Locality
The roads linking the Balkans and the West
Keywords
beauty, labour, encounter, balkaning, communitization
Mode of travelling
By truck
Researchers
Dragan Teodosiev, Hana Milenkovska, Klelija Zivkovikj, Klementina Ristovska, Simeon Angelovski
Partner
SocioPatch
Stream of Research
Cultural Heritage and Cultural Practices / Migration and Labour
Cross-Cutting Issues
migration, ecology, identity and belonging, mobility, beauty
Stream of Research
Cultural heritage and Cultural Practices / Migration and Labour
Cross-Cutting Issues
migration, ecology, identity and belonging, mobility, beauty Glossary
влече за јазик (vlɛt͡ʃɛ za jazik) - to pull at someone’s tongue. To provoke someone to say out loud something that they’d rather restrain themselves from saying. It can be used both for saying something positive or negative, but it is usually used in the context of being provoked to enter a confrontation.
to balkan - to think and act in a continuous pursuit of reclaiming the term Balkan, of becoming capable to celebrate, respect and own the Balkan experience, collective creations and ways of being. Ex. I’m tired of doubting everything Balkan and seeing it as less, I want to start balkaning.”
Myth
Myth 1: Work/life in the West is your best chance for success and happiness. Choosing to stay in your home country is choosing failure, so you must always be facing Westward (со една нога у странство = “with one foot abroad” an often used phrase when someone asks you “How do you do?/What do you work?/How’s life”...)
Myth 2: The full organization of our society, our physical and social environment, will only become livable and orderly if we keep Performing the West. Eventually, we’ll get there. For now, we are still on the losing side.
A(rt)pproaches
Conversation as doing, Tongue as a weapon, Beauty as a guide for our joined effort. Terms of Encounter
Dragan Teodosiev, Hana Milenkovska, Klelija Zivkovikj, Klementina Ristovska, Simeon Angelovski
For the most part, our process unfolded in the black mirror. We embraced online meetings as our main space for creation. We talked, reflected and added on each others’ thoughts, expressed, evolved, grew, wrote as we talked — cooked noodles — and then talked some more. Instinctively following a Balkan tradition of storytelling, we unconsciously created our art research narrative as we kept talking. Viber is a mobile application widely used in the Balkans. Truck drivers and trucking dispatchers use it daily to communicate. We used it to temporarily resettle from Skopje to Denis’s truck cabin, горе (see Glossary Entry 01), somewhere on the French highways.
Intimate, cigarette-smokey, flat listening sessions, where sounds were born, thread after thread, music was listened to, silences were comfortable, dry humor bits were uttered and enjoyed amid discussions on belonging, art and the Balkan identity. Доле, a Kriva Palanka бавча picnic up in the mountains, and a гозба in Kavadarci, on Tikvesko Lake, with ракија и скара in the vineyards, made up the North-South tips of our truck drivers’ interviews map.
Upon receiving the instruction to “work with a community” during the research process, we followed an inkling to interview truck drivers and get acquainted with their views and feelings of the Balkans and their job. In retrospect, what probably sparked our interest in truck drivers was a kind of revolt against the “communitization” of parts of The Balkans and the tendency to burden it with a quest for universality so it can be neatly packaged and presented in the context of a project. We felt like we were expected to “be Balkan” and prove the very stereotypes for The Balkans which we were tasked with dismantling/deconstructing.
We felt that the misconceptions of a Balkan person in the West converge in the image of the gastarbeiter. As artists and researchers, our experiences of living and/or working within the EU, or between the EU and The Balkans, didn’t resemble it. However, given the history of Balkan people moving to countries in the EU as a cheap labour force across sectors and industries, we could see significant overlaps with our experience of exporting our labour to the EU through EU funded projects.
Resilience, resistance and beauty
Using music and text, our research team wove together the words and sounds of truck drivers and artists into a story of labour and beauty conveying the conflicting desires and urges which drive our decision-making as workers, who are often targeted as a “community” within the context of contemporary art and culture production.
The testimonies of the truck drivers are juxtaposed with our own in a spoken word performance, with the purpose of representing our subjectivity in this process, as well as in the parallel one of working on the project Some Call Us Balkans.
As we are distilling myths and misconceptions, both our own and the ones about us, our work tells the story of how subjectivity is continuously forged, and how it in turn serves as a foundation for a relationship to an Other.
The process of decision making which took place within our team during the research in action phase inspired us to articulate a document stating our Terms of Encounter, which we prepared to act as ground zero, both for taking responsibility and for setting boundaries.
The process
A series of talks with four truck drivers coupled with unsuccessful attempts to arrange interviews and visits to sites important for the community alerted us to the need for more time necessary to invest in building a genuine connection with them. This led us to a mid-process grounding in our capacity, or lack thereof, to see this process through as we conceived it without compromising its quality and integrity. Our capacity was impeded by our growing frustrations at being unable to afford the time our work merits.
