USA Projects

Organized by three emerging curators and Belgrade-based international arts organization Eighty Ten, UNLISTED will take place in Belgrade, Serbia from September 20-22 as a satellite event to the 2012 BITEF Festival. We developed UNLISTED as a reaction to our realization that Belgrade has innumerable unused public-spaces, a multitude of arts festivals, and very few site-specific performances. We’d also become increasingly aware of the many young, emerging artists within the Balkan region eager to work outside of their home countries, contributing to the mass diaspora that continues to plague former Yugoslavia. Starting with the keywords of PARTICIPATION and TRANSFORMATION, UNLISTED developed into a project aimed at working towards increasing cultural exchange, transforming how citizens of Belgrade view their city, and developing a platform for emerging artists to work collaboratively.

A small change in awareness or perception can create a ripple effect, nudging the aesthetic and emotional life of a whole city in a new direction. At UNLISTED’s center are three performances in three public, non-theatrical spaces, or “hubs”. These site-specific performances will be created collaboratively by separate teams; each team will include both Serbian and international (hailing from Bosnia, the United States, Croatia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, and more) artists. The performances will be both TRANSFORMATIVE and PARTICIPATORY: participating artists will transform the spaces and enlist the help of audiences to do it, sparking a new awareness of each hub’s potential in the citizen-participants and, indirectly, in the mind of the entire city.

Cost of airfare, visa, housing, and food means the amount of funding and other resources it takes to collaborate internationally are inevitably greater than when you’re creating similar work at home. Funding UNLISTED is particularly challenging because, in keeping with our goal of impacting all Belgraders who use these public spaces regardless of income or commitment to the arts, we don’t plan to charge admission.

Meeting our USA Projects goal will go a long way towards bringing all of our collaborating artists to Belgrade, housing and feeding them there, and providing them with materials to create their performance pieces. Anything over and above this amount will allow us to pay artist fees, kick up our production values, and strengthen local advertising. The funds we raise here will be integral to pulling off an event whose effects will ripple outward long after the performances have ended: both in the platform for long-term, cross-cultural artistic collaboration that the new connections forged between the UNLISTED artists will build, and in the shifted perspectives of the Belgrade citizen-spectators for whom these public spaces will no longer be “unlisted”. The UNLISTED team couldn’t be more thankful for anything you can give in support of this ambitious project.

For more info, visit http://yinzerspielen.org/current-projects/unlisted

UNLISTED is made possible in part with funds from CEC ArtsLink.