Place: BAK Utrecht, The Netherlands
Time: November 10, 2004; 8 p.m.
Project: Cordially Invited, series of discussions initiated by Nomads & Residents on the diversity of perspectives on inclusion and exclusion in Europe
Presentation: European Magazines � Prelom Belgrade, Pages Rotterdam, Plotki

PRELOM UTRECHT REPORT or:
Welcome to Europe, Now Go Back Home

Let us imagine the following situation: you are in the tourist information centre in the middle of Amsterdam, the year is 2004, and together with your bus ticket for one of European destinations, you receive a leaflet made by the Dutch police, whose aim is to inform you about a specific danger existing in this town. The text is written in several languages (English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish) and says that fake policemen with fake police identity cards have been seen recently in the streets; these men are Eastern European men and they will show you their fake card, ask you for your credit card, ask you for your PIN code in order to activate that card and take your money from your account right in front of your eyes. We will not go too far with our analysis of the real incidents and situations that caused the creation of this kind of leaflet. At this moment, we are interested in the construction of the identity of East European men, as something specific and distinctive.

The first thing to notice here is that this is not a neutral warning about various criminal �activities� and �perpetrators� but geographically and almost ideologically colored representation of these people. This leaflet is a good example of how the distinction between �Westerners� and �Easterners� still exists in the public discourse and imagination in the West. According to it, you are supposed to be able to instantly recognize Eastern Europeans. Once hidden behind the wall, they are now infiltrated into Western societies, represented as the danger to this perfect and safe system.

What we are dealing here with is the process of signifying certain groups of people as dangerous and not wanted, and one of the missions of PRELOM from the beginning was to point out the different mechanisms and processes of creating ethnical, gender, cultural, or social Otherness, that had led further to its discrimination and abuse by the dominant group. Experience of living in Serbia during the nineties gave us an unfortunate opportunity to examine this process at work to its extremes.

We would like to use this leaflet as an example for the necessity to initiate or continue the discussions about the process of constructing present-day Others in the West, that seems to be just a modification of previous processes. We are happy to see that this necessity was recognized when the project WHO IF NOT WE� was initiated and we believe that it is primarily the task of the West to re-examine its positions and maintain critical awareness at least in intellectual debates.

One of the topics that extends over several of our issues was and still is the rise of right-wing politics in Europe, but seen basically as the problem of the left movements, which became almost impossible to distinguish from those on the Right. We introduced some important positions of French theoreticians from the Left, who underline the fact that the concept of a foreign worker has been erased and replaced with the concept of an immigrant. According to this point of view, the Left is to be blamed with why the regulation of the status of foreign workers has become the question of security and responsibility of the police. The question: How can we call leftists politicians who support wars? � still remains. The decision to forbid Muslim women to wear their veil has been seen as the final defeat of the feminist struggle and politics. By seeing the times ahead, as possibly even more dangerous, we wanted to pose a question whether the ideology is really dead, as some had proclaimed, or was it not its greatest device to make us believe that it does not exist anymore?

By treating problems in Serbia, as part of the global ideological and political processes, we also started the discussion about Serbian right wing politics and the problem of the ultimate defeat of the Left, bearing in mind the fact that Milosevic�s politics wanted to represent itself as left/socialist one.

After the so-called democratic changes in 2000, we strongly reacted against the official division of Serbia in two parts: urban/pro-European/democratic as opposed into the rural/oriental/backward one, after the ecstatic proclamation of the victory of the former. We have seen this process as a culture-racism, hence extremely dangerous one, since it had repressed one part of Serbia to the space of the unconsciousness and was surprised when it exploded again.

Analytically interesting field where this clash took place was the field of pop-culture, through the music genre called turbo-folk. In musical terms, we could describe it as a Serbian answer to world-music � mixture of folk and contemporary pop/rock/techno music, similar to the new music production, which can be heard all over the Mediterranean area. But the main difference between turbo-folk and these similar music genres was its connection with Milosevic�s politics and ideology, as it was strongly supported by his establishment. We see this urban vs. rural division to be the main problem and danger in Serbia today, together with the further isolation by the international community, e.g. Europe. By means of initiating of the debate on turbo-folk (Oriental vs. European) we created a platform for critical approach to the idea of �belonging in Europe�.

One of the topics we considered to be extremely important was the analysis of post-Yugoslav war movies, seen as sometimes pure example of projection of group fantasies, but in the most of cases serving the dominant political and ideological construction of stereotypes and �warrior� cultures. We paid special attention to the authors and movies considered to be a sign of �democracy� and new ideological positions in order to pose question if they really were so progressive and different, or just another modification of mainstream positions they pronounced to fight against. When the wars were over in reality, they continued their existence through the movies.

As we have recognized the necessity of initiating similar debates regarding contemporary processes of workings of ideology on an international level, future activities of PRELOM will be focused on publishing of an international issue that will not only bring closer the debates concerning ex-Yu spaces to the international community, but also start the necessary analysis of current processes in politics and arts in the globalized world, as seen from a new perspective. As the example of the police leaflet from the beginning has showed, the need of learning the ways of reading visual representations has become even greater.