After the Lost Highway Expedition (LHE) in August 2006, the next phase of the project called ‘Building Lost Highway’ is to start in March 2007. It is envisioned as a process that would last about half a year, with an idea to interlink and build upon expedition generated projects, art works, networks, architecture and politics based on the found knowledge.

A series of three work sessions is to spark this process towards a ‘source book’ from which a variety of interpretations and representations can be drawn for different occasions (a book, a symposium, an exhibition...) by those interested in the issues incited by LHE - not necessarily only by the participants of the process. The source book will be Internet based, collectively authored and later made into a printed draft.

The initial idea is that the source book is built around three lines of thought: Expedition as an experimental Society, Lexicon of the future (extracting concepts and notions that relate to the future or European territory that come from a positive interpretation of the notion Balkanisation) and individual Projects. It is likely that these three strands will start to intertwine along the process and that actual result would be a kind of combination of a lexicon and atlas. The idea for a source book resulted from discussions among expedition participants that took place in Tirana, Podgorica and Sarajevo.

In September 2006 - right after the expedition - Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen and Kyong Park applied on behalf of Centrala Foundation at the European Cultural Foundation for funding to get the source book process running and make a draft print out of the product. We are glad to say that our proposal will be granted with 25.000 euro. This will be seed money to let some of the participants of the Expedition meet again at different locations - not only in the Western Balkans.

It is obvious that not all of the LHE participating organisations and individuals can participate in all of the meetings but the idea is to open the process to those interested to join in and contribute with content. Therefore the work sessions will be taking place in three different cities to allow for those local or near by interested to take part.

The first source book session will take place in Rotterdam from 17-19 March. This session is to set a direction towards the final result and also think how to (technically/online) involve a large LHE community. The idea is that the second and third session would take place in the region. Initial contacts have been made with Kuda.org and Press to Exit project space.

The first session will be joined by Azra Aksamija (Boston/Sarajevo), Ivan Kucina (Belgrade), Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Basel/New York), Katherine Carl (Basel/New York), Ana Dzokic (Rotterdam/Belgrade) and Marc Neelen (Rotterdam) from the initial group, Yane Calovski (Skopje), Barbara Galassi (Belgrade/Rome), Vahida Ramujkic (Barcelona/Belgrade), Jaume Nualart (Barcelona/Vienna), and a group of LHE participants residing in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Arnoud Schuurman, Hugo Lammerink, Wietske Maas, Auke Touwslager, Ursula Lavrencic and Emiliano Gandolfi, curator at The Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. The session will take place in the Harbour #1350, Maashaven in Rotterdam, studio space of Stealth.

After the first session is over we will inform you of the next steps and we hope to start building the content collectively and that some of you will be able to join at the next source book sessions.

More about Building Lost Highway initial idea from the time of the application to European Cultural Foundation is to find at: http://europelostandfound.net/node/890. Some things have changed, like the dates but the general idea is there.