A continuous thread during the process, our meetings over Skype emerged as a prime site for growth in a professional and personal sense and forging the research direction. These talks, at times resembling support group therapy sessions, enabled our emotional processing to happen and our experiences to materialise as a valid and integral part of the output.
Monologue - We felt “pulled at our tongues” (see Glossary Entry 5) and talked back
Split into three acts, the monologue is a train of thought, constructed from the discarded notes taken during the research process. Built using a few different Augusto Boal and Brechtian techniques, it follows the trajectory of the inner conflict brought on by the tendency to consent to precarious working conditions and the passion for creating beauty and community which has been our core motivation. Looking back, the monologue writing process emerges as the culmination of a persistent effort to talk back (to reply quickly and often rudely to something that someone says) to the cop in our heads. Having identified moments of kinship in the stories of our interviewees added to our readiness and confidence in talking back. Composing it and eventually witnessing it come alive during the performance marked a catharsis in our process.
Externalizing the inner dialogue each of us leads with our own internalized oppressors helps us hone the arguments and become clearer on where the anger and frustrations come from, where the bitterness ends and personal accountability begins.
The monologue as an artwork was the vessel for coming face-to-face with the bones and tiles of our internalised oppressive structures – witnessing its performance allowed us to check ourselves, distinguish what “the Monster” is made of, where and why the oppression hurts us, how to begin the process of healing, so we can start producing new tools for dialogue with ourselves and the Other.
Video
Terms of Encounter – Monologue (12’44’’)
Shot by Mila Stardelova, Actor Martin Gjorgoski, Courtesy by SocioPatch, CC BY-SA 4.0
Soundscape - We know what The Balkans are, and if you allow us we might just show you
When we speak of what The Balkans is to us we describe sensations, and wax poetic about our belonging as something which we feel in our blood and heartbeat. This is not an argument which has been in service to our pursuit to be taken seriously, but rather one which has labeled us emotional and chaotic.
Yet, we stand by the idea that belonging is not rational, and to attempt to rationalize it is to alienate it from all the beauty it can hold.
Therefore, our starting point was to try and understand the sounds which can be encountered in the cabin of a truck en route between the EU and The Balkans, and inhabited by a Balkan driver. How is comfort achieved through sound? In which way is belonging called upon for comfort? Some drivers spoke of how driving refrigerating trucks was calming, the sound of the motor of the refrigerator acting as white noise which helps them fall asleep in the evenings. Others spoke of music being distracting when they are on a long drive, and preferring wordless melodies, while others told us of songs which go straight to their hearts, keeping them stimulated on the road.
We researched the music which can be found under the genre “камионџиска” or “шоферска”, and created a collections of sounds by way of dissecting, analyzing and extracting meaning from this cultural phenomenon. The resulting soundscape is a piece of original music which asks for your consent to try and show you the way of The Balkans.
„Listening to the music of the Balkans, you soon notice the strange meter. Many 'skewed' (limping) time signatures come from the East. The 7/8 time is said to come from India. The beautiful 10/8 time signature comes from Armenia and Iran. In western Turkey, Greece and Egypt the 9/8 size is widely used. In classical art music, 9/4 and 10/4 time are common. All these time signatures also ended up in the Balkans via the Turks. But in Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and Macedonia it is even more colorful. There you will encounter 5/8, 11/16, 13/16, 15/16, 18/16, 25/16 and even 28/16 time signatures. It sounds more unlikely than it is. The local musicians and singers use these time signatures quite often and regularly, like pants that fit them exactly and the local farmers have no trouble dancing flawlessly on them. Precisely because these very strange time signatures occur in the Bulgarian and Greek remote mountain regions and not in Turkey, we must assume that the strangest time signatures are authentic from the Balkans. Since we do not have written music sources from before 1300, it is not easy to determine which rhythms originate from the East and which do not. However, if we take old rhythmic lines of poetry as a starting point (for example Homer), it is clear that limping time signatures were indeed used in (Greek) antiquity. It is therefore very likely that many of the skewed time signatures do indeed have a European source.“* Soundscape
Presenting the SoundScape of Terms of Encounter by SocioPatch (23’05’’)
Sound by Dragan Teodosiev & Simeon Angelovski, CC BY-SA 4.0
Participative event in Skopje
Since the beginning of the project, it was crucial to us to discover and create ways to involve the audience in our process, both as a way to expose our findings to the public, and to communicate the importance of the perspectives our work holds.
