Europe? Pass me another sandwich!

Musings of a non-European at the Trans-European Picnic, 29 April-1 May 2004, Novi Sad, Serbia & Montenegro. Organised by V2 and Kuda.org

Aotearoa (New Zealand) will never be invited to join