“Reality Check – How we perceive and construct the world through media” is the theme of this year’s call for cross-border school projects. The competition is organised by the Academy of Central European Schools – aces, one of the largest international school networks in the region.

Mass media – and especially digital media – offer broad access to information and new ways of participation in society, politics and culture but, at the same time, also carry the risk of manipulation. Cyber-bullying, violations of privacy and personal rights or copyright issues are only some of the challenges. In this context media literacy is a crucial factor for active citizenship in today’s information society: It is a repertoire of competences that enable people to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate an increasingly wide range of messages using image, text and sound. Media education empowers young and old to develop these skills and to become wise consumers and creative producers. Therefore this year’s call focuses on media literacy and invites schools to encourage students to analyze media content and to create and distribute their own media products.

Schools from Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic and Slovenia are invited to find a partner school and to apply. An international jury will select the best projects and the winners will be awarded with a grant. Together with the partners, the schools will implement their joint project idea. They receive support during the implementation phase and are invited to international network meetings. An online partner finder (available on www.aces.or.at) helps schools to search for the “ideal match”, according to common interests and requirements.

Project proposals can be submitted until April 30, 2012.

Detailed information you will find at: www.aces.or.at

Exhibition at PLATFORMA (MNAC-Anexa) Calea Mosilor 62-68, etaj 1, Bucuresti

1 – 19 February 2012
Opening on 1 February, 6:00 p.m.

WITNESSES XXI – REVISITING THE PAST is a collection of video interviews with artists, art critics and art historians who played a key role on the Romanian art scene before 1989. They answer questions referring to the artistic, politic and social context of those years, to their personal projects and opportunities to exhibit, to censorship and its effects on the artistic creation, to issues related to art education (discussing about teachers who had a major influence in their formation, about their colleagues, about the access and the nature of the sources of information during the 60s, 70s and 80s, etc).

The project is coordinated by Aurora Király, based on a concept developed together with Iosif Király. The interviews were conducted by four young art critics and curators: Raluca Nestor, Cristiana Radu, Magda Radu and Oana Tănase. The questions were answered by: Geta Brătescu, Magda Cârneci, Constantin Flondor, Mircea Florian, Ion Grigorescu, Peter Jacobi, Wanda Mihuleac, Mihai Oroveanu, Alexandra Titu, Gheorghe Vida, Ileana Vlasiu.

4 – 11 February 2012
Opening 4 February 2012 , 4 pm
The National and University Library of Kosovo
Trg Hasan Pristina, Pristina

Club Alpbach Belgrade and Initiative Group Alpbach Kosovo are warmly welcoming you to the opening of €uroXibition.

Groups of young academics, professionals and students, members of Club Alpbach Belgrade (CAB) and Initiative Group Alpbach Kosovo (IGAK), members of European Forum Alpbach, tried to shape the European present and future of the region and contribute to the development of leaders in various fields, among them cultural exchange.

The main idea of the exhibition is to demonstrate willingness and ways of cooperation between youths from Kosovo and Serbia through the cultural exchange. Ten photographers (five from Belgrade and five from Pristina) were chosen to make photos and capture symbolism of the EU and Europe in their environment; usage of Euro sign (€) and words such as: ‘Euro’ and ‘Europe’ for various purposes (e.g. shops, buildings, marketing, etc.).

During the project the chosen photographers participated in two workshops organised in Belgrade and Pristina, aimed to bring them closer together, enhance their cooperation in the working process and intensify exchange of ideas. Lectures by eminent photographers and facilitators from Serbia and Kosovo helped not just bringing the results of photographers work in one place during the exhibition, but also initiated cooperation and communication during the entire project implementation process.

Exhibition will also be presented in Belgrade in March and in Alpbach during the European Forum Alpbach 2012.

For more information visit Klub Alpbach Belgrade on Facebook

Cynthia L. Haven

Hot New Social Media Maybe Not so New: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Imagine there’s no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Internet at all. What would you do? How would you communicate? How would you stay in touch with others? Maybe you would do what people did in the 17th and 18th centuries: write letters and little notes, read posters and newspapers, host discussion circles and salons. The Age of Enlightenment was a laboratory for new forms of communication. They are the predecessors of today’s social media. Cynthia Haven on the information explosion before Facebook, Twitter and Co.

