REAL PRESENCE
laborations and shared interests. In retrospect, I can see that the final exhibition was really an open space, a plateau, even though it happened at many different sites and in many different moments. It took the shape of the initial and quite spontaneous collective performance we made as an homage to Szeemann, who at the time was directing the Venice Biennale. In 2001, at the beginning of the new millennium, he chose “Plateau of Humankind” as the theme. The main exhibition site for “Real Presence” was the former Tito museum, a monumental building with a flat roof that looks just like a plateau. We were there with Harald Szeemann on the top of the museum, looking at the flow of young artists arriving and climbing up, passing the soldiers guarding Milošević’s residence at the back of the museum and facing the city skyline which still bore the marks of the NATO bombing. We took the place over: this shallow museum became a place for new art to be created. A A When I visited the 10th edition of “Real Presence” I was particularly impressed by the very format of this workshop: there was a sense of self-organisation among the participants. The fact that there was no hie-
30
rarchy, no professor, tutor or curator who would impose a line, created particular group dynamic. D D As curators, we provided the structure of the workshop and exhibition spaces, the character of which varied over the years: from institutional spaces like museums and galleries to spaces that hadn’t been in use for a while and thus could be re-appropriated by artists. But all these spaces had their own density: from Tito’s museum, emptied of its collections and significance, but still strongly echoing a glorious past now embodied in tiny fragments, forgotten photos and archival materials, to the Military Museum’s cave-like store rooms where medieval cannonballs could be found next to parts of the “invisible” aircraft shot down by Serbian anti-aircraft fire during the 1999 bombing. We also had fully operational art institutions which opened their doors and collaborated with young artists, as well as public sites in the city, which would mostly be taken in quite a “guerrilla” way. Although we used a simple format based on lectures, daily presentations and a final exhibition, every edition was thematically different, because artists would act on/react to the given context and spaces and their common inter-
ests. Because we didn’t impose specific teaching methodologies or curatorial concepts, we were able to “read” a thematic line afterwards. Ten years of the workshop, corresponding to what is known as Serbia’s “normalisation” phase, is really a prism through which we can observe the transformations that took place on the political, social, urban and cultural level. A A “Real Presence” wasn’t restricted to Belgrade, though. You also organised workshops within important international manifestations and institutions? D D Our first collaboration was with the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2002, Daniel Birnbaum, the dean and artistic director of Portikus, organised “Gasthof” with Jochen Volz and Dirk Fleischmann. Germany hosted two big art events that year: “Documenta 11” in Kassel and “Manifesta 4” in Frankfurt. In the same way that we gathered young artists and art students in Belgrade, Städelschule relaunched with a project focused on the concept of hospitality. The academy was transformed into a “hostel”: classrooms and studios were emptied to provide space to host a large number of young artists and