Europe Lost and Found
October 24, 2006, 10 am to 5 pm

Columbia University
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
International Affairs Building, 15th Floor, Room 1501
420 West 118th St. (corner of Amsterdam Ave.)
New York, NY 10027

Organized by Consulate of Slovenia and Columbia University with Centrala Foundation for Future Cities and School of Missing Studies

ELF at Columbia, On Nostaligia, lecture by Mitja Velikonja

ELF at Columbia, elevatorELF at Columbia, audienceelF at Columbia, crew

Program

10 - 10.15
Introduction by John Micgiel, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia

10.15-10.20
Introduction by Alenka Suhadolnik, Consul General of Slovenia

10.20 - 11.00
Kyong Park / Europe Lost and Found
Katherine Carl & Srdjan Jovanović Weiss / Lost Highway Expedition

11 - 11.30
Gearoid O'Tuathail / On Political Geography

11.30 - 12.00
Ivo Banac / On History

12.00 - 12.45
Discussion moderated by Kyong Park

12.45 - 13.30
Lunch

13.30 - 14.00
Mitja Velikonja / On Nostalgia

14.00 - 15.45
Lost Highway Expedition organizers and participants, including: Azra Akšamija, Stefanie Busch, Khadija Carroll, Ana Dzokić, Ivan Kucina, Marc Neelen, Jill Magid, Kavior Moon, Oliver Musovik, Angel Nevarez, Pilar Ortiz, Kyong Park, Meg Rotzel, Erzen Shkololli, Valerie Tevere, Stephen Zacks
Discussion moderated by Katherine Carl and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss

15.45 - 16.00
break

16.00 - 17.00
Roundtable and response by Laura Kurgan with all conference participants

Brief biographies of conference speakers:

Ivo Banac is Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. From 1995 to 1999 he was the University Professor of History at the Central European University at Budapest, where he also directed the OSI/CEU Institute on Southeastern Europe. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees
from Stanford University, and is the author of The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984), which was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (1988), which was awarded the Josip Juraj Strossmayer Award by the Zagreb Book Fair, as well as numerous reviews, articles, and collections. He has edited eight additional books. He was the editor of East European Politics and Societies and served as co-chair of the Open Society Institute (Croatia), as a member of the presidency of the Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and as the Director General of the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik.

Gearóid Ó Tuathail is Director of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He was a Research Fellow at Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, 1999, Faculty Fellow, US Institute of Peace, 1998. His publications include A Geopolitics Reader (Routledge 1998 and 2006), A Companion to Political Geography (Blackwell, 2004), Rethinking Geopolitics (Routledge, 1998), An Unruly World: Geography, Globalization, and Governance (Routledge, 1998), Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). He has also contributed to academic journals in areas of political geography and international relations on such subjects as: Bosnia's Third Geopolitical Space: Nationalist Separatism and International Supervision in Bosnia's Brcko District" in the journal Geopolitics (2006), and "Contradictions of a Two-State Solution" in Arab World Geographer (2005). His most recently completed book is titled Remaking Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Cleansing, the International Community and Population Returns.

Velikonja Mitja is Associate Professor for Sociology of Culture and Research Fellow, at School of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture from University of Ljubljana, 1997 (M.A. in Sociology of Culture from University of Ljubljana, 1994). He completed advanced study at University of London and Keston Institute, Oxford, in 1995, 1997 and 1998. He has been Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Rosemont College, Philadelphia in 2004/2005, Visiting Professor at the Centre for European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, 2001/2002 and 2002/2003. Dr. Mitja’s main areas of research are contemporary Central-European and Balkan religious, national and cultural processes and political mythologies, popular culture and collective memory.

Laura Kurgan explores the interface between building, electronic media, and information technology in both her art and her architecture. Kurgan teaches architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is Director of Visual Studies and the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab. SIDL is currently collaborating with the Justice Mapping Center on a project called "Graphical Innovations in Justice Mapping" in selected states -- Arizona, Kansas, Los Angeles County, Louisiana, New York, and Rhode Island. She has followed the declassification of satellite imagery and GPS technology in a series of research projects across the significant political events of the last decade. This work, which has been exhibited internationally, is collected in You Are Here: Post-Military Technology and the New Landscape of Satellite Images, forthcoming from Zone Books.
As principal of Laura Kurgan Architecture, she recently completed the new offices for WITNESS, a human rights organization that distributes video technology and training to local activists. Past projects include Around Ground Zero, a fold-out map of the area around the site of the World Trade Center, widely and freely distributed in the months after September 2001. Over the last decade she has worked with new spatial information and mapping technologies, especially declassified satellite imagery and GPS technology.
As an artist, her work has been featured at the List Art Center at M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.

