Hello Everyone

Marc, Ana and me put together an application to European Cultural Foundation on Sept 15th for 3 work sessions in WB to build contents for the "ELF Source Book." The applicant is Centrala, and the project is called Buliding Lost Highway. We thought that it would be good for us to put important portion of the application here. This is to build communcation and transparency within this community/society, by announcing our activities with you all. As most of you know, the idea of worksessions and source book was borne out during LHE, in various meetings that spontaneously occurred in Trana, Podgorica and Sarajevo. Centrala has simply translated these discussions into this application. Since our request to ECF was for 29,650 Euros, it will not be enough to invite everyone in LHE through this budget. We are projecting to cover the participation of Centrala members [8] and representatives from each of LHE cities.

So we upload our application to be used by anyone who would be interested in getting your own funds through other sources, to participate. Your own funding does not have to be limited to participation of Centrala program, and we welcome to add additional programs or events of your own creation that could further enrich the Building of Lost Highway, especially toward your own projects that you would like to develop from LHE. This way, you can both participate in the work sessions, and still be able to develop your own projects that would later become the content. [see Worksession 3/ Projects below]. Such funding stratagy is consistent with the concept of this society of self-generating and self-sufficient. Each one of us or a group can develop, fund, conduct and produce own programs and projects in ELF. You deveop concept, raise money, become responsible, and take the leadership to manage it. You can invite whom ever you wish to collaborate or work alone. For those who wants to raise their funding, Centrala can help by sending an official letter of invitation to Building Lost Highway, or even become your applicant if you need registered foundation status that Centrala has. Regardless, we welcome anyone's suggestions in further developing the concept and program of Building Lost Highway.

The Source Book at this phase will be very rough manuscript type printing to keep the cost of it limited to about 2,000 Euros. It will not be designed much, and be like note book. We hope to apply to other fundings to have a budget to edit, translate, design a more official book. If you have any suggestion on how to do accompolish this, you are welcome to make proposal, or become temporary leader on this project to direct it. This final and official publication could be called Opening Lost Highway.

ENJOY OUR APPLICATION TO ECF AND HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON
Kyong

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Applicant
CENTRALA - Foundation for Future Cities (Stichting voor Toekomstige Steden)

Project summary
Building Lost Highway is a collective work process towards a ‘sourcebook’ that organises material and produces knowledge from Lost Highway Expedition (LHE) that took place in August 2006. Through LHE, a 26-days exploration of cultural and urban landscapes of nine cities of the Western Balkans, an experimental temporary society of over 200 artists, architects, cultural workers, etc. was formed. Since moving through Ljubljana to Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Prishtina, Tirana, Podgorica and Sarajevo, expedition participants have started to construct their individual projects and creating ground for common ones. We seek a support for producing the content for ‘sourcebook’ that gives a future-oriented interpretation of the Western Balkans within Europe. Through three working sessions in the region, the ‘sourcebook’ will be collaboratively created online and printed in a format of a manuscript. It contextualizes future exhibitions (first two in Ljubljana, spring 2007) and becomes a manual/tool for Find Europe Expedition (2008).

end 12/ 2006
Session 1 - Building Lost Highway: Society - principles of non-hierarchical structure and its rules

01-02/ 2007
Content production: Society

mid 02/ 2007
Session 2 – Building Lost Highway: Lexicon – notions, terms and paradigms of future Western Balkans.

03-04/ 2007
Content production: Lexicon

mid 04/2007
Session 3 – Building Lost Highway: Projects – individual art, architectural, film, theoretical projects and their common grounds

05-06 / 2007
Content production: Projects

08/2007
Print-out / presentation of ‘sourcebook’

2.d Context
Building Lost Highway (for which this application seeks support) follows the first event of a multi-year and three-phased project called Europe Lost and Found (ELF), an interdisciplinary and multi-nationally based research on the future of new and transforming borders and territories of Europe. The subject is the continent of immigration, and its depopulation and aging, and the necessity for redefinition of states, sovereignties and citizenships. Challenged is the established belief and practice of nation-state, and in search of alternative definitions for the populous and cultures in movements, all within the contradiction between homogeneous and multiple identities of individuals and communities, the fluidity of capital and containment of labor, and the liberation and restrictions of citizens under sovereignty. Clearly, Europe cannot subsist by itself, and is already being redefined by “the others” in its quest for a self-identity. In such contexts, ELF suggests the future of Europe is best seen in the contemporary Western Balkan.

