Europe Now | Europe Next (2006/07)

A project of culturebase.net

Artistic on-line and real-life Encounters on the EU enlargement 2006 / 2007

The House of World Cultures realizes together with its partners Baltic Sea Cultural Centre (Poland), Danish Center for Culture and Development (Denmark), Intercult (Sweden) and Visiting Arts (Great Britain) the project Europe Now | Europe Next, a series of on-line and real-life Encounters accompanying the EU enlargement. The public is invited to join this creative dialogue on the current and the next Europe. Send us your contributions as images, texts, video or sound files, present your related web project on www.europe.culturebase.net .

The aim of the Encounter Cultural versus national Borders (Budapest, 19/20 February 2007), which was hosted by the House of World Cultures, was to open up new perspectives, to initiate new discussions and to turn the spotlight on artistic contributions that reflect upon European processes independently, subjectively and in a provocative manner. Participants include the artists Tamás St. Auby (Hungary), Tanja Ostojic (Serbia), the artist groups Azorro (Poland), Irwin (Slovenia), the writers Lásló Marton (Hungary), Eugenijus Ališanka (Lithuania), Aleš Šteger (Slovenia), the art theorists Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Great Britain), Yilmaz Dziewior (Germany) and Lidia Varbanova (Bulgaria/Canada) – among others.

The online encounters will offer participants an opportunity to discuss existing contributions on eight different topics on various aspects of the expansion of the EU and to comment on these in contributions of their own. Following a decades-long division into East and West, the continent of Europe has now experienced almost two decades of constant turmoil: political systems have collapsed, wars and conflicts erupted, and national frontiers changed. Furthermore, our concepts of East and West, the centre and the periphery, the interior and the exterior are changing continuously. With Romania and Bulgaria joining the European Union for example, the EU’s borders have shifted yet again. These developments have inspired new dialogues, especially at the centre of Europe. New and new-old geographical-cultural alliances and identities have become an important issue. Different notions of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe, South-eastern Europe, the Baltic and the Balkans are circulating and will be the subject of discussion in the future too.

With the support of the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union.

Associated partner of the Europe Now | Europe Next Encounter in Budapest is the Collegium Budapest.

Kindly supported by: Goethe Institute Budapest, Museum of Literature Petöfi, József Attila Kör (JAK) and Lettre International Hungary.

Let's talk European: Europe Now | Europe Next is presented by signandsight.com .