LOST HIGHWAY EXPEDITION

A multitude of individuals, groups and institutions will form a massive intelligent swarm that would move roughly along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in the former Yugoslavia. The road was made in sixties in the massive voluntary campaign of the peoples of all nationalities that constituted Yugoslavia. The expedition is meant to generate new projects, new art works, new networks, new architecture and new politics based on experience and knowledge found along the highway. Projects developed from the expedition will lead to exhibitions, publications and symposia of “Europe Lost and Found” in Stuttgart and Ljubljana in 2007.

Lost Highway Expedition will begin in Ljubljana, and travel through Zagreb, Novi Sad, Belgrade, Skopje, Pristina, Tirana, Podgorica to conclude in Sarajevo, comprised of two days of events at each city and one day of travel in between. The events may include guided tours, presentations and forums by local experts, workshops between the participating travelers and local participants, discussions, exhibitions, radio shows, picnics and other events that can be self-produced by the host cities. Members of the Lost Highway Expedition do not have to travel or stay together and can enter and exit the expedition for any length of time and at any point. Participants are to self organize, support and realize their journey in the “Highway of Post Brotherhood and Non Unity.”

Everyone is free to participate in any of the events or to bring their own to the highway. Word of the expedition will travel like a rumor from friends to friends, colleagues to colleagues. The reason for the Lost Highway Expedition is to find and study missing relationships on the highway and look at them as a model for diverse Europe.

Lost Highway is the fictional name for the old road made in Ex Yugoslavia to connect the major cities of its republics: Ljubljana, Zagreb, Beograd and Skopje. The road was made in the ‘60s in the massive voluntary campaign of the peoples of all nationalities that constituted Yugoslavia and named according to the most important state parole – The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. It was not accidental that this ideological name signified the connection line among different nations.

Like the highway, Western Balkans is a territory without content. “Western Balkans” has no meaning of interconnections but rather a set of separate obligations toward expanding Europe. Without content it is emptied also of ideology. Communism believed that it had the capacity to overcome national difference in the pursuit of universal wellness. Communist illusion of eternity was brutally shortened during the nineties. The collapses of utopian systems stripped down the concept of national unification. Old national conflicts were awakened for the new bloodshed of war. Yugoslavia was buried, the term lost its sense and today the new temporary definition Western Balkans applies to countries waiting for the future in the EU: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro.

The highway, on the other hand, survived even more improved. After the war new tracks and services were added according to EC standards. Now, it looks like any European highway, comfortable and without local identity. The ideological meaning that once marked the belief of the people that were building it, had been lost. “Highway of Post Brotherhood and Non Unity” is missing its contemporary meaning. It only functions as linear mechanism in the framework of the recent EU political invention of Western Balkans.

Following the line of the Lost Highway through the unknown territory of contemporary meanings of Western Balkans as a model of Europe, members of the expedition will explore new modes of meaningful and sustainable links among different entities. At the end, one question that persists is whether it is possible to construct a better life that is non-utopian and without ideological illusions.

Lose yourself along the Western Balkans highway find yourself in Europe.

http://www.schoolofmissingstudies.net/sms-lhe.htm