At the same time we have resolved to enter upon a common future. On 1 May 2004, a part of history will be revised, and the expansion of the West, the so-called eastern expansion, will take place. The old and the new Europe will have to learn to share the same house. Do we have any conception of the relational work which will confront us? Of the envy and the necessity of a new kind of solidarity? The public spheres in the East and the West are still approaching the past and the future in a very indirect way. Distorted and twisted images of illusions are supposed to protect against disillusionment.

What we will need, by contrast, like the shared loaf of bread, are dis-illusioning dis- estrangements, the construction of relations among relatives, the birth of a shared language from the polyphony of history and artefact. Without doubt, we share more than we are aware of by way of shared cultures, and we are separated by half a continent. Art as an artefact of the construction of relations, a compelling concept of the Federal Cultural Foundation. After thirteen years of the East’s opening which I have been able to help shape — in part as head of an institution[2] specialized in cultural relations between East and West — changes of paradigm have become urgent. First of all, because the expansion of the European Union internalizes the hitherto unknown dynamic of a dialectic between what is one's own and what is foreign, and no longer allows externalization. And secondly, because the national, bilateral models of co-operation have come to an end. Relations have become a European question, even though this does not seem to have happened in the reflection and reflexes of national politics. Here is not the place to give more precise reasons. Here I will assert rather than prove that the unimagined complexities of a shared future require the seismograph of art and the avant-garde, the laboratory of words, images, experiments without which societies will drown in materialism.