If you feel overwhelmed by social media, you’re hardly the first. An avalanche of new forms of communication similarly challenged Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries. “In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” said Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of Stanford University’s “BiblioTech program.” “It was an early modern version of information overload.”

The Copernican Revolution, the invention of the printing press, the exploration of the New World – all needed to be digested over time. There was a lot of catching-up to do. “It was a dynamic, troubling, messy period,” she said.

Public postal systems became the equivalent of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and smartphones. Letters crisscrossed Paris by the thousands daily. Voltaire was writing 10 to 15 letters a day. Dramatist Jean Racine complained that he couldn’t keep up with the aggressive letter writing. His inbox was full, so to speak.

Stanford’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters project,” which forms part of the context for Saint-Jude’s remarks, shows that 40 percent of Voltaire’s letters were sent to correspondents relatively close by.

What was everyone saying? Not necessarily much. Rather like today’s email. “It was the equivalent of a phone call, inviting someone to tea or saying, ‘OMG, did you know about the Duke?’” said Dan Edelstein, an associate professor of French and the principal investigator for the project.

Clearly, something had changed: Commercial postal services were on the rise. Though their prototypes had existed down through the centuries, they had mostly served government officials, and later (via the Medicis, for example) merchant and banking houses. Suddenly they were carrying private correspondence. More people were writing, and more people could respond quickly, not only with friends and family, but across far-flung distances with people they had never met, and never would. Rather like some of our Facebook friends.

According to Saint-Jude, it was an era, like ours, of “hyper-writing,” even addictive writing. The aristocratic Madame de Sévigné wrote 1,120 letters to her married daughter in Brittany, beginning in the late 1670s, until her death in 1696. It was important to keep her kid up to date with the goings-on in Paris. Although she is remembered today for her witty epistles, she never intended them to be saved, let alone published.

For a time, the streets of Paris were littered with little bits of papers – les billets – filled with a few words of scabrous and politically defamatory verse that were thrown to the public. Sound like Twitter?

The little bits of paper in your pocket could cause big trouble – Voltaire landed in jail for his verse. Nonetheless, these short, anonymous postings bypassed the government censor. It was also a way of organizing uprisings. Edelstein points out that Egyptian social networks were critical to coordinating demonstrators and drawing large crowds this year.

Indeed, he noted that social networks are key to almost all revolutions. “The Egyptian youth organizers may have excelled at mobilizing people at a moment’s notice, but interestingly it’s another kind of social network that seems to be taking advantage of the post-revolutionary situation – the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

“This network may be less agile, but it has created longer and better sustained bonds between members over time.” Unlike Facebook networks that almost anyone can join, the Brotherhood echoed the older, more exclusive networks that vetted prospective members, such as France’s Jacobin clubs. “Flash mobs quickly splinter into cacophony,” Edelstein told an assembly of incoming freshmen at Stanford last month.

What is public? What is private? More correspondence meant that letters could fall into the wrong hands. Laclos‘ epistolary novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, showed the dangers and disgrace that could befall the writers of wayward correspondence. In our own era, need we mention the fate that befell the indiscreet Republican Anthony Weiner?

Meanwhile, modern journalism was born, via a precursor of the blog. Nobles, such as Cardinal Mazarin, hired their own “journalists” to report on scandal and sex in the city. These writers set up bureaus around Paris to get the juiciest news, and it was written and copied and distributed to subscribers. Literary reviews and newspapers soon blossomed, along with letters to the editor and a new environment of literary and cultural criticism.

These new networks flexed a new kind of media punch. For example, Edelstein noted that across the ocean in America, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 2. The news was published in a newspaper on the legendary 4th. “What we’re really celebrating is not the fact that 56 men signed the declaration, but rather that a new network of people emerged around the published declaration – a network that would ultimately become the United States,” he said.

The poster was invented to invite more and more people to more and more public events – theater, for example, became the dominant art form in the 17th century. Posters mobilized these slow-motion “flash mobs.”

The new spaces we have created are virtual, not physical. But the physical spaces of the 17th century and Enlightenment were just as much of a psychological earthquake – l’Académie française, l’Académie des sciences, the celebrated salons. That large groups of people were getting together to chat about literature, discovery, ideas, revolution, or simply to watch a show, was a change from the carefully manicured guest lists of the court, where the principal order of business was big-time sucking up.