Therefore, ELF will evolve in the following major thematic phases: ‘Balkanization’ (2006-2007), ‘Europeanization’ (2007-2008) and ‘Mapping the Future’ (2008-2009), with each phase building the trajectories for the next one, to pose new set of questions and strategies for the next researches and products. Process oriented, ELF emulates the transformative realities of contemporary social, political, economic and urban landscapes, and avoids the inflexibility of predetermined goals and issues that many cultural projects practice. First two phases begin with an expedition, followed by documentations, researches, and production of issues and their contents, ending with exhibitions, publications and other products. The final phase, by reflecting on both phases, will construct comparative influences on the potential futures of two territorial concepts. This phase will also work toward the visualization of data and information on movements of different subjects, to create dynamic mappings about the transforming borders and territories of social, political, economic and urban landscapes, with emphasis on movements against definitive structures.

Ultimately, expedition - as both a tool and experience - is the key element of ELF. Beyond it being a form of movement through different borders and territories—a navigational guide for "Intercultural Communications"—it also forms a network of broader and specific views on the movements of economic, political and cultural geographies, and offer theoretical and practical exchanges between different individuals and groups who are working in these issues. For example, Lost Highway Expedition (August 2006), which started by plotting a route along a European road nowadays called Corridor X, formerly known as the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, is not about reconstructing the Highway built to unite Yugoslavia, nor to critique the economic ambitions and political dimensions of today's highways there. Rather, Lost Highway Expedition is about making a third and non-physical infrastructure to link different thoughts and cultures, to generate the importance of shared meanings rather than hierarchically constructed exclusionary values that incites conflicts between places or within societies.

Finally, ELF is a society itself, not merely a project. It is a temporarily and self-organized experimental society in a stateless condition because it moves and transforms constantly. It does not have a fixed executive office nor a center, but instead operates through a highly committed network of temporary attractors that initiate and realize their own ideas and programs at any of its nodes. In the age of post-ideology, ELF is an emergent system that wishes to find intelligence through the swarming of a massive collaboration of self-determinant entities. What it wants to know is about our future between the uniformity of incorporated Europeanization and the Balkanizing capacity of self-organizations, and how the urban landscapes would evolve as the chosen spaces for cultural, ethnic and religious conflicts and resolutions. ELF thinks that this grim perspective of unstable and unpredictable future of Europe can also bring the change necessary for building the next free and civil society, a compelling quest that Europe Lost and Found would like to imagine. And this all begins with the expeditions behaving like a moving city, permeating the inflexible lines of old borders and forming destined networks of new territories. In ELF, the project and its subjects are indistinctive.

2.e Short term objectives
• Bringing the experiences and impact of Lost Highway Expedition as a transitory and non-hierarchical model of a societal organism (Society) to a level where its founding principles can be measured and analysed.
• Forming Lexicon of terms and (re)definitions imagining the Western Balkans as a vital and important source for the possible futures of Europe.
• Creation of a collective pool of material and knowledge coming out from the Expedition - ‘sourcebook’ – to be used as a material for participants of the project and others interested (curators, educational institutions, magazines, etc.) to initiate future exhibitions, debates, publications, workshops.
• Development of a collaborative and experimental group working approach (cross border, cross cultural, cross hierarchical, open source based)
• Defining the scope, program, activities and working methods for the next stage - Find Europe Expedition (2008) – within the community.

2.f Long term objectives
• Critical and constructive understanding of the theory of Balkanization, through examination of emerging cultural and urban landscapes of the Western Balkans since the recent political and economic changes.
• Explore the potential influence of periphery to core territories, or from subjugated to dominant cultures, particularly learning from the recent transition in the Western Balkans toward the future development of Europe, and the construction of a European identity.
• To orient the idea of EU as a universal concept, globally and locally, and to free it from current foundation in territories and borders.
• Find operational balance within the dialectical thoughts of the world, especially between Balkanization and Europeanization, and globalism and localism.
• To construct and practice decentralized, fragmented, self-organizing, and temporary network-based societies.

