urban matters

The Cultural Cooperation project Some Call Us Balkans (SCUB) is a Creative Europe-funded transdisciplinary programme, an art-based inquiry, and a community that explores and mobilizes moments of collective production of knowledge, imagination, research, and multivocal representations that challenge myths and misconceptions regarding the “Balkans” as the “European Other”. It is organised by a transnational collective of curators and partners based in Serbia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Greece, Italy, and Germany.

On the occasion of its upcoming programme, which is based on the artistic research built throughout the project, the SCUB community is looking for 8 emerging artist-travellers from the participating countries, who will form a collective and work jointly, committing to the programme’s timeline and activation moments. SCUB provides a unique platform for the participating artists, including a three-step co-creation and mutual learning process, activated at different locations spanning the wider Balkan region.

After the selection process and the announcement of the participating artists in February 2022, the programme will unfold starting with a one-month residency in Banja Luka (BIH) at DKC Incel Cultural Center in May 2022, where the artists along with a set of experts, curators, and local communities will co-create and develop individual and collective artistic works as part of the Mobile Forum and the dramaturgy of a Ground Tour Journey.

Following the residency, the artists will stage the Mobile Forum in public spaces at partners’ selected sites, engaging local communities and putting into action the Ground Tour Journey in a participatory format during 1 month between September and October 2022. This is imagined as a travelling theatre piece with the artist-travellers, the localities, the communities and the local actors involved as protagonists. The Mobile Forum is conceived as a mobile public art installation where artistic practices and tools are used as triggers for cross-border dialogue, exchange and learning while travelling across geographies and peoples. Conceived as an open assembly space where new sociocultural imagination can be conceived, the Mobile Forum aims to document and make grassroot claims visible while connecting local cultural practitioners and communities of practice with artists and the hosting partners and communities.

The Journey will end at the Biennale of Western Balkans (BoWB), Ioannina (Greece) in October 2022. In the aftermath in between November 2022 and March 2023, the artists will have a mentored, remote time to produce retrospectively their individual work to be presented at the final exhibition of the project in Prishtina at the partner space of Termokiss Community Center.

The purpose of this project is to initiate a series of activities resulting in the co-creation of a mobile forum, opening spaces of encounter and imagination that transgress borders and nationalisms in the Balkans, throughout Europe and beyond.

SCUB community includes ICSE&Co., UNSA Geto, Tačka Komunikacije, Biennale of Western Balkans, Sociopatch – platform for civic engagement, Tulla Culture Center, ZK/U Berlin, Termokiss Social Center, and The Ground Tour project, collaborating with the support of the European Union (Creative Europe, Western Balkans 2021-23).

More information

Website: https://somecallusbalkans.org/

Open Call: https://somecallusbalkans.org/scub-activities/open-call/

Project enquiries: info@somecallsusbalkans.org