School of Missing Studies
Katherine Carl and Srdjan Jovanović Weiss
SCHOOL OF MISSING STUDIES
[Written for Utrecht Manifest]
SMS projects and initiatives bring into focus sources of dormant knowledge in cities marked by abrupt transition. SMS scouts for this knowledge through a pro-active, cross-disciplinary, often collaborative, approach.
Some things that motivate us in that work are questions about whether territories themselves can have knowledge and how we can get at that knowledge. This normally isn’t found in traditional disciplines, but it is something that moves fairly freely between them. When people from different disciplines come together this knowledge can emerge, can be unearthed. So SMS discovers new mechanisms to get at that kind of territorial knowledge and then articulate a study from that research that can then be performed collaboratively.
For example, (the most recent) project by the School of Missing Studies from 2006 called Lost Highway Expedition was a collective journey of international architects, artists and curators through nine distinct and emerging capital cities in the Western Balkans. Over the thirty days of the itinerary approximately 300 people took part, and although there were specific meeting points and joint activities, each participant organised their own projects and itinerary. SMS avoided getting swept away by the organisational complexity of such an undertaking to focus on creating a character of the expedition so that people who didn’t know about the history of this territory and certain realities, could make their own trajectories and determined the shape of their emerging knowledge.
Instead we opened our time to charting both physical and social interaction. Mapping was not made exclusive to SMS, participants made ad-hoc mapping workshops such as in Belgrade on the empty walls of the local Turkish bath in neglect. The bath’s empty pools were used for ad-hoc performance in attempts to give collective shapes to immediate knowledge of the trip.
Another group coming from Barcelona and friends from the RotoR collective presented virtual highway map of LHE to demonstrate how the network of LHE grows and shrinks dynamically, showing the many different players involved, from many different places.
How was this all orchestrated? The answer is that some fixed nodes along the fluid infrastructure of the project allowed for extensive improvisation. Instead of tracing the route, SMS established places and times of meeting and exchange in every capital city on the way. This was a chance to actually interact with partners of the route beyond simple host-visitor relationship, which is so often the norm in travels. In these joint ventures discussion of capitalness of each city emerged as an important topic and led to the conclusion that distinction is a key characteristic of the cultural and territorial processes of Balkanization.
The group of initiators and organisers of LHE included us, Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen from Rotterdam, Ivan Kucina from Belgrade, artist/architect Azra Akšamija from Sarajevo and MIT, and Marjetica Potrč and Kyong Park. We collaborated openly together to make the LHE open network happen.
In order to open up the collective notions of missing knowledge, LHE did not aim to make a new or better society. At the same time LHE did not operate outside of society, it was not a nostalgic utopia.
First, LHE was set up to be a fleeting ephemeral experience: 28 days in August 2006 with about 30 people in each city. Lost Highway Expedition dealt with infrastructure and also what’s left out of infrastructure, i.e. the hardware of the highway and the ideological components of that infrastructure. So we asked some questions to ourselves about this process of doing an expedition. We wondered: can an expedition be a work of art and design? Can travel be a form of activism? Can an expedition build infrastructure itself?
The Western Balkans went through a significant character change. Today Western Balkans is former Yugoslavia minus Slovenia plus Albania. Slovenian territory was hardly considered part of Balkan geography previously and is now part of the European Union, while Albania is a land part of the Balkans, which is now encountering serious economic, political and consequently infrastructure transformation.
After World War II when socialist Yugoslavia was formed, the large question was not only how to upgrade its state capitals, but also how to urbanise the country in between. In the history of Yugoslavia Tito was a savvy leader, who knew that he needed to keep people busy with small projects and at the same time form a huge network, a network of allied countries in order to create a scheme larger than the citizens themselves. The scheme of this territory was to build the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, this particular line, the backbone of the country. It does not go to the seaside, it connects Europe to Turkey and to the Middle East, at least on the plan. Once traced, we see this kind of curious roman numeral X, in an attempt to connect a couple of capitals along the way.
