Editorial
"Heterotopias are real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted."
Michel Foucault: "Des espaces autres" (Of Other Spaces), 1967
After Foucault, we can think of a day when space will no longer be treated as sacred, a day when we will make the space profane and thus cease dividing our life into separate spheres defined by unalterable borders; a day when our anxiety of space will disappear. This does not mean that we wish to transfer the multiplicity of spaces we now inhabit into one, unique, homogenous, empty space. On the contratry, in this modern time and age we have the urge to create other spaces that exit in correlation with the multiplicity of spaces we inhabit, and at the same time they exist only to contradict this multitude. Thus we can think of a day when the space will be porous, and not divided. The first step forward would be to perceive that these other spaces are nothing else than spaces we live in.
We invite the artist on the "governmentalistic" research of the city, that is, discovering internal borders, antagonisms and frictions, in disclosure of the invisible mechanisms of force. To start from the aforementioned essay would mean to accept the possibility that there is a possibility to find differences and utopia in the existing spaces; spaces of heterotopias as a space where the resistance exists. After the structural changes in space - power relations, the changes provoked by the general political change in the neo-liberal forms of ruling, the modern city has mutated into a city of fragmented spaces. Homeless, criminals, poor, youngsters and other marginalized groups in our perception and knowledge represent a danger. But the new urban grammar demands contra-discourse and their heterotopias. Because the power of the heterotopias is in the possibility to revoke the reality, to oppose it and to annul it.
The programme will be realised in the public city spaces, to extend the domain of action out of protected walls of galleries and theatres and to animate the public space as space of coexistence, confrontation of different views and also possible antagonisms.
organized by: [BLOK] - Local base for culture refreshment is a non-profit and non-governmental organisation that produces and organizes innovative artistic events, woks on widening and changing public spaces through inspiring citizens participation, hybrid artistic research project focused on rethinking social phenomena and urban structure. [BLOK] works on creating and preserving continuum of artistic effect in the public space.