Letter of acreditation for collaboration on Vahida Ramujkic's research on Balkan Histories

By this letter we, Center for new Media Kuda in Novi Sad,  hereby confirm that Vahida Ramujkic is invited to develop her investigation project on local history text-books in collaboration with our center, having on disposal our space, equipments and archives for her needs during the period of fall 2007. 
In this reason we are encouraging any possibility in her intention to get financial support for realizing this work.

Center for New Media Kuda took part as one of the hosts of itinerary project Lost Highway and (part of wider project Europe Lost and Found), aim of which was looking for the possible future of Europe trough the actual situation on Balkans. 

New Media Center_kuda.org is an independent organization which brings together artists, theoreticians, media activists, researchers and the wider public in the field of Information and Communication Technologies. In this respect, kuda.org is dedicated to the research of new cultural relations, contemporary artistic practice, and social issues.

Kuda.org's work focuses on questions concerning the influence of the electronic media on society, on the creative use of new communication technologies, and on contemporary cultural and social policy. Some of the main issues include interpretation and analysis of the history and significance of the information society, the potential of information itself, and the diffusion of its influence on political, economic and cultural relationships in contemporary society. New Media Center_kuda.org opens space for both cultural dialog and alternative methods of education and research. A social question, media culture, new technologies art, and the Open Source and Free Software principal are areas in which kuda.org is engaged. 

Rotterdam - datum      (ako ima neki logo Centrala fondacije...)

ATTESTATION

pisem ti na srpskom, lakse mi je -  ovako nesto:

Ovim pismom se potvrdjuje da je Vahida Ramujkic aktivni ucesnik experimentalno-socijalnog projekta LHE u okviru koga je za svoj pocetni istrazivacki rad na temu komparativnih istorija na teritoriji zapadnog balkana primila 700€ (sto ukljucuje troskove transporta i dnevnica).

Lost Highway Expedition is supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ljubljana and the Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York. Additional in-kind support comes from LHE partner organizations in the cities of the Lost Highway Expedition.

LHE was conceptualized and developed through personal investments of its initiators and its founding members. Since LHE network is constantly expanding, participating individuals and organizations additionally support LHE by in-kind services and infrastructure.

The Lost Highway Expedition is a part of the Europe Lost and Found

The Lost Highway Expedition is a tour to explore the unknown future of Europe. It was initiated by the School of Missing Studies [SMS] as the first event of Europe Lost and Found (ELF), a multi annual and three-phased project. “Europe: Lost and Found” is an interdisciplinary and multi-nationally based research project to articulate and imagine the current evolution of new and transforming borders and territories of Europe. The subject is the continent of immigration, and its depopulation and aging, and the need for redefinition of states, sovereignties and citizenships. Challenged is the established belief and practice of nation-state, including non-representative and technocratic construction of European Union yet to vision more open and alternative definitions for populous in movements. The rejection of constitutional referendum and the riots in France signal the contradiction between homogeneous and multiple identities, the fluidity of capital and containment of labor, the liberation of individuals and their restrictions under sovereignty. Clearly, Europe cannot subsist by itself, and is already being redefined by “the others” in its quest for a self-identity. In such contexts, ELF suggests the future of Europe is best seen in the Western Balkan.

ELF involves following major phases: “Balkanization” (2006-2007), “Europeanization” (2007-2008) and “Map the Future” (2008-2009). Each project phase will build the base for the next one, thus posing new set of questions and determining new research directions. In this way, it will reflect on contemporary Europe, which it understands as a cycle of continuously reshaping social, political, economic and urban conditions and communication processes. Each phase is planned to realize an expedition, followed by exhibitions and a publication.

Programmed with processes and events, ELF is a temporarily and self-organized society in a stateless condition because it moves. For example, the event that begins first two years of ELF is mass oriented expeditions, possibly engaging thousands of people. The first, called Lost Highway, is made of linearly threaded events through nine cities in the Western Balkan, inaugurating Balkanization as the theme of its first year programs. Europeanization is the theme of its second year, and it will begin with a non-linear expedition called Found Europe, across equal numbers of cites and regions in the continent, including the eastern and southern edges of the Mediterranean. Their purpose is to observe the restructuring of society from modernist ideology and the blurring and pixelizing of Europe and Western Balkan into hybrid and parallel states.

ELF will then decentralize and act as a self-organizing platform in its final year. It will therefore invite a network of separate works and projects that are independent from ELF, who have set precedents to, or occurring at the same time as ELF. The hope is to form a network of broader and specific views on the movements of economic, political and cultural geographies, and offer theoretical and practical exchanges between different individuals and groups who are working in these issues. In the final year that is themed as “Eurovisions,” ELF will begin to model and present adaptable, innovative and bottom-up concepts that bounds the transnational communities in Western Balkan and Europe, while developing comparative studies between the two regions and the programs of its first two years.

These investigations together would yield the production of analysis, expressions and initiatives in wide forms of visual, textual and design works, and will be presented in exhibitions, publications, conferences, workshops, interactive web, dynamic mappings, participatory cultural contests and other events. The premise of these actions lies in the thought that the fate of contemporary cities lies between the uniformity of incorporated Europeanization and the Balkanizing capacity of self-organizations, and urban landscapes are the chosen spaces for cultural, ethnic and religious conflicts and resolutions. ELF thinks that this grim perspective of unstable and unpredictable future of Europe can also bring the change necessary for building the next free and civil society, a compelling quest that “Europe: Lost and Found” would like to imagine. And this all begins with the expeditions that behaves like a moving city, to permeate the inflexible lines of old borders and form destined networks of new territories. In ELF, the project and its subjects are indistinctive.