Our relations in new Europe — we know them as little as we are familiar with distant members of the family who have emigrated. Or rather like lost relatives who turn up on the doorstep one day? After the "glacier of communism has melted, we are stumbling around in the terminal moraines, in archives, destinies, insights"[1] (Wolfgang Büscher).
"The East is our historical grave", or, as a Andrei Plesu puts it: When he meets an official in Brussels, he presents himself in the following way: "Allow me to introduce myself, I am your past."
At the same time we have resolved to enter upon a common future. On 1 May 2004, a part of history will be revised, and the expansion of the West, the so-called eastern expansion, will take place. The old and the new Europe will have to learn to share the same house. Do we have any conception of the relational work which will confront us? Of the envy and the necessity of a new kind of solidarity? The public spheres in the East and the West are still approaching the past and the future in a very indirect way. Distorted and twisted images of illusions are supposed to protect against disillusionment.
What we will need, by contrast, like the shared loaf of bread, are dis-illusioning dis- estrangements, the construction of relations among relatives, the birth of a shared language from the polyphony of history and artefact. Without doubt, we share more than we are aware of by way of shared cultures, and we are separated by half a continent.
Art as an artefact of the construction of relations, a compelling concept of the Federal Cultural Foundation. After thirteen years of the East’s opening which I have been able to help shape — in part as head of an institution[2] specialized in cultural relations between East and West — changes of paradigm have become urgent. First of all, because the expansion of the European Union internalizes the hitherto unknown dynamic of a dialectic between what is one's own and what is foreign, and no longer allows externalization. And secondly, because the national, bilateral models of co-operation have come to an end. Relations have become a European question, even though this does not seem to have happened in the reflection and reflexes of national politics. Here is not the place to give more precise reasons. Here I will assert rather than prove that the unimagined complexities of a shared future require the seismograph of art and the avant-garde, the laboratory of words, images, experiments without which societies will drown in materialism.
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Here is a paradox: a national (German) cultural foundation transcends the frame of national cultural diplomacy. Non-paradoxical: a new institution acts daringly as an incubator for risk-taking. I gladly accepted relations’ invitation to join the international advisory board. My work at the European Cultural Foundation[3] is oriented toward similar parameters. There are partners who are developing European projects and are promoting transnational innovation, but not very many.
* relations invests in the partner countries, in the freedom of artistic dis-estrangement — admirable and generous and rare.
> relations does not negate the origin of the means and the initial idea - realistic and not covering-up.
* relations ties together projects in the expansion countries and the countries still waiting for expansion, and that too is an advantage of the program, to think also about the exclusions, such as the Balkan countries, while proceeding with its approach of inclusion.
* relations ties back the projects, products and people to Germany. Europe emerges only in a local context, in the cities, galleries, workshops of local appropriation. Civil society and glocalization...
* relations communicates horizontally: the regions of the inside, the imminent inside and the still-outside all interact on a European plane through the probes of artefacts, through the art of free play in the realm of necessity.
relations is work on relations among relatives and it is a joyful experiment.
* In Vienna we would say, A scheene Verwandtschaft (a lovely bunch of relatives).
In Amsterdam I say, one more Free Haven.
Good luck!
Gottfried Wagner
Secretary General of the European Cultural Foundation
Amsterdam, 10 April 200
[1] Most recently published: Wolfgang Büscher: Berlin-Moskau. Eine Reise zu Fuß. (Berlin-Moscow. A Journey on Foot). Rowohlt 2003
[2] KulturKontakt Austria
[3] Founded by Denis de Rougemont in 1954 in Geneva. First president: Robert Schuman. Located in Amsterdam since 1960. Current president: Her Royal Highness, Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. International board with national committees in 23 countries. |