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by Eda Čufer
In his very last writings, Walter Benjamin used the term “Tigersprung” (tiger’s leap) as a metaphor for the construction of history, for the definition of a special historical moment which consists of leaping into the past to find the future. The tiger’s leap is regarded by Benjamin as dialectical, fusing the classical and the eternal with its antithesis, the contemporary. To confront the awareness that we live in the 21st. century is to take a tiger’s leap into the “open air of history”, to acknowledge that our existence is transhistorical, tied to the past as much as it soars into the future. Our survival and success in the new century will depend not only on the developments of market economies and the new technologies but also on our ability to construct/re-construct the memory of the beautiful and horrifying 20th century. Only by looking back will it be possible to see a new kind of human horizon — a horizon which can support and sustain the weight of the future projected onto and from the past.
 
The challenge of constructing and re-constructing the memory of the past is not only a specifically eastern European one, but it has special relevance to eastern Europe, where the idea, image, and notion of eastern Europe, eastern European Art, and east Berlin already signify something completely different from what those terms denoted before the fall of Berlin Wall. When the border between western Europe and eastern Europe was still a physical reality, it posed a different set of challenges from the one it poses now. Today the Wall as a Wall does not exist, but its meaning and memory as an intellectual and cultural construct persists. There exists a certain paradoxical necessity that something becomes recognized as different exactly at the moment that it wants to become a part of larger identity, which in this case is a common European identity. There are positive and negative sides of this phenomenon. The question is how to think about it dialectically and not ideologically. I propose three questions to begin with:

1. What is eastern Europe, does it exist at all and how does it exist?

2. How does it want to remember itself, or who/what does it want to become?

3. How do we, as a hypothetically undivided European self, want to remember it? And what do we want to become?
 
 
1. What defines eastern Europe as a certain political and cultural space that can be recognized as such is not a unifying political or ideological agenda but rather, on the one hand, the common memory of the communist past, the memory of Soviet domination over certain parts of it; and on the other hand the very brutal economic reality and all the social and political complexities connected to the so-called transition from one political and economic system of socialism and communism to the another — to the market economy and the desire for democracy. What defines eastern Europe as eastern Europe today are also very visible and tactile elements, like the urban and rural landscapes with their clear traces of the destruction of one world and the other rising on its ruins. The impression of eastern Europe today can be an incredible inspiration for anyone willing to think about the deep logic that constructs, builds and deconstructs systems, destroys and re-constructs worlds, and connects the memories and visions that belong to them.
 
 
2. On the other hand, what makes it hard, impossible or at least very complex to answer the question of how Eastern Europe wants to remember itself, is exactly the nonexistent or poorly developed links and networks among the eastern European countries themselves. The major difference between how the western and eastern worlds experienced the reality of the 20th century is perhaps exactly the idea of open borders, free movement of ideas, goods, people, the expansion and of course the existence of the institutions, links, networks that keep the western countries connected to each other although still politically located in separate national states — as opposed to the well-known communist obsession with borders, isolation, control over the free movement of ideas, people, goods, etc. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, eastern Europe was defined by its strong militaristic and ideological apparatus. For decades this apparatus not only prevented Bulgarians from having access to images of life in Germany or America, but it also kept Czechs from having knowledge about the life of Romanians, Poles and Lithuanians. Communism did not provide the possibilities for any kind of cultural growth; the only cultural model that Communism encouraged was a model of national culture which was isolationist and nostalgic, deriving from institutions built at the turn of the 20th century (which was for the majority of the countries before they entered the communist period). If we accept the fact that culture is the cutting edge of every society, providing the values and visions of how to live, how to communicate and who we are, then we should not be surprised that the first symptom that occurred after the fall of communism was the outburst of nationalism all over Eastern Europe. The first impulse these societies followed after the destruction of the system that had provided order was the reconstruction of identity around something that already existed, however old and regressive — not around some new visions and concepts.
 
