The “Lost Highway Expedition” was initiated by Centrala Foundation for Future Cities and the School of Missing Studies [SMS].
LHE is the first event of Europe Lost and Found (ELF), a multi annual and three-phased project, involving following major themes: “Balkanization” (2006-2007), “Europeanization” (2007-2008) and “Map the Future” (2008-2009). Each project phase will build the base for the next one, thus posing new set of questions and determining new research directions. In this way, it will reflect on contemporary Europe, which it understands as a cycle of continuously reshaping social, political, economic and urban conditions and communication processes. However, each phase is planned to realize an expedition, an exhibition and a publication.

“Europe: Lost and Found” was conceived by the artist/architects Kyong Park and Marjetica Potrc in the fall of 2004 in the course of their month-long expedition through ten cities in the Western Balkans. While discovering and exploring new urban phenomena in these cities, Kyong Park and Marjetica Potrc collected their preliminary research material, including extensive photo-documentation, and established contacts with individual initiatives and various institutions in each city. These connections formed the network for the development of “Europe: Lost and Found.”

Since the spring of 2005, Kyong Park and Marjetica Potrc have been collaborating with the artist/architects Azra Aksamija and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss. During this period, two research seminars feeding into the project conceptualization were organized, both taking place from March to June 2005. “The New Maps of Europe: Mapping a Balkanized Society” was organized as an independent study seminar with Marjetica Potrc, assisted by Azra Aksamija, at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Through a reexamination of contemporary Balkan cities as “moving cities” and “cities of extremes,” the seminar aimed to take these cities out of their territorial grounding and place them in a larger, more global perspective. The shattering of states and the huge population shifts that marked the Balkans in the 1990s were seen as a microcosm of changes in Europe in the twentieth century. Seminar participants explored contemporary mapping practices, and developed their own dynamic mapping projects, which reflected on contemporary culture while allowing for an understanding of population, cities, and regions in temporal terms.

The second research seminar, “Balkanization: From Metaphor to Architectural Strategy,” took place as a collaborative exchange between two seminars in two institutions: at the Graduate School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York, organized by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, and at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade, led by Ivan Kucina. Participants engaged in researching, reading, and mapping an extensive array of contemporary sources related to war and architectural strategies. Specific focus was placed on the recent wars in the Balkans and further attempts to transfer its strategies of progressively dividing territory into planning and architectural realms. Participants in the seminar were challenged to develop, in a positive way, their own “balkanizing” design strategy based on any of the recent or current global conflicts or divisions.

Since then, with a timely support for research and development of ELF from the SMFA, Centrala Foundation for Future Cities was found in Rotterdam, to operate as the coordinating agency for the open platform structuring and application of ELF, with Azra Aksamija, Katherine Carl, Ana Dzokic, Ivan Kucina, Marc Neelen, Kyong Park, Marjetica Potrc, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss as its founding members. ELF was officially launched in Ocotber 2005, with Kyong Park, Marjetica Potrc as its co-curator, and was soon joined by three institutions that will exhibit ELF, Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (February - March 2007), Moderna Galerija and SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana (May - June 2007).

But before the forming of Centrala, its founding member physically met in numerous occasions, in New York, Cambridge, Ljubljana and Strobl, Austria, where we agreed to initiating ELF with expeditions, first with LHE and then the following stage with Found Europe Expedition, which aim to create a comparable movement through peripheral cities of Europe and beyond, such as Barcelona, Marseille, Naples, Rotterdam and Belfast, where contacts were already made, and with the hope of extending later to Budapest Bucharest Thesalonniki Istanbul Beirut Cairo Tangier and more. The collective development of ELF was possible through more than 20 Skype-based conference meetings that where 75% of Centrala members participated typically for 2-hours of discussions.

Then the operation of LHE was made possible by official agreement of collaboration from SKUC (Ljubljana); Mama, Platforma 9.81, WHW (Zagreb), Kuda.org (Novi Sad), Prelom kolektiv, School of Missing Studies (Belgrade), Missing Identity (Pristina), Press for Exit (Skopje) and SCCA/Pro.ba (Sarajevo)