These spaces evoked new questions: How does one conduct oneself? How does one appear to others? Managing your public profile became vital. The result? A new self-consciousness was born, and a new social nervousness. The players had the same questions we have today, said Saint-Jude: “How do you curate all this information?”

——————————

Cynthia L. Haven is an American writer and journalist. She has contributed, amongst others, to the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post Book World, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Recently, her book An Invisible Rope:Portraits of Czesław Miłosz was published. She is also the author of Czesław Miłosz:Conversations and Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven. In 2008 she was a Milena Jesenská Fellow at IWM.

Visit Cynthia’s blog at: http://bookhaven.stanford.edu

The Milena Jesenská Blog with all posts can be found here.

IWM, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by the author & World Literature Today. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author and World Literature Today.

Working on an investigation about communities in the Balkans? Don’t miss your chance to scoop a €2,000 journalism bursary, receive travel and research expenses and attend career development seminars in Vienna and Skopje.

Experienced journalists from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia are invited to apply for the sixth annual Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence programme.

Each year, ten journalists are chosen, through open competition, to receive funding and professional support to conduct further research into a topic of regional and EU significance – for 2012 the subject is communities. Fellows are expected to deliver investigative stories of no more than 2,000 words that will inform regional readers about issues that have not been covered by the media before. Applicants selected by an independent committee to take part in the fellowship will receive a €2,000 bursary, up to another €2,000 for travel and research expenses and will attend career development seminars in Vienna and Skopje. In addition, the top three articles, again judged by an independent committee, will attract awards of €4,000, €3,000 and €1,000. Completed articles will be published in English and local languages in regional and European online and print media.

Annual Topic: Communities
Applicants are encouraged to consider the annual theme, communities, in a broad sense. Candidates should examine different groupings – political, economic, national, gender, generational – and the relationship between them, external influences and the development of entirely new groups or factions.Ensure you think about your story’s significance not just in your home country, but also in at least one other regional state and within the European Union. Choose phenomena that are relevant, current and original.

Click here to find out what 2011 Fellowship programme winner, Juliana Koleva, has to say about the programme and here to read useful tips by alumni fellow Nikoleta Popkostadinova.

The fellowship was established in 2007 by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ERSTE Foundation, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, to promote journalistic excellence and advance balanced coverage of complex reform issues that have regional and European Union significance.

The closing date for applications is March 5, 2012. The application form, guidelines and further information about the fellowship are available online:  fellowship.birn.eu.com

To learn more about the Fellowship watch “I am a Dreamer”

Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986, Germany) is now considered as one of the most influential artists of the 21^st Century, though or because his work produced controversial debates about contemporary art and the socio-political commitment of artists in the 1970s and 1980s. Today his approach seems more relevant than ever. 

Young art students from Banja Luka, Brno, Kosice, Novi Sad, Pécs and Wroclaw are invited to deal with the validity of Beuys’ artistic approaches to today’s society, to develop new art works, interventions and performances that deal critically with Beuys’ ideas and/or that are influenced by them. They are encouraged to deal artistically with current social and political issues and their interrelation.

Altogether 6 students, one from each city, will be chosen and get the possibility to realize their project ideas and to get in touch with the local art scene in Pécs. The students will be awarded with a fee (300 Euro per person). Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers, as well as an allowance for production and material costs. 

 “I know no weekend” is supported by ERSTE Foundation, Goethe-Institut and Robert Bosch Stiftung.
For further information on the application, please visit the project’s website.

Rundek Cargo Trio is a sort of Balkan gothic cabaret, worldwide, full of sound and fury, defying any attempt of categorisation. It was funded by Darko Rundek, one of the main exponents of the former Yugoslav New Wave in the early 80´s who left Zagreb to Paris during the civil war and who seems forever scarred by the apocalyptic state of mind that characterised this conflict.

Rundek Cargo Trio performed at the European Forum Alpbach in August 2011, upon invitation of ERSTE Foundation and on the occasion of the annual Foundation Community gathering.

We invited the Trio to our premises to tell us their story. It is a story about exile, migration, wars, diversity, new beginnings…a story about the social and political reality of our times.

Vukša Veličković

Inside Gaddafi’s Tent: the Colonel’s Yugoslav Connection

Libyan dictator Muammar al Gaddafi is no more. However, until his very end, he kept close ties with Serbian and Croatian politicians. A Yugoslav connection with tradition. Back in the 1970s, Josip Broz Tito had been a close friend. For the majority of post-Yugoslav states, Gaddafi remained a persona grata as they had tangible economic interests in the North African region.

