Center for Cultural Decontamination and its partners: YUROM Centar (Nis), Active Region (Subotica) and Sent Magazine (Novi Pazar) gladly announce the launch of the “The Context Studies – The Diversity of the Diversity”.

The project was conceptualized in cooperation among CZKD and the partners and in the first year of “The Context Studies” they will establish a polycentric platform for education, production and exchange, to enable its participants to shape their own education program and learn during the process of cultural production. Duration of the project is one year, from December 2013 to December 2014.

“The Context Studies” project has the following themes:

1.      Translation as a cultural form – polemics and translation

Translation as a process enables liberation, moving of the meaning is happening in the process of semiosis, and it is done by the cultural translators; the origin of humanistic sciences is hiding in translation, “in the process of the continuous search for new models of knowledge in the domain of culture” (Tomislav Longinović). The magazine Beton from Belgrade and Multimedia from Pristine did the most subversive gesture by translating literature from Kosovo and Serbia; the magazine Symposion from Subotica has re-contextualized the practice of bilingual literary production as of a flux of languages and noise of post-Yugoslav literature, stemming from Subotica and Hungarian-Serbo-Croatian writing and translation in the dynamic osmosis with visual languages; how much is Roma language present in contemporary education system and cultural production – that can’t be seen only through statistics, but from the everyday life to see that there is a strong relation between its marginalization and hate-graffiti on the monument of Saban Bajramovic in Nis; how much can a practice of translation in Sandzak can instigate a new dynamics in literature; all of these examples are starting points in wider research of the translation as a heterotopia.

2.      Diversity of the youth cultures – Self-organized production

The diversity of the youth cultures in Serbia and the region today is not visible or predicted outside the language/ethnical limits of the understanding of the diversity, but is also hidden by the stereotypical media and cultural treatment of the youth. Problematic youth as a symptom of the society in crisis has been the regular issue in the game of guilt, responsibility and frightening of the society, but in every specific situation which is brought up, the dominant representation of the youth is actually hiding all of the other “differences” which are not predicted to be its attributes due to their subversiveness or because they fall out of the register of the social structures. Which are those practices of the youth cultures which are not recognized by other generation due to the difference in sensibility, or lack of will, language to register as the contemporary cultural diversity – it is best to see that articulated by the very participants of that diversity, offering them the previous languages, models and public infrastructure to do that.

3.      Brecht as a method – secularity safeguarding the diversity

Open theater production lead and conceptualized by the theater director Zlatko Pakovic, starting with dialogues and literary discussions in the form of Brecht didactic public actions, scenes, will be an opportunity for the participants to embed their own experiences into the lacunas of the existing social and political life.

The program of the studies will be presented through the public events in all four cities involved (Belgrade, Nis, Subotica, Novi Pazar) with the participation of the cooperatives and mentors. The program of the lectures and mentorship will address the needs of the participants and their suggestions, shaping that course of the “missing knowledge” as an inter-generational exchange in public space and for public space of education.