Контекст
Koj
Our team of artists-researchers and other collaborators – one social designer, one theatre director, one critical theorist, two musicians/composers/sound designers, one actor, and one camera person
Клелија Живковиќ, Хана Миленковска, Клементина Ристевска, Драган Теодосиев, Симеон Ангеловски, Мартин Ѓоргоски, Мила Старделова
Каде
Мал локален бизнис. Кафе книжарница Буква (which would translate to „Letter“ in English) во центарот на градот- продаваат книги само од мали издавачки куќи. Служат кафе, но и алкохол и работат до полноќ. Веднаш до Кино Култура, една од поважните културни локации во градот, затскриена во брезите зад Домот на Армијата и Собранието на Република Македонија, спроти спорната црква која е „во изградба“ поради растурен тендер веќе една декада, дијагонално од спомен куќата на Мајка Тереза која е критикувана поради стилот кој потсетува на графиките на Ешер, а самата „Буква“ е во градба за која пак Гауди и Хундертвасер се главната инспирација на сопственикот.
Having produced two pieces of performative art, we hosted an event with the purpose of performing both for the local audience in Skopje. During the event, the audience was introduced to our process through a simple participatory activity: each table had pieces of paper which had a question written on them.
Each question was one of the many questions we asked ourselves during this process, and inviting the public to answer them was an opportunity to reevaluate both our standpoints and findings.
Балканците се ....................................................................................................................... На Балканот .......................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................... како балканец. Балкански ............................................................................................................................. Кој ти е омилен балкански израз?
Дали и кога ти се случува да си од Балкан?
Дали и кога ти се случува да си камионџија?
Што ти паѓа на памет кога ќе чуеш камионџија?
Дали познаваш камионџија?
Камионџиите се ................................................................................................................... Камионџиски ….................................................................................................................... .................................................................................................................. како камионџија. Со камионџии ...................................................................................................................... Што ти паѓа на памет кога чуеш Балкан?
Структура на нашиот процес
Експозиција: Decision to work on the project – We are reclaiming our voices as Balkan subjects.
Заплет: Decision to choose truck drivers as a community – We see the perception of a Balkan person in the West layered in the image of the gastarbeiter
Кулминација: Decision to ground in our capacity – We cannot afford the time our work merits.
Перипетија: Decision to introduce our subjectivity – We stop trying to act iznad situacije (if the Balkans is in turmoil, so are we)
Расплет: Decision to redefine the terms – We are claiming a common future
Retouching is our favorite artistic device. Each of us is a curator in his own museum. [..] Uncover A, cover up B. Remove all spots. Keep your mouth shut. Think of your tongue as a weapon. Think one thing and say another. Use round expressions to obfuscate your intentions. Hide what you believe. Believe what you hide. – D. Ugresic**
Terms of Encounter
Each party takes decisions along the way that ultimately define the way one participates in the encounter. Not all parties have the same liberty (the power or scope to act as one pleases) to make decisions.
(0. Our names matter. We should learn to pronounce them correctly.)
1. Our voices belong to us.
2. Our lived experiences are not a subject of interpretation.
3. Each party bears responsibility for the way they participate. Acknowledging the asymmetry in resources and symbolic capital each brings into the relation is where responsibility begins.
4. We revolt against the stereotype of the Balkan worker. We embrace the stereotype of the Balkan worker.
5. We prioritise a quality resource distribution in the process over an emphasis on delivery and preset markers for success.
6. Capacity building is not a currency. We expect to build our capacities through work, not as compensation for our work.
7. We cannot find community without clarity in our own subjectivity first. Good intentions are problematic. Kinship instead of community.
8. Transformation is turbulent, ugly at times and packed with self-doubt.
9. We choose to explore the gravity of beauty and authorizе it to shape the outcome of our joint effort.
Notes
* Crispijn Oomes , ‘Een musicologische analyse van Osmaanse invloeden op Balkanmuziek’, www.donaustroom.eu/een-musicologische-analyse-van-osmaanse-invloeden-op-balkanmuziek, 2007
** Ugrešić, Dubravka, “The Ministry of Pain”, Ecco, 2007
Literature references
Audre Lorde - Zami: A new spelling of my name
Paulo Freire - Pedagogy of the oppressed
Paulo Freire - Education for critical consciousness
Augusto Boal - Games for actors and non actors
Augusto Boal - Rainbow of desire
Bertolt Brecht - Dialectics of Theater
Silvio Lorusso - Entreprecariat
Dubravka Ugresic - The museum of unconditional surrender
Dubravka Ugresic - The culture of lies
Franco Cassano - Mediterranean thought
Donna J. Haraway - Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene
Bruce Mau’s Incomplete manifesto for growth
Bertolt Brecht - Five difficulties in writing the truth
Artwork references
Bogomir Doringer - AJNHAJTCLUB - https://bogomirdoringer.info/ajnhajtclub
Akhram Khan & Sidi Larbi - Zero Degrees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQG9BTW5AE&ab_channel=AkramKhanCompany
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui - https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidi_Larbi_Cherkaoui
Safet Isovic Hej Soferi 1969 - Safet Isovic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQoMNjmxrc&ab_channel=StarePesme
Mali Amer 2019 - SOFERI i DISPECERI (Uzivo) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2dGJ1oj498&ab_channel=XMaliAmerX
Blue frog society - Barbara Holub - http://www.barbaraholub.com/the-blue-frog-society.html
