface containing the largest possible volume. Presented as a state towards which the Balkans might aspire, a positively structured state as opposed to the imploded chunk of chronically fractal geography that tends to be depicted on the world map of conflicts. The metaphor lends itself to all kinds of readings and ramifications. Ferid Muhik who begins in French, quoting Saint Simon - "savoir pour prévoir et prévoir pour pouvoir", makes a plea for positive investment of the wording that today tends to decry all things balkanian. Muhik denounces mechanistically determinist discourse and the resultant settling into a fatalistic loop, where too much focus on causes supposedly beyond one's control leads to neglect of such vital factors as human motivation and aspirations. i.e. it leads to a state of abnegation, resignation, abandonment, a state that lacks the sense of guilt that Muhik considers a prerequisite for the elaboration of a project likely to be pertinent both regionally and globally. There are many sparks flying, many words and ideas that trigger cascades of mental response, that will come through the papers. Stevan Vukovic's presentation of Balkan ghosts - an uncanny tack on spectres. Muezzin calls regularly punctuate the chilly air, resonating throughout the Skopje soundshell, mixed with gunfire from nearby training barracks. 

It's good to be able to listen in order to try to begin to understand. Intimidating at times, the tangible ferocity of this need to speak and dialogue, to try to forge the terms of a new parlance, an identity. An almost voyeuristic sensation - hovering between feeling immensely privileged and illegitimately present. It seems indecent to "prendre la parole" other than as a Martian, the only status I can honestly assume in this context. "In how many languages can one keep silent?" (a quote from Ventsislav Zankov's paper which is worth the re-re-reading). In the midst of heated and recurrent debate about how far south and how far east the Balkans stretch, my bearings crumble. It happens often. For somebody from/ in my country, Aotearoa, in the south Pacific, Asia is west and the US is east. Unless one turns one's back on the world to align with the vision of the globe too often considered "universal". some choice. Perhaps Branislav Sarkanjac can see things from this perspective - disconcerting to be holding a copy of his latest book in which the one word I can decipher, apart from a few names, is "Aotearoa". 

Misko's idea of a Saturday night on the town is also one that will no doubt remain with us all for life - thanks also to Stefan Saskov's esoteric address book for making this possible. A "zikir" dervish ceremony in an icy room up in the hills (so many experiences were somehow up in the hills), where a dozen men gradually work themselves into a semi-trance state and in turn transpierce cheeks and various parts of the flesh with a long skewer-like needle that is ritualistically proferred to the religious leader for benediction before and after each such act. Images of turning bodies exhibiting this strange appendage which protrudes well beyond the usual morphological limits, promiscuity of blood brothers where no blood is shed. The ringleader is a "bon vivant", a memorable character with a comfortable belly, a sharp eye, a slow laugh, and all the mischievous humour of a zen monk. He reminds me of Ueshiba and other martial arts masters. Someone you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of. The icy room with its broken window warms up and condensation forms on the remaining panes as the initiates pick up speed, energy. Something they do every Saturday night, though attendance during Ramadan is apparently not so predictable. We are lucky.

Sunday evening is equally memorable for totally different reasons. The basketball game on the programme is for real. Sunday afternoon features a presentation by Zoran Naskovski and Vesna Pavlovic, describing the strategy whereby basketball is being introduced and encouraged in all kinds of urban Yugoslavian settings, notably places totally deprived of sports facilities. A lively, socially ponderated counterweight to the sports spectacle they show as epitomising US TV couch potato culture. The presenters are not just there for the rhetoric. They're also excellent basketballers. So, it turns out, are most of the regional attendees. Walter Van der Cruijsen, as the other "alien" in Skopje, also does well with his Dutch build and sports agility. The fact that I have no appropriate shoes for the well maintained gymnasium floor is a sort of lame excuse for playing spectator sport (actually, even if I had brought shoes, I'd have been totally inept). The playfulness, tactics, exchange, emergence of team identities, are exhilarating to watch. Body language. Misko rushes round like a wild bull, but what's amazing is that he is ALSO very effective. It turns out that Zoran is a champion. Vesna is unexhaustable. (see Misko's Spectre post of December 5th for the full team). Sounds of bouncing balls, finger snapping, whistling, calling, clapping, and a lot of good solid gut laughter. Slam dunks adroitly administered by players with their backs turned to the goal. Ventsislav loping across the terrain like a big Bulgarian bear. Alexander Kiossev throwing off his professorial image and shoes turns out to have this game in his genes too. A delectable insight into Understanding the Balkans.

Monday's visit to the Centre allows discovery of Tanja Lazetic's and Dejan Habicht's "Weather Report". Something implacable about these totally preformatted images and legends, that are nevertheless twisted to fit political meteorology, extending up to the last and recent round of Macedonian political negociations that will hopefully hold out, remain minimally consensus. A long and encouraging discussion also with Violeta Simjanovska at the Performing Arts and Multimedia Center. Shared hopes to build links. As with the Fine Arts faculty, a caravanserail in the heart of the bazar, where art school activities are housed alongside a museum brimming with vestiges and traces of Macedonian craftsmanship. A school where Dinka, painter and teacher in the (extremely energetic) printing department is a dedicated relay and delightful companion. Funny to learn that he very nearly emigrated to New Zealand decades back. Monday evening's visit to Nebojsa Vilic's 359° gallery. Discussion with him which leads to the unique experience of sitting in on a session with a group of his theatre students from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, students he's encouraged to use this space as a venue to thrash out ideas and ideals. Compared with the sometimes distressingly blasé behaviours of my students (and entourage), it's encouraging to witness the motivation that drives others to frank intellectual confrontation, to ardent exchange while a large part of the privileged world slumbers in front of a TV set. It's strange also how I begin to feel hooks into the language, into the issues being debated so hotly, issues of how and why and where theatre as an art form might continue to exist meaningfully. No doubt this has something to do with the vital, transformational motivation that Ferid Muhik talks about. 

Will wind up the saga here, it should hopefully go on forever anyway, will try to build these bridges that this trip was made for, between my unruly school and, particularly, a few individual students there, and some of the people I've been lucky enough to meet in Skopje. Was fortunate in that the French Cultural Institute timed things to allow me to try my hand at Understanding the Balkans. A long way to go, but Skopje seems like a pretty good starting point. As long as I don't have to say where it's east or south of. 

may 2002 bring spectral rainbow horizons to all

Kia ora, meilleurs voeux

sjn

--------------------- Original Message Ends --------------------

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Melentie Pandilovski
Director
Contemporary Arts Center  - Skopje
Orce Nikolov 109, 1000 Skopje
Republic of Macedonia
Tel/Fax: +389.2.133.541
Tel/Fax: +389.2.214.495
Mobile: +389.70.217.075
http://www.scca.org.mk
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