From diaspora to diversities. The mission statement of the team running a „World Culture Center" named „Esperanza" („Hope") in Skopje (Macedonia) contains: „World Culture is an open, diverse, pluralistic, non-hierarchical aggregate of cultural practices, communicating among themselves through structural or incidental, systemic or programmatic, hierarchical or subversive cultural policies, economic undertakings or social movements."

Robert Alagjozovski marked the starting point of a collaborative project with a sentence of philosopher Etienne Balibar: "Europe always remains heterogeneous and differs from itself as much as it differs from others". It seems, after a short period of nationalism, we forgot what made Europe. As contemporary art practice is not suitable to an ideology of closed borders, we search for dialog and collaboration with people who made complete different experiences growing up in quite different societies. So we are linked to a project, the Esperanza-Crew developed:

Robert Alagjozovski

From diaspora to diversities.
Transformative action for diasporic art&cultural diversity management

It will start next summer and end in april 2017: "The project ‚From diaspora to diversities’ was inspired by the urgent necessity to address the diasporic art practices originating from Western Balkans artists. It would initiate new understanding of the diasporic notions that would diminish the old-fashioned abuse by the nationalistic circles."

We got to take responsibility on the local and regional public debates: „The discourse of diaspora and artistic practices of diasporic subjects have mainly been used by the nationalistic cultural and political elites in the region."

Esperanza started to create a cooperative platform of cultural managers, artists, theoreticians, curators that would apply change in the broader socio-political understanding of diaspora, exploring and enabling artistic and cultural diasporic practices, helping their visibility and fostering their integration as dialogical cultural diversity in both new and old homelands.

Esperanza goes for raising critical discussion and knowledge transfer regarding the notions of diaspora. We get part of this mission to explore artistic and curatorial practices based on diasporic concepts and subjectivity. This means also prooving the antiquated way of thinking, that is establishing an 19th century-kind of center-province-relationship.

So the team asked: „Why traditions are significantly invented in retrospective affiliations?" And: „Where is the space of the transmigrational groups and non-citizen classes, such as immigrants, economic migrants, exiles, refugees and illegal aliens?"

One of the questions I am interested the most, is: „Can there emerge different kind of citizenship -- flexible, diasporic, and nomadic?"

+) The basic setting associated with Esperanza:
- Kunst Ost – Cultural Laboratory (Martin Krusche), Gleisdorf, Austria
- Oracle network of European cult. managers (Ljiljana Simic Deru), Brussels, Belgium
- Remont – Independent Artistic Association (Miroslav Karic), Beograd, Serbia

As Kunst Ost is running a work in progress, we now prepare to be ready for the first steps of the Esperanza-Crew and our colleagues, so we can find the next links of collaboration.

+) Head of our working community is Mirjana Peitler-Selakov (art histoarian/curator)
+) Project manager: Martin Krusche (artist)
+) Basic working community Kunst Ost („Kulturspange")
- Günther Marchner (scientist)
- Selman Trtovac (artist)
- Ewald Ulrich (entrepreneur)

-- [Diaspora] [Esperanza] [Generaldokumentation] --

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