This highway was hard infrastructure. It was a physical and landscape object that needed to be built, but it also was delivered with a virtual, imaginary aspect of socialism. Communism - the imaginary future of socialism - was both the driver and collagen that fused pragmatics of mobility and protection of socialist ideology in place. That facet engaged voluntary participation to build the highway, which in theory could lead, drive into the state of future Communism. Everyone was encouraged to come out and participate with enthusiasm and pride. It is interesting to point out that until the Balkanization of the Balkans in the ‘90s and the forming on nation states, the highway of Brotherhood and Unity was completed in parts at about half of its original scope.
For citizens in recent history of the Western Balkan territory to build their own highway was an unprecedented exercise in self-management. Yugoslavia co-opted the idea of self-organisation and self-management and the nature of this ever unfinished highway was one of its major manifestations. Basically each citizen was building his own highway. This is the drawing of how much has been built until today. It is an unfinished project by default. Each Republic is constructing first to the west and then, slowly, to the east. We Lost Highway Expeditioners knew how the real highway was but our imaginary highway was this imaginary line between the ends of the finished routes. In a way, SMS opened a way to retrace the territory, following first the real and then the virtual infrastructure, and then everyone’s personal experience.
The cities that we went to on LHE, starting in the Northwest and making a loop through the region. Again, this was a collective migration, a collective journey. To initiate the exchange of knowledge around the positive aspects of Balkanization, such as distinction of capitals, each city was revealed through a topic. The topics themselves have been previously discussed by all the partners on the way, SMS and observers.
For example, in Skopje, Macedonia, the topic of the city was solidarity, because the city comes out of an earthquake in the Sixties. The city branded itself as the city to receive solidarity from others but at the same time created communities, Roma communities, Albanian communities spilling their own influence across the capital city of Macedonia. Other topics were similar in nature that was not to brand the city as a totality, but deepen an aspect of common knowledge, so common that the studies of it would be hard to find.
Even though LHE had a specific time frame during August of 2006, it performs beyond its own time-frame. Multiple initiatives were open to use the common source of scouted knowledge along the way. ŠKUC galerija from Ljubljana hosted an collectively curated exhibition of art-work and activist work from the Lost Highway Expedition. Stealth group administers an online lexicon of distinct concepts of the possible future in the region called the Lexicon of Pro-visionary Futures. Kyong Park went on an even larger self-initiated expedition along the traditional Silk Road, connecting Europe and the Middle East. We have collaborated with Markus Miessen on the project and book East Coast Europe which took LHE as inspiration to examine the real and imaginary edges of Europe.
Additionally SMS collected an archive of all photographs made by the participants on the Lost Highway Expedition (25,000 of them), and the two of us edited a book Lost Highway Expedition Photobook which selects about 500 of them in a volume designed by a young Bosnian designer.
An upcoming project out of LHE is called Future of Neglect. It also comes out of the shared pool of knowledge and the loose network LHE has scouted. We will now focus on some fantastical aspects of late socialism, its space and its representation, as well its conundrums, that led to distinct social futures, social designs, that ended in some sort of time bubble. We are working with Armin Linke, Italian photographer to documents some of the sites visited during the Lost Highway Expedition, giving way to opening a place for photographical knowledge and temporary architecture winning over desires for permanence.
It was not written, but it became and unwritten rule that SMS changes methodologies and sites for individual projects, from one to another. In order to be beyond disciplinary positions we rely on some latent system of values that all the members trust or subscribe to. A visual culture that is shared needs to curated, rather than designed in a traditional manner. Across different cultures, disciplines, backgrounds, economic systems, despite different opinions and ways of working. This means also supporting of carving out knowledge via voluntary investment to scout what has “no bibliography”. This method also goes beyond contemporary rise of opinions that common cultures are plainly amateur. SMS is set loose so the research without relying on mediation or outside sources would not suffer from diminishing nature of top-down categorisation.
School of Missing Studies experimented in LHE with a new approach to a research place of art and architecture as well as curatorial knowledge as defined concurrently by Irit Rogoff and Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths College, Department of Visual Cultures. Yet on LHE itself, the initiators set up circumstances, parameters, and infused networks with further synapses that have perhaps only coincided with theory. Although the organisational structure was complex, its dispersion was simple as it went across many authors and so was not cumbersome. Roles of artist, curator, architect were purposely transgressed, but left unfinished.