Milena Dragicevic Sesic

BELEF, Polyphony of Cultures - Challenges for the New Cultural Policy

In the collective memory of the city, certain buildings, streets, corners and little walls, restaurants and cafes, shops and shopping malls, squares and parks, remain permanently imprinted through the event that had marked them, whether artistic, social, political or sport. Only in the last couple of years has the policy of urban regeneration started developing as a consistent policy, but in its absence the artists have attempted to find an appropriate way of developing a dialogue with the city in which they live, especially through the programs of BELEF since 1997. Therefore, BELEF is the city festival - a celebration that originates from the spirit of the city, but at the same time it makes it richer, expanding its horizons and enabling it to get to know itself.

Belgrade, a cosmopolitan city - a city of multiple interrupted identities, separated from its essence during the 1990s, turning into a large Serbian small town. But the dreams of Belgrade that once were, the dreams of the great metropolis (from the time of the Non-aligned Movement, utopian dreams about the future world of a community of equals, but also the time of the exciting BITEF, midnight FEST, students' festivals.) - the dream of Belgrade as a regional cultural center and a place of intercultural dialogue of southern Slavic cultures - never ceased to live. We sometimes called it nostalgia; sometimes megalomania, sometimes futile effort, but all these words have essentially been way off the mark. In spite of everything - politics, the exodus of the youth, embargo, and misery - Belgrade has remained a multi-cultural, exciting city, a city in which different generations and different cultural models live together, albeit with different experiences. In this sense, Kalemegdan is a paradigm of the open city space full of memories, in which every generation, every social group finds its own mode of communication and "utilization" of signs, ramparts, buildings, walkways, monuments. The lost aura of a cosmopolitan city is brought back by artists through festivals and manifestations that are marking and constructing new meanings for Belgrade.

Summer cultural programs - the programs that are equally a production of the most important players in the Serbian non-institutional artistic scene, but also a representation of colorful trends on the world artistic scene, are bringing completely new experiences, artistic adventures and re-discoveries of forgotten or hidden angles and meanings of the city. Teaching us how to see, like the spread of visual literacy among the Belgrade population unaccustomed to look away from their usual walking or driving routes toward the neighboring ruins or the ramparts of Kalemegdan, has become the characteristic of BELEF, the festival which ventures in private dialogue with the city's population in public space. This is a city festival that is the most open to the world, to world margins - peripheries that carry meaning and create new value - in spite of everything. "In From the Margins", like the well-known slogan (the title of the book) of the Council of Europe, BELEF puts different initiatives and projects, processes and works of art, in the heart of its programs. At the time of globalization and commercialization of art through its mass consumption in the form of goods protected by copyright (and not by the rights of the author), this opening of margins and recognition of cultural variety as the future of the world is all the more important.

Therefore, the main means of expression for BELEF in the "society of spectacle" (Debord) and institutional consumerism, are no longer shows, concerts and exhibitions in closed spaces - the main institutions of culture in Belgrade, but billboards, leaflets, plotters on the walls, installations and electronics, that is, numerically expressed works of art, with performances in walking and park zones of the city, and on reborn summer stages.

The new practices of artistic adventures and behavior of Belgrade's audience correspond to these expressional art forms - the discovery of new spaces comes instead of loyalty to an institution, a walk instead of the convention of serious presence, and the ambiental placement of art processes and creations becomes the key to understanding and experiencing them. After all, the policy of private life in the summer has also changed: the seaside, cafes and weekend cottages, those symbols of the consumers' dream of the 1970s are no longer valid; new summer practices have been born - summer in the city, summer at Ada Ciganlija, BELEF summer. The city is not being abandoned; it is being lived in increasingly more.

The city's old topography that remembers the Turkish times: Dorcol, Cubura, Vracar, Bulbulder, Karaburma, Tasmajdan; and the one from between the two wars when dates have been set between the London casino and the Moscow hotel, at Albania palace or at Slavija square, have been changed for some new signs and markings. Shopping malls, cafes - "valleys" of them - new housing projects, floating cafes. Thus, all three Belgrades, that of the Balkans, the cosmopolitan one and the newest one - the Belgrade of searching for the new, still not a finalized identity, are living together - leaning on one another, interfusing and making one another richer.

The new urban identity of Belgrade calls for new markings of space, but also for a memory of the past, for some of the moments in history that have been pressed into and have been given landmark status to a certain city quarter. In the constant reappraisal of the local (historic) and the worldly (modern - global), with much ironic distance, the culture of invention and innovation prevails at BELEF. It is not a culture of consumerist or media representation, but a trans-cultural festival, a festival that calls for high social and cultural capital (Bourdieu), and which is constantly developing readiness to accept something new and different, therefore developing a new form of capital: intercultural or transcultural. Belgrade thus becomes a new center, not only of this new state (the state community of Serbia and Montenegro), but the regional Balkan or ex-Yugoslav center. The pluralism of thought and the pluralism of approach makes certain that neither urban elitism nor traditional populism prevail - therefore neither EXIT nor Guca, but BELEF as the production driving wheel of our cultural scene in our encounter with the world.

Here, local media products are as equally important as the local cultural practice (cruising the cafes, roving around shopping malls, roaming the water cafes) - great producers but also alternative actors and agents. Also important are world artists who are coming from the periphery of cultural events, but whose creations are nonetheless parts of the contemporary world scene. All of them together, the creators and the audience, form the inseparable part of the summer festival, because they are then engaged in open dialogue much more than during any other, purely artistic event (concert or tour.). Therefore, during the encounter between the kletzmer orchestra and Tartarian music with Australian scores, Spanish world music, the theater expression of Indonesia, Roma theater expression which is ever so established in Europe, the art of Italy, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Israel, Great Britain, and finally the art of the Tuareg, new conditions will be created for the abundance of sound, forms and colours, movements and lights, to make Belgrade once again a cosmopolitan, open city of the future. Belgrade in itself will be "a learning network", a network that provides the space for a meeting of cultures, for the abundance of adventures, for experience which is outside that of dominant cultural models and matrices - a network that connects the spaces of BELEF that have already been impressed in the collective memory, such as the Barutana (Powder Storage), Zindan Gate, the Summer Stage, Knez Mihajlova street and Republic square, but also the traditional spaces for art productions - the Sava Center, the City Hall, the Belgrade Cultural Center, the Museum of African Art, with new city spaces that have relatively seldom been used for cultural events - from the Ada Ciganlija river island to the corners of New Belgrade.

Thus, a new cultural policy - the policy of inciting creativity and cultural variety through small, innovative cultural production - is gaining new sense and meaning, conveying multiplication effects in the city's cultural scene. By engulfing its own heritage through contemporary practice in dialogue with other cultures, routes of future development are discovered and a new image of the city is created.