2.g Originality
Using expeditions as the initiating and governing tool for our project is to eliminate preconceptions and subjectivities that are detrimental to producing something new and original at the end. This open-ended process—beginning a project with no ‘fixed’ end or goal in sight—allows the project itself to determine our actions, not us determining the project. The project, therefore, places process above products, giving importance to constructing of information, knowledge and relations, rather than objects and aesthetics. And following the notion of expedition as a journey into the unknowns, or to discover something new, our project is based on to legitimacy of learning from real experience in real space, to compliment, or to analyze the overwhelming resources and information that are currently accumulating in academic, intellectual and digital industries.

3.a Target groups
In the Lost Highway Expedition (LHE) participated more than 200 artists, architects, theoreticians, curators, filmmakers, etc. (travellers and locals). One of the primary project targets is to involve this group in creating the content of the projects ‘sourcebook’, on a base of their shown interest and commonly shared experience. Also the aim of this phase of the project is to further collaboration with organisations that carried Lost Highway Expedition locally: SKUC (Ljubljana), Platforma 9.81 and Mama (Zagreb), Kuda.org (Novi Sad), Prelom kolektiv, Context gallery, Rex, Cultural Centre Students City (Belgrade), Press to Exit (Skopje), Missing Identity (Pristina), 1.60 Insurgent Space (Tirana), Projektor (Podgorica), Pro.ba/SCCA, Mediacentar (Sarajevo). Through conducting working sessions in the region, the aim is to involve other local thinkers in the process of production of the sourcebook.

3.b Audience
LHE has created a vital and highly engaged community of groups, individuals and institutions in-and outside the Western Balkans. Projects web-platform (www.europlelostandfound.net) has over 300 registered users and attracted hundreds of other visitors. Apart from them, the sourcebook will be directed towards those already interested in the project’s theme and results: curators (a/o WKV/Stuttgart, Stroom/Den Haag, NAi /Rotterdam, Bonniers konsthall/Stockholm), researchers (Goldsmith/London), Lab for Culture), theoreticians, magazines (Domus/Milan), Cabinet/New York)… Already two exhibitions, at Moderna Galerija and SKUC Gallery in Ljubljana (May-June 2007), will use content produced through the sourcebook. Further, Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs promotes the project at diplomatic levels in its European network. With the sourcebook, we will be able to open this scope even further and extend to other audiences and formats.

3.c Output
The output of the Building Lost Highway is a sourcebook with newly created pool of perceptions, works and paradigms for imagining potential futures and powerful new horizons for Europe from the Western Balkans perspective. It contains three sections: (1) Society, capturing and reviewing the LH Expedition as a non-hierarchical and temporary societal experiment, (2) Lexicon of Future’s Mythology, orients the potential of the Western Balkans towards the future (and refers to Lexicon of YU Mythology – see LHE reader, page 61/62), (3) Projects, contains individual interventions and proposals based on the participants works during and following the Expedition. The sourcebook content will be created online at www.europelostandfound.net, Drupal based software and through technical assistance of Kein.org. In the end of the process the content will be printed in a manuscript manner (200 copies) to be spread to those relevant (see audience).

3.d Impact at policy level
Europe Lost and Found is a decentralized, self-organized, non-hierarchical and network-based project, an alternative to the pyramidal systems of cultural production, a critique also on the need for a more open, flat and bottom-up process for policies, both in culture and politics. An open-ended system, it begins without pre-determined goals and subjects, and allows information and knowledge gathering during its course to define its processes and programs. Used in LHE, the method brought more flexible programs and diverse results, that is fitting to our idea of exploration to the unknowns, such as current state of our future. Additionally, our unique collaboration, from the start, with Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, exemplifies the influence the project already has on governmental sector, with potential to bring forth a rewarding integration of community and state relations in cultural policies.

4.a Expertise
ELF is a project based on knowledge, experience and resources of its initiators, the members of Centrala who have conducted urban researches and projects that were widely exhibited and published internationally. Centrala is predominantly constituted of people residing in or originating from the Western Balkans and actively contributing to intellectual and cultural activities both in the Western Balkans and EU cities (see short bios). In addition, Lost Highway Expedition has now activated a much large community of individual artists, theoreticians, cultural producers etc, and this will continue to expand through next phases of the project, especially in Find Europe Expedition. The centrifugal expansion of our expertise and knowledge aided by participating local organisations so far involved (for a list of organisations involved, see section 6). They belong to the most active and critical cultural initiatives within the Western Balkans.

