About

The aim of this site is to catalogue, critically approach and present every artistic action, past, present and future, it characterizes itself as ARTIVISM in the wider area of Balkans or/and any action is conceived as such by the audience it is addressed to. Artistic actions which neither their creator nor the audience conceive as ARTIVISM will be included as well since the artwork, by the time it is delivered and meet its receivers, it has its own voice and life; so, it is possible some artworks to (give the possibility to) be interpreted as ARTIVISM, even though nobody intended either to create them or to understand/feel them as such.

This is not a project of endorsement. In democracies, for most of opinions and actions, there is always the opposite one, and it is very difficult for citizens to find out who has right and who has not. But nobody can deny that also in democracies some opinions cannot reach the audience they appeal to, because of the oligopoly concentration of the traditional mass media (mainly tv) ownership and their entanglement with power mechanisms. This informative gap tends to be filled in by the social or/and digital media and the web-distributed content. So, this site’s aim is to gradually become a platform of uncensored presentation of the Other/ Different opinion, which strives to be heard through Art.

As the notion of the Other is not static and changes from time to time and from country to country, the site embraces this openness: it encompasses past ARTIVISM productions, it presents contemporary ones, and it is willing to include any kind of future artworks conceived and function as ARTIVISM. So, the site resembles a digital archive, which is always under construction, a project which will never finish. According to this, the site endorses not even its existence as a permanent repository of ARTIVISM actions since it always diverges from its ending point. It aspires to function only as another voice into the modern noise; if it has luck, it will be heard or someone will listen to it.

This site is the deliverable of a postdoc research project conducted in the Academy of Arts, Novi Sad Serbia, which is entitled “Artivism in the Balkans” and it is integrated to a broader research project named Aspects of Politics in Theatre across the Balkans. Its creator is Dr. Tasos Angelopoulos (affiliated fellow) under the mentoring of Vice-Dean professor Vesna Žrdnja (project’s supervisor).

Research Assistant and Translation: Suzana Kaplanovic