Alenka Gregoric, the artistic director of Škuc Gallery, and responsible for one of the Lost Highway Expedition key nodes is setting up Lost Highway Exhibition this August in Ljubljana. All the expedition participants, as well as wider interested circle of artists, architects, and other practitioners are INVITED TO SEND IN PROPOSALS TO THIS OPEN CALL! The deadline is June 8, 2007. Here under read further for more info and backround.

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EXHIBITION FRAMEWORK:

The presentation of the Lost Highway Expedition – a dynamic project with an open structure - combines existing information and projects, and offers an insight into new projects connected with the expedition. The intertwining of the one and the other can survive in the context of mutual collaboration, questioning, suggestions, and compromises. The projects created before, during, and after the expedition respond differently to their regional environment, called the West Balkans in this case. An informal coming together of countries which once marched under the same flag, and their neighbour Albania, yields both 'retro' as well as future-oriented projects, views, and strategies.

This exhibition seeks to present works that look towards ideas for the future, some of which may be semi-fictitious stories, rather than re-interpret the narratives of former Yugoslavia and Albania.

The exhibition should exceed the presentation of mere artefacts of the LHE experience, from which many viewers might be excluded. It should cohere as an entity with a limited number of exhibits, which will exceed the number of its nominal parts. This can be achieved through presenting work that is attentive to building on the concepts that instigated the expedition.

for complete text visit: http://europelostandfound.net/node/377

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EXHIBITION FACTS:

- show will open between August 10 - 15 and would be on until September 7, 2007
- DEADLINE for proposals is JUNE 8, 2007
- all the proposals should be sent on email address: europelostandfound@gmail.com
- proposals should contain textual part and some visual material if possible (photos, sketches, etc)
- decision will be made until JUNE 15
- money is an issue as usual - SKUC can not cover production costs but can help artists with possible applications to different foundations
- at the same time, exhibition proposals will feed into the LHE Source Book.

COLLABORATIVE CURATORIAL PROCEDURE - from Alenka's e-mail:

"I want to start the whole process by inviting 5 of you (Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen, Patric Ward, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Katherine Carl) as artists that will take part in the exhibition. It’s typical curatorial approach but there is no other way :) we have to start somewhere. I do not want to go on with typical curatorial practice, that is why we agreed that we do it together. We will discus all proposals which we will get during the open call.

HOW TO START:
- we put the texts out and we give 2 weeks for sending proposals.
- we have one mail that we are all checking and we talk about every project separately when it comes.
- we give the final list out one week after dead line because we have to see the whole exhibition in one.
- if somebody has questions to pose to artists we should all "hear" them ... to have complete overview over the process.
- we also try to make one or two Skype conferences just to put everything on its place before final decision.
- I know it is not easy one but let's try since I really hate to have dictatorship role in the exhibition process... at least there will be 6 of dictators :))
- all of us write short text about the project for the show
- concerning my contribution I would like to put out the text from the reader... the last part is specially about how I see the show… short!
- so you write text and we send it to all participants of LHE and we post it to ELF web page.
- call is open to everybody not just to people who were participating on the expedition.”

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PROJECTS ALREADY BROUGHT IN:
(in short, for further reading vist the links to individual documents)

Open Futures - still here to be claimed
STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen)

Open Futures - still here to be claimed is a project that centres around large empty urban areas - usually very centrally located and strategically important - in 9 cities in the Western Balkans. For a number of reasons and coincidences these sites have been 'waiting' for decades and didn't develop even now amidst the hectic speed of post-socialist ‘transition’ that these cities go through.

In this project we seek to bring them back into the public debate by presenting their cumulative past, present and - most importantly - their potential for a common future. In the exhibition space at SKUC, Ljubljana, this will be present through a video documentary featuring about 35 visited sites, accompanied with a fictional narrative opening their past, present and future in the format of a large size imaginative map and a compact publication - and with that start taking these spaces into their own perspective again.

for more visit: http://europelostandfound.net/node/974

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Untitled (Entrance)
Patrick Ward

The collection began in 1998 and continues to grow to this day. In some way this archive, this anthropological study traces the liminal nature of the intercom itself. From commercial offices, private apartments to social housing blocks, the intercom is a gatekeeper, marking the threshold, the space between outer and inner-worlds.

As a photograph, the intercom becomes a stand-in, a surrogate for the building and it’s occupants. How many occasions have we found ourselves on a doorstep rehearsing the lines in our head before apprehensively pressing the buzzer?

for more visit: http://europelostandfound.net/node/976

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Stadium Culture, Novi Sad
NAO (Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Katherine Carl)

STADIUM CULTURE - an ongoing project to renovate and expand an existing open handball stadium located in Novi Sad to become an electronic youth centre and event place. For STADIUM commissioned by kuda.org - Centre for New Media based in Novi Sad, we propose a hybrid program for based on the two central agents for youth activity: sports and electronic media, lingering at loose ends in today’s transitional society.

For the Lost Highway Expedition exhibition at Galerija Skuc in Ljubljana, NAO will present the full proposal process for STADIUM CULTURE displaying research, design, conceptual underpinning related to history and current youth art and activist practice in the city, scale models, legal documentation, correspondence between key actors including government entities undergoing major transition. The installation will demonstrate how STADIUM CULTURE has negotiated and made visible the issues of public space that are at stake in the emerging democracy in the Western Balkans today.

for more visit: http://europelostandfound.net/node/978