As the leading country of the Non-Aligned movement during the Cold War era, Tito’s Yugoslavia kept close ties with North African regimes: individuals like Hosni Mubarak and Muammar al Gaddafi figured prominently as political partners and Tito’s personal friends.

Gaddafi’s Libya was particularly engaged in this bilateral economic and cultural cooperation. Among the many African students who regularly attended Yugoslav universities, the Libyans were perhaps the most distinctive. In 1981, a group of Libyan students formed a band called Green Wings, releasing an LP in Belgrade appropriately called Jamahiriya, sung in an obscure mix of Arabic and Serbo-Croatian:

In the same way he had been on good terms with some Western leaders, Gaddafi remained persona grata for the majority of post-Yugoslav states. The countries continued to keep ties with the colonel’s regime, promoting industrial links in the North African region. Apparently, Serbia was (and still is) interested in selling weapons, building armament factories and military hospitals in Libya, whereas Bosnians are currently entering the Libyan construction business, and the Croatians already have nine registered companies in the country, employing 500 workers.

During the 1990s, Gaddafi remained loyal to his fellow autocrat, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, backing Orthodox Serbs against the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims. He was seen with former Croatian and Bosnian leaders Stipe Mesić and Haris Silajdžić, as well as with the recently elected president of Kosovo, Behgjet Pacolli and the current Serbian president Boris Tadić. Tadić’s last visit to Gaddafi’s tent was in April 2010, when he congratulated the colonel on his 41 years in power. The previous year, Muammar had presented Boris with a medal.

Although not everyone managed to win Gaddafi’s heart. In what would turn out to be a diplomatic disaster in 2010, Kosovar president Pacolli flew his entire staff to the desert to try to persuade the dictator to change his pro-Serbian stance on the issue of Kosovo’s independence. The Economist reported that upon their arrival to his tent, Gaddafi ordered Pacolli and his staff to sing and dance. When they ran out of tunes, he dismissed them “with words to the effect that he would never recognise Kosovo as long as their leaders remained American poodles.”

And, to some extent, he managed to keep his promise. In the meantime, the Serbian nationalists had opened a Facebook page under the title “Support for Muammar al Gaddafi from the people of Serbia.” The page currently has more than 76,000 likes, about the size of a small Serbian city. Who knows, if only they had all flown to the desert to fight the rebels, their beloved colonel might still be alive today.

————————

Vukša Veličković is a Serbian writer, journalist and cultural critic. He is Creative Director and Editor-in-chief of Bturn magazine and contributes frequently to, among others, Prestup magazine and B92.net. He is also a performing artist and the author of two novels, Gužva (“Crowd”) and Vrt Uzivanja (“Garden of Pleasure”). In 2008, he was a Milena Jesenská Fellow at the IWM in Vienna.

The Milena Jesenská Blog with all posts can be found here.

IWM, 2011. Copyright © 2011 by the author & the IWM. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically, in whole or in part, without written permission from the IWM.

We support course development, study visits, literature purchases, guest lectures, student excursions and publications connected with the courses. A group of four international advisors will select 12 unversity courses from the applications submitted.

PATTERNS is a transnational programme that aims to research and understand recent cultural history. It commissions and supports contemporary cultural projects in a variety of formats and media. PATTERNS aims to document, analyse and investigate different aspects of and practices related to the transformation of daily life and culture in Central and South Eastern Europe, while accounting for the pluralities that characterise the region. The initiative focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, as well as on the “transition” period leading up to the present.

The call for submissions will be open from 30 January to 19 March 2012.

All application documents including guidelines will be available for download on 30 January at www.patternslectures.org.

For more information visit:
www.patternslectures.org
www.erstestiftung.org/project/patterns-lectures

Paul Celan Visiting Fellows are invited to spend three to six months at the IWM between July 2012 and June 2013 to pursue their translation projects while working in residence at the Institute. Fellows receive a monthly stipend in the amount of EUR 2,250 to cover all expenses related to the stay in Vienna. The IWM provides a personal office with internet access, in-house research facilities and other relevant resources in Vienna. Paul Celan Visiting Fellows participate in the scholarly community and activities of the IWM.

Deadline for application is 25 March 2012.
Please click here for more information about the call.