The project focuses on the (post)Yugoslav space as a paradigmatic case of exhausted geography,
which will be explored through artistic practices, curatorial projects, and art-theoretical research
referring to the notion of Yugoslavia before and after its dissolution. This still undefined and complex
geopolitical zone, consisting of new national post-war states (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia), functions as a zone of discomfort, as a
differential or counter-public space where theoretical, artistic, activist, as well as curatorial practices
occur and simultaneously produce both dislocation and new locations, while being given different
geopolitical names such as South-Eastern Europe, the Balkans or Former/Post/Ex-Yugoslavia.
Tracing the relation between todays art and contemporary art (as a historical category), the
(post)Yugoslav space and epistemology, the project questions ways of producing, situating, and
institutionalizing the public knowledge that this relation triggers. The process-orientated output of the
project is the living archive (an epistemological archive or interarchive) consisting of art-based
practices, theories, and research dealing with the problem of geographical belonging. The living
archive is developed as a normative process of dialectical analysis of conflicted ideas which concern
the exhausted geopolitical zone of the (post)Yugoslav space, researching both the geopolitics of art
and arts geographies. Using living archive as a (counter-)space, the project looks for political
subjectivation (the politics of belonging) rather than for (geo)political identification (the politics of
identity) of this still undomesticated knowledge.
Accordingly, the project interconnects theoretical insights with art and curatorial practices, especially
those which introduce geography into the sphere of political thinking and social life. Through
performative voices, visual inscriptions, and the aesthetic glitches of emerging artworks that produce
the politics of affect and politics of error, the project further develops an experimental methodology
for exploring new art or a differential one. Dealing with the impossibility to break through the
contemporary art systems and their exhausted geographies, the politics of error appears as a symptom
of the living art contemporaneity, in particular when it comes to the question of (post)ideological
participatory or collective practices. Introducing error as a new turn or, more precisely, counter-turn,
the project thus opens space for a new epistemology that deals with both: the geopolitics of art and art
geographies (resulting with an art-theory publication).
Both outputs of the project: the process-oriented living archive and the more outcome-oriented
publication have the same commitment habitation in the field of art theory or, more precisely, in the
field of the epistemology of art.