However, besides the national culture, there is another cultural phenomenon known in all eastern European cultures. This is the phenomenon of the so-called hidden, unofficial, underground, alternative, genuine contemporary and open culture, practised in private circles or through some hidden social channels. The visibility and the levels of institutionalization of this culture, however, depend on the level of ideological repression in different countries, ranging from very high in Soviet Union to quite liberal in Tito’s Yugoslavia, for example. On the one hand, this alternative culture was defined by political and social resistance to communist ideological domination and also to the model of national culture. On the other hand, it was driven by a desire for open borders and internationalism, following very carefully the ideas and trends appearing in the West. Although this hidden culture acted as a crucial social dynamic following the fall of socialism, paradoxically, in the transition period, it was not taken as a model to be followed in the future precisely because it had never been a part of the institutional culture and therefore it had practically no visible or provable tradition.

I personally believe that the construction and re-construction of the memory of this hidden culture is of vital importance to the future for many reasons:

* It is a real source of analysis, ideas and values giving local societies opportunities to adopt more contemporary views of themselves.

* It is a base for the critical re-examination, construction and re-construction of the narrative leading from the past to the future.

* It is the only cultural tradition open toward constructive communication, integration with other European countries, bringing new issues, views, problems to the existing common European agenda.

* It is basically the only cultural tradition which provides the ideas and values which could act as an equal partner in the process of European integration.

Yet, this is still a culture that does not exist on the map of local, national cultures — neither on the map of eastern European culture (if such a thing exists at all), nor on the map of western or common European culture, still of course dominated by western Europe. But it would be too simplistic to say this is just the consequence of western cultural imperialism; it is of course also the consequence of the inability of the East or eastern European countries themselves to change the view, to look upon themselves and invent their own models of expansion and growth.
 
 
3. The project relations is therefore a unique initiative coming from the western sphere which wants to dive a bit deeper into the real, although quite traumatic problems of how to cross the reality borders after the ideological ones fell quite some time ago. All of the projects selected, although very different, are focused on the question of how to improve the very different Eastern realities and how the result of this can communicate with or even inspire or transform the gaze from another, for example German, Western reality.

From my point of view, in this dialectic the question of the strategies of developing inter-eastern links and networks of communication and exchange is just as important as developing strategies for West-East communication and exchange. As my thinking has been focused on the question of constructing/re-constructing memory, on the issues of how do we want to remember who we were in order to understand who we are becoming, I would focus on the proposal by the Foksal gallery, at the centre of which is a publicly accessible archive documenting certain art practices still held in private archives of the artists. This can be connected to the experience that the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljanja went through in holding the exhibition Body and the East and later East 2000+ (collection of eastern European conceptual art practices), where again most of the works shown had been forgotten in the basements of the artists… Or it can be connected with the experiences of the Slovenian visual arts group, Irwin, in developing their East Art Map project, which tries to bring together the image of east European art memory through discourse. Or it can be related to the efforts of SubReal, the Romanian collective, which used the archive of the art magazine Arta as the material foundation for a conceptually ambitious project called the Art History Archive, to give but a few examples of other projects which have functioned to preserve memory and integrate the past into a contemporary perspective.

Of course there are many ways and approaches one could take to address issues such as the ones discussed above, but here is my concluding, concrete, proposal for addressing these issues through the structure provided by relations:

* Bring the different inter-East groups working on these impossible tasks of cultural reconstruction together in a workshop to share ideas, techniques, experiences, contacts, networks, and to find very practical solutions to the problems and goals they share; record and/or publish the first workshop experience as a form of alternative exhibition to be added to, supplemented and mediated by the experience of others.

* Alternatively, as a supplement to the workshop described above, relations could sponsor a conference on constructing/ re-constructing the memory of the 20th century which would bring together intellectuals, artists, and art professionals from the East and the West with the aim of detecting and sensitizing participants and their constituencies to the differences, meaning and character of the spaces they occupy and the borders they are erasing and crossing with increasing frequency in their work, lives and communcation by focusing on and comparing the different experiences of the participants with specific projects they have been involved in (discussing current books, exhibits, festivals, programs, etc.), then gathering the discursive materials and views on this as a case study to be distributed by video.

Eda Čufer, Ljubljana, 24 April 2003