For Lost Highway Expedition:

Azra Aksamija is an artist and architect based in Cambridge. Since 2004, she has been affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture, and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1976, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Graz, Austria in 2001 and received her M. Arch from Princeton University in 2004. Her work has been widely published and exhibited in venues such as the Generali Foundation Vienna (2002), Biennial de Valencia (2003), Graz Biennial of Media and Architecture (2003), Gallery for Contemporary Art, Leipzig (2003), and the Liverpool Biennial (2004). She is currently researching her dissertation on contemporary Islamic architecture in Europe.

Stefanie Busch is an artist based in Dresden and currently has residency fellowship in Cleveland OH. She was awarded a grant by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen in 2005 and in 2004 was awarded first prize at the Kunst am Bau Competition held by the German Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine and in the same year the Hegenbarth Fellowship. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Penta Park Photo Prize. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions internationally including:
Faszination Fußball, Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, experiments, galerie hamburger kunstprojekt, Hamburg; SOZIALE EINHEIT, Galerie Baer, Dresden; boofe L.E.Delikatessenhaus, Leipzig; transrapid, Hamburg; Wir können auch anders, Kunsthaus Dresden; Dresden - Ostrava 4:4, Ostrava/ Tschechien; Dresden – Prag, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg.

Katherine Carl is Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions at The Drawing Center since February 2005. She is writing her PhD on conceptual art of the sixties and seventies in the former Yugoslavia in the Department of Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. This follows her work at Dia Art Foundation (1999-2003), ArtsLink (1996-1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-1995). At The Drawing Center, her upcoming exhibitions for the 2006-7 season are: Common Destination (September 2006), Yona Friedman and Levity (Spring 2007). With Catherine de Zegher she co-curated Joëlle Tuerlinckx: Inventory of Drawing (2006) and prepared Persistent Vestiges: Drawing From the American-Vietnam War (2005), and with Luis Camnitzer Analog Animation (2006). Katherine Carl was curator of Flipside, an exhibition of contemporary art from Eastern Europe and the United States at Artists Space in November 2004. Her independent projects include: School of Missing Studies (ongoing since 2003) and go_HOME (New York, 2001). She has taught on art history and contemporary culture in the Department of Art at New York University (2002-3) and has received a number of fellowships for her research and projects and has lectured and published her writing internationally.

Khadija Z Carroll is an Austrian-Australian, working earlier this year on the Biennale of Sydney’s collaborations between eastern European and Australian artists on the topic of ‘Zones of Contact’. She is a teaching fellow in the department for the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University (Fall 2006 – 2008) and associate curator of Oceania in the Peabody Museum. Currently, she is at work on an exhibition and book on contemporary Indigenous artists’ intervention in the Peabody Museum. She also works as a curator, writer and researcher on several ongoing exhibition projects at the Harvard Design School: Constructing the Swiss Landscape, which will open at the GSD on November 30 2006; and an exhibition and book titled Transition as Condition> Strategy> Practise on the city of Zagreb, which will be published by ACTAR in November 2006. The latter position arose from her other specialization in the late Habsburg Empire and Twentieth Century history of Central Europe, in this case as it pertains in this case to architecture and conceptual art in former Yugoslavia. Khadija has published in Word & Image, Sculpture Magazine, The Age, and most recently has an essay in the upcoming Rodolphi Amsterdam book series on art, literature and consciousness entitled Epistemic Colonialism.

Ana Dzokic is a founding member of Stealth.[un]limited, a collaborative practice based in Rotterdam, established in 2000. Stealth experiments on the borderlines of cultural and technological issues to conceive tools to deal with the spatial implication of changing societies, specifically the relations between planned and non-planned urban processes. The work of Stealth has been internationally published and exhibited at institutions including: a/o, Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Archilab 2004 (Orleans), V2 (Rotterdam), Kunstverein Munich, Fridricianum (Kassel), Urban Drift (Berlin), Mutations (Bordeaux, Tokyo, Brussels, Milan). Dzokic was born in the Belgrade (1970), where she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture. In 1998 she moved to The Netherlands, where in 2000 she received a master's degree at the Berlage Institute on the issue of the unplanned urban transformations of the city of Belgrade. She is guest lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft. www.stealth.ultd.net

