D o bri la D e ne g ri – C urat i ng Caus es
Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun Photo: Wojtek Olech Courtesy of CoCA in Torun
understanding and deep social integration. Through its settings, it was almost an invitation to participants to have a certain attitude during the creation process. Did you anticipate that the identity of the workshop will lead to this type of behaviour? This manifestation was realized for the first time in 2001 with the intention to mark the moment of democratic change occurred in Serbia after the fall of Milosevic’s government and it was motivated by the urge to reconnect with other cultural contexts after ten years of war and isolation. Thanks to the “presence” of almost three-hundred young artists as well as some important guests, like Harald Szeemann at the first edition, we decided to carry on with the manifestation through the following years as well, as long as there was the need for this kind of multicultural platform in a country like Serbia, which was under the visa-regime until the last year. But the workshop’s pattern emerged as a result of the curatorial activity carried out by Biljana Tomic in the Student Cultural Centre for a long period of time. Together with Joseph Beuys, the first exchange programs with the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf
were created already in the mid ’70s and this practice continued through the following years also drawing some other important European academies or professors like Rabinowitch, Klingelhöller, Pistolletto, Kounellis, to name just a few. So this pattern emerged from a certain understanding of art and its function within society, and so it inevitably remained faithful to the idea that creative potential (especially of young people) have to be valued and encouraged. Even though every generation of students comes and goes, do you consider that the city of Belgrade received any real benefit from the “young healers” who would come once a year to “cure” the cultural wounds and gaps of the city? Our initial goal was to give a chance to young people coming from other European countries, with the desire to become directly familiar with this cultural background, and therefore to offer them the possibility to develop an opinion which would not be based only on the “reality” as presented by main-stream media in the war years on the territory of former Yugoslavia. This goal was fully achieved, since I’m sure 15