The Culture Lobby: An Archive of Cultural Memory / Lobi Kulture: Arhiva kulturne memorije /Лоби на културата: Архива на културната меморија / Lobi-Ngu Kulturor: Arkiva e memorjes kulturore
In collaboration with KIOSK platform for contemporary art (Belgrade, Serbia), Cindy Blažević (Toronto/Zagreb) and Pascal Paquette (Toronto) authored The Culture Lobby: An Archive of Cultural Memory, the publication of the eponymous project, in 2010. The 380-page book in four languages (English, Albanian, Macedonian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin) was launched in the Western Balkans and was available for purchase at Art Metropole in Toronto.
“In his 1995 book Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida suggested that participation in the archive is essential to the control of memory and the effective democratisation of society. In recent years, many artists, from Thomas Hirschhorn in his elaborate installations, to The Atlas Group in their distilled photographic presentations, have addressed ideas concerning the archive and attempted to challenge its implied authority and claim to truth. These artists collaborate with others to create repositories of information that their audiences are then invited to explore, to discover and, most importantly, to question. The endeavours of The Culture Lobby can be seen in this light; through its contributors’ practice, the pedestrian, the commuter, the consumer, but above all the citizen, adopt an agency in relation to these new notions of the archive, and in so doing engage in inscribing their own meanings where they have passed, looked, read, spoken, thought.” – Rebecca Heald, writer and curator, UK.
The Culture Lobby is a portrait of the territories of the Western Balkans that have yet to join the European Union, the product of a three-year endeavour in collaboration with Kiosk, the Sarajevo Centre for Contemporary Art (Sarajevo), G-MK | Galerija Miroslav Kraljević (Zagreb), Cultural Centre Lindart (Tirana), Laboratory for Visual Arts | LAB (Prishtina), ProStory (Podgorica), Center for Contemporary Public Art Elementi (Bitola) and Index on Censorship (London, UK). The project created a participatory ‘active archive’ of cultural memory in the Western Balkans during this moment of transition, by documenting visually and aurally what ordinary citizens believed/fear/wished would change when their respective countries joined the European Union.
This subjective and historically-oriented space facilitated by the artists enabled a series of dialogues that are the core of the artwork itself. These dialogues represent the backbone of the visual archive—namely, the opus of photographs created by the 15 participating artists is a response to and interpretation of every single conversation they had during their research.
The Culture Lobby project was realized within the British Council’s Creative Collaboration program and in partnership with Fund for Open Society, the European Cultural Foundation, Balkan Trust for Democracy, the European Fund for the Balkans, the City of Belgrade, Swiss Cultural Program and the Ontario Arts Council.
