Helmut Draxler: The Crisis as Form. Project Cultures and the Fate of Critical Discourse

Curating as “reformatting” institutional models 

 

In my talk I will present as case study the Centre for Visual Culture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia, and how I conceptualized its new profile and methodology of work. 

When the Centre was established out of Museums’s educational department in the mid-1970s, its programmes were guided by the methodology of permanent education and grounded in an ideological conviction regarding the social role of the arts. The main aim of the Centre was “education through art”, and its activities comprised of a series of public seminars and lectures, held both inside the Museum and also in cooperation with schools, faculties, factories and public companies, with the goal to reach broadest public. This orientation reflected the socialist society of Yugoslavia of 1960s and 1970s that was marked by rapid urbanization and modernization of the country. 

Today, the profile and the role of the Centre had to be adjusted to the actual socio-political situation, but also to recent developments in art practices. The new strategy of the Centre was intended to continue local as well as international cooperation with professionals of various profiles and to create a platform for all of the contributors: an open laboratory where they could discuss issues surrounding contemporary art and its social function in relation to the contemporary art system and socio-political context that frames it. The Centre is thus oriented towards both long term research on topics developed and profiled by the engaged team, and towards education through public presentations and talks by team members and guest experts of the program. Above all, the idea of this working methodology is to create a melting pot for individual or group production, wherein professionals of different profile will be invited to critically address the issues suggested with the general topic of the Centre.

The first topic, put forward to the initial research group in 2006 was entitled Differentiated Neighbourhoods of New Belgrade. It espoused a very broad perspective, but its theoretical subtext was Henri Lefebvre’s idea about the possibility to create differentiated spaces (neighbourhoods) in opposition to neo-capitalist homogeneity. The context of transition in Serbia was important for the choice of Lefebvre as a reference, as the onset of neoliberal capitalist ventures in the urban core of Belgrade, and especially in New Belgrade, had the side effects of homogenisation and segregation in urban spaces, which effectively produced a situation that was similar to Lefebvre’s examples. The idea was to have a topic that would provide a good platform for the development of different approaches within the interdisciplinary working group—an ‘empty signifier’ to be filled with content throughout the working proces.

 

The second long term research project From Dionysian Socialism to Predatory Capitalism comprised of film, audio and space design workshop, respectively under tutorship of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, composer Miroslav Savić – Mipi, and visual artist and architect Milorad Mladenović. It has started with the premise that history is not simply a given fact but is always constructed, and thus may as well be reconstructed and deconstructed. The young participants to the workshops - filmmakers, composers, and architects - were invited to develop actively critical attitude concerning the way the history is written, and to infuse their creative efforts in respective media while working with materials from audio and film archives.