COLLECTIVE DREAM THAT IS BECOMING REAL

The Third Belgrade, Belgrade

By: Bojan Krištofić

Big city suburbs in the post-socialist Balkans are deteriorated and messy which presents, along with all the flaws of unplanned urbanisation, a sort of an oasis of slower rhythm opposite to rushed and loud city centres. Where huge blocks of buildings disappear and fast motorways run over slow and muddy rivers, it is still possible to sit down and think; to do something sensible for your community and for yourself, here far away from all the noise and fanfares – to make your own nest, quite literally. Last spring, in Belgrade’s suburbs, an unusual art association used this opportunity, which city’s urban planning calls the Third Belgrade. They chose the northern bank of Danube, Pančevački path, to create their own ‘’mental and physical space for art’’ and to discover possibility of utopia in contemporary post-transition, capitalist, post-modern social context. They opened their own gallery, work and living space.

The Gallery and the association were founded by Selman and Sead Trtovac, who gathered artists in 2009 and according to architect Milorad Mladenović’s blue-prints started to build modern buildings, radically extracted from the rest of the environment around the river but also unobtrusively hidden among exotic vegetation of the area. The building is not yet finished due to a lack of funding, but the Gallery on the ground floor was opened in 2011, together with a kitchen, guest-rooms, a library and offices on the first floor. Although the final date on the building has not been determined, creativity around the Third Belgrade is already flourishing. Work invested into this project was not only intuitive, nor was it a result of a sudden reaction on the contemporary position of art. Reasons for these determined actions can be read in essays written by members of Third Belgrade, which they started to publish soon after the association was founded.

In their manifest and in their code Third Belgrade – Foundation, Activities, Actions 2009 – 2011, (Publication 3BGD, Belgrade 2012), artists illustrate their definition of Utopia by quoting an American philosopher Frederick Jameson, who says that Utopia means ‘’a presentation of society’s contradictions and an attempt to define an enclave (social differentiations) within a social area’’. Relying on theories of mainly liberal social and art philosophers of the second half of the 20^th century, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Michaela Hardt and Antonio Negri, members of Third Belgrade regard their artistic position in the context of ‘’resistance to post-modern fragmentation’’, i.e. resisting the fragmentised, hidden system of power and exploitation in modern society, especially in region of post-Yugoslavian countries, that wrestle the worst variation of this system in Western suburbia. On the other hand, a traveller with good intentions that finds himself on the muddy banks of Danube should not be frightened by the demanding and detailed political discussion. Artists use theory as encouragement and argument, a tool that sets their work in its rightful context and place in history, connecting them to fellow artists in other countries. Third Belgrade’s connections with other counties have already given results – for instance, cooperation with Swiss artists Valerian Malyem and Klara Schilliger, who are in Belgrade, creating a monumental sculpture for the Gallery, in a shape of a ginger (Monument Ginger-society Belgrade), illustrating model of non-hierarchy connecting and spreading, immanent for Third Belgrade.

The work presented by the artists during the last year in their, but also our Gallery, is far away from lingustic issues of conceptual practice. They express artists’ political positions and poetic refinement of their approach through warmth of the space, close cooperation within their community, by performance in style of Beuys’s key of social sculpture, i.e. creativity that includes openness, directness, curiosity and responsible approach towards the community. Titles of Third Belgrade’s performances and installations speak of their intentions – Collective Dream 1 & 2, A Warm Place or Lunch on the Grass. In Collective Dream members of association sleep in the Gallery or nap under blankets; in A Warm Place they set a number of old domestic wood burning stoves throughout the Gallery and invite visitors – friends and neighbours – to join them, get warm and hang out; in Lunch on the Grass artists took photographs of their summer meal in Gallery’s garden and presented it as a moment of a relaxed catharsis in the monotony of everyday life, as an opened collective exchange of emotions and experiences then and there. Most of Third Belgrade’s art actions are documentations of process of creating this Utopian project, this enclave that is connecting with other similar areas on the banks of Danube around Belgrade (museum Macura, ITS-Z1 – Ritopek, Small Art Centre in Zemun – ZMUC), creating what some already know as ‘’Danube’s art rute’’. These small galleries and art studios are scattered from Novi Banovci to Zemun, and they exist only thanks to work and enthusiasm of few individuals who wanted to offer a clear alternative to the old system of exhibitions and discussing contemporary art (especially to help young artist), that is independent from superior, corrupted institutions of the State. For an example, Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art has been under renovation for years and there is still no fixed date of its finalisation, which makes it clear that new, informal gallery spaces like Third Belgrade are more than welcome. Third Belgrade is not only a gallery, but a place for learning, socialisation and cooperation, whose main aim is to affirm ethnic and aesthetic norms that seem to be disappearing from the modern society.

These associations and actions can only serve as a good example for artists throughout the region and as guidelines what art can become if it stays inside autistic self-isolation and predictable communication with its public – it becomes dangerous for art itself. Furthermore, transformation of forgotten spaces in suburbia or building new ones in rural areas is a true act of resistance towards centralisation of cultural resources and connection of these small enclaves, as the ones on the banks of the Danube, is a social engagement  par excellence, according to maxim by William Blake: ‘’I must create my own system or become enslaved by the existing one’’. Third Belgrade’s artists and their friends have firmly decided not to be enslaved in the most important part – their art and their creative work.