4.b Approach
The working method for Building Lost Highway combines the potential of an internet community based project (1,5 month period between each session) with fast and effective results during personal encounters (3 sessions). Therefore, the working sessions are condensed moments where a number of specific issues is discussed and practically worked out, with the participation of least 13 people (11 non-local and 2 local to a specific city) to ensure cross-cultural and cross-regional inputs. Each session benefits from the specific capacity of the host organization (respectively on society, cultural theories and art production). A work session is followed by input from participating members and the wider community (via internet platform), building contents from previous session and proposals for the next. We believe this combination of direct and internet-based meetings is the most productive model – also regarding its financial effectiveness.

4.c Communication/PR strategy
Europe Lost and Found will use its societal network and participating institutions as the primary means of communication to cultural and public sector. As shown in LHE, numerous public media attentions were achieved (see articles in local newspapers, New York Times), including television and internet media. Building Lost Highway sourcebook will first serve as a communication tool between its participating network, including governmental sectors through Slovenia Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a PR source for exhibitions, conferences, next expedition… It will collect and present the issues and contents of evolving ELF, as wells as bringing more participation to the project, including future funding proposals. The products, or contents developed from Building Lost Highway, would later lead to Opening Lost Highway, a fully edited, designed and translated book, which can communicate the project to wider public audiences.

5.a Evaluation techniques and indicators
Europe Lost and Found is a collective, a society, and Building Lost Highway will first be inherently self-evaluated through its wide and diverse expertise and knowledge from its participating members. This is the reason for the combined strategy of work sessions and internet platform in between, where self-evaluation parallels with self-initiating concept. The internet platform also allows a broader condition for evaluations, because it is open to anyone outside of participating members. We are also currently building in a more complex system of automated evaluation into our web platform, through better software application from the expertise of Jaume Nualart that can measure critical level of membership participation and contents. As a part of building a society, Building Lost Highway has special concern to the better development of self-evaluation, which correlates to empowering our individual members to guide this society.

5.b Sustainability
ELF is a multi-year 3-phased project, with Building Lost Highway following the LH Expedition during its first phase. Centrala will apply to Culture 2007 for one-year support of Find Europe Expedition, an exploration on the identity of Europe through events in key cities in Europe, Middle East and North Africa. Planned for the first half of 2008, it will coincide with the presidency of EU by Slovenia, and the year when ‘Intercultural Communication’ would be the policy theme of EU. For this, the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs will invite the participation and sponsorship from the foreign ministry of other EU nations, as well through their Euro-Mediterranean affiliations. Other foundations to be contacted are Erste Bank, Anna Lindt Foundation, ProHelvetia and more national and regional foundations. Besides this, ELF is based on the different self-initiatives of its members to self-fund, to program and manage different venues that they themselves create. We believe this forms a powerful combination of coordinated and individual action.

Centrala - Foundation for Future Cities aims at initiating projects for the future cultural and urban development, in response to the increasing uncertainty of political, economic and social landscapes. It acts as a platform for multi-disciplinary researches and new forms of expression of cultures in different regions, languages and histories. It is process driven, research-based, intellectually engaged, critically minded, and a socially destined cultural project.

What are the main activities of your organisation?
Centrala’s projects and programs are grounded on research through direct cultural and spatial experiences, to construct conferences, publications, internet platforms, and others alternative venues of presentations and communications. Art, architecture and other visual and communication mediums are both the sources and products of the foundation, focusing on peripheral nodes of territorial and intellectual understandings.

Describe the structure of your organisation.
Centrala - Foundation for Future Cities is an international, interdisciplinary, artist and curators run non-profit organisation, registered in the Netherlands. Europe Lost and Found is the initiating project of the foundation, from which other independent projects from its enlarging membership would develop, including a ‘back office’ for financial management and reports, fund raising and organizational developments. In the principle of self-organization, its structure will remain networked based and out-sourcing, and operate with the smallest possible administrations and empower the capacity and responsibility of our nodes. Board: Kyong Park (New York and Ljubljana/Belgrade), Ana Dzokic (Rotterdam/Belgrade) and Marc Neelen (Rotterdam). Members: Azra Aksamija (Boston/Sarajevo), Katherine Carl (New York), Ivan Kucina (Belgrade), Marjetica Potrc (Ljubljana), Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (New York /Novi Sad)