Ivan Kucina is an architect, assistant professor, member of the Council of Belgrade Associateion of Architects, the Council of the October Art Salon, the Stealth Group, the School of Missing Studies, and the Centrala Foundation for Future Cities, one of the initiators of much of the current research and workshops on informal processes in Belgrade. Born in Belgrade in 1961, graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Belgrade in 1988. Since 1997 he has worked full time as assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, and since 2004, part-time at the Department of Architecture, University of Montenegro, in Podgorica. He is also Co-ordinator of the Tempus Project for the reform of the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade. He is currently building an experimental family house on Mt. Avala, near Belgrade, and working on a new interior design and setting for the Museum of African Art in Belgrade.

Jill Magid is an artist based in NYC. She works in all mediums to explore the issues surrounding intimacy in public space and often inserts artifacts, presences or actions into systems of power by working with the operators of the system itself. Her work has been presented at The Liverpool Biennial, the DMZ exhibition in the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam. She will have a solo exhibition this year at Centre d'art Santa Monica in Barcelona and will participate in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan. She was recently awarded a commission from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for their Off the Record series of public commissions, and she teaches at Cooper Union and University of Pennsylvania. www.jillmagid.net

Kavior Moon is exhibitions and publications assistant at The Drawing Center and contributed to Cabinet Magazine's most recent issue on Fruit.

Oliver Musovik is an artist living and working in Skopje, Macedonia. He is currently in NYC as an ArtsLink Fellow at StoreFront for Art and Architecture.

Marc Neelen is a founding member of Stealth.[un]limited, a Rotterdam based research collective experimenting on the borderlines of cultural and technological issues to conceive tools to deal with the spatial implication of changing societies. Stealth established and participated in a number of projects on the complexity and inconsistency of the contemporary city in very different (European) contexts, including: a/o, Wild City, Mutations, Urban Catalyst, Pulse-dynamic mapping in architecture, INFRActures: Translations between the Sonic, Spatial and Temporal. Neelen (Heerlen, 1970) graduated as an architect from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Parallel to his work within Stealth, he focuses on new design techniques and the influence of information technology on architecture and urban design in projects with a/o V2_Lab and Delft University of Technology. He has been co-editor of the architecture platform www.ArchiNed.nl.

Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez work together as neuroTransmitter, a project whose work fuses conceptual practices with transmission, sound production, and mobile broadcast design. Through a combination of media forms and sound performance, their work re-articulates radio in multiple contexts, considering new possibilities for the broadcast spectrum as public space. neuroTransmitter’s public performances connect FM radio technology and the body - sonically negotiating and occupying the invisible and physical spaces of the city. As radio-sonic installation, their work references the politics, history, and technology of the medium.

neuroTransmitter have created visual works, performed, and broadcasted live on local bandwidths and in public spaces, museums, and galleries internationally, including: viafarini, Milan, Italy; The Anna Akhmatova Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; The New Museum, NY; Govett Brewster Museum, New Plymouth, NZ; Centre d’Art Passerelle, Brest, France; Set & Drift, LMCC, NY; Museu da Imagem e do Som, Sao Paulo, Brazil; The Drawing Center, NY; among others. From 2003-2004, they were artist-in-residence with the R&D program at Eyebeam, NYC, and in 2006 in-residence with the Corso Aperto of Fondazione Ratti, Como, Italy. In 2005, neuroTranmitter were awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts, artist fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts, project grant. In 2006 they received a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art in Public Places grant, and a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Fellowship.

Pilar Ortiz is a video artist based in NYC.

Kyong Park is a member of International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit and Centrala Foundation of Future Cities in Rotterdam. Recently he was co-curator and an artist for Shrinking Cities in Berlin (2002-04), a recipient of the McMartha Award (2002), a visiting chair in urbanism at the University of Detroit, Mercy, School of Architecture (2000-01), a curator at the Kwangju Biennial in Korea (1997), a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University (1996-7), and the founder/director of StoreFront for Art and Architecture (1982-1998). He is the editor of Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (2005).

Meg Rotzel is associate curator at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

Erzen Shkololli is a curator and artist working in Peja, Kosovo, who is currently in NYC as an ArtsLink Fellow at Apex Art.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss [b.1967, Subotica] is an architect educated at Harvard and Belgrade universities working between New York and the Western Balkans. He is the founder of Normal Architecture Office and a co-founder of School of Missing Studies, network for architectural and urban research. His recent book "Almost Architecture", published by Merz&Solitude and kuda.nao explores the roles of architecture vis-à-vis democratic processes, abrupt political changes and architectural appearance of post-communist ideologies. Jovanovic Weiss also teaches geo-politics and architectural design at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design and is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College in London on the topic of Balkanization as a contemporary spatial practice. He has exhibited and lectured widely at universities and museums in Western Europe, North America, Japan and published internationally. www.thenao.net

Stephen Zacks is an editor at Metropolis Magazine and has contributed to The New York Times and other publications.

Conference rationale/need
How will the changes in the geography of the European Union be experienced in the future? What cultural, economic, and political ramifications can be anticipated and analyzed now? At the heart of this symposium is the proposal that the best way to start to find Europe is to research and experience areas outside the current European Union that will be future member states. Specifically, the Western Balkans offers a compelling and multifaceted case study for what the future of Europe looks like. Slovenia provides an entry point for such an investigation because it is new to Europe and was formerly connected with Balkan territory while part of Yugoslavia.
The conference will bring scholars involved in research on Europe in dialogue with Lost Highway Expedition participants, who are mostly architects and artists, to discuss the future of Europe by looking at new links and sustainable communication between very different entities using current experience in the Western Balkans as a model.

Lost Highway Expedition background
Lost Highway Expedition took place in August 2006, and moved roughly along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in the former Yugoslavia. It started in Ljubljana, and travelled through Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina, Tirana, Podgorica and concluded in Sarajevo, comprising two days of events at each city and one day of travel in between. The expedition was set to generate new projects, new networks, new art works, new architecture and new politics based on experience and knowledge found along the highway.
Lost Highway Expedition is to find and study relationships on the highway and look at them as a model for diverse Europe. The events included guided tours, presentations and forums by local experts, workshops between the participating travelers and local participants, discussions, exhibitions, radio shows, picnics and other events that can were self-produced by the participants and partners in each city. Participants in the Lost Highway Expedition did not have to travel or stay together and could enter and exit the expedition for any length of time and at any point.
The highway at the focus of this study was made from 1946 till 1980's, in the massive voluntary campaign of the peoples of all nationalities that constituted Yugoslavia and named according to the most important state saying – The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. This ideological name signified the line connecting different regions in Yugoslavia at the time. Now, like the highway, the Western Balkans is a territory without content. “Western Balkans” has no meaning of interconnectedness but rather a set of separate obligations toward expanding Europe. Without content it is emptied also of ideology. Communism believed that it had the capacity to overcome national difference in the pursuit of universal wellness. The Communist illusion of eternity was brutally shortened during the nineties. The collapses of utopian systems stripped down the concept of national unification. National conflicts were awakened resulting in the new bloodshed of war. Yugoslavia was buried, and today the new temporary definition “Western Balkans” applies to entities waiting for the future in the EU: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. Members of the Lost Highway Expedition were to explore new meaningful and sustainable links among different entities.

Conference Participants:
Lost Highway Expedition organizers: Azra Aksamija, Katherine Carl, Ana Dzokic, Ivan Kucina, Marc Neelen, Kyong Park, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, plus participants: Stefanie Busch, Khadija Carroll, Jill Magid, Kavior Moon, Oliver Musovik, Angel Nevarez, Pilar Ortiz, Meg Rotzel, Erzen Shkololli, Valerie Tevere, Stephen Zacks.

Ivo Banac, Professor of History, Yale University, New Haven, USA
Historical precursors to current situation in Western Balkans

Gearoid O’ Tuathail, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA
Critical geopolitics in relation to the Western Balkans

Mitja Velikonja, School of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Post-Socialist Nostalgias for Socialist Times in the Balkans

Laura Kurgan, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, USA, respondent

Conference Structure, Schedule and Goals
The conference structure will take the lead from the nomadic movement of the Lost Highway Expedition and its function as an open platform for exchange. To increase the valences for dialogue between the experiences gained from LHE and the speakers, experts in the field of European studies, the presentation of artworks and research from LHE will lead the day and then be interspersed among the conference speakers. A roundtable with all the participants and a response will cap off the day. The conference itself should be an active dialogue to build further on Lost Highway Expedition from more perspectives. This dialogue can contribute to the development of the conceptualization of future presentation of Lost Highway Expedition through Europe Lost and Found exhibitions, publications, websites.