Sarajevo, VrbanjaFor a number of years STEALTH has been investigating how the issue of non-regulation/non-control affects the way cities develop and are being used.

Following our project in the city of Belgrade (‘Wild City’, on the multitude of anonymous and non-authorised interventions contributing to this during the 1990s highly non-planned, but ‘collectively authored’ city), in 2006 we started investigating urban changes in 9 major cities in the Western Balkan region (Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Prishtina, Tirana, Podgorica, Sarajevo) along the Lost Highway Expedition.

Open Futures - still here to be claimed is a project that centers 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.

Interestingly, these sites are the loopholes catapulting us into some of the most important dimensions of the local context. They let us read their past of interruptions, changes of plans, political systems, ownerships, ideologies and visions. And their empty, yet undeveloped status pressures them as the most important signifiers of the potential future to arrive on them.

Now, while the pressure on them is mounting, the main issue - who decides about their future, or, in other words: is the future still ‘ours’ - has escaped discussion in the public domain.

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 hand-out publication for the visitors to take - and with that start taking these spaces into their own perspective again.

STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen)
http://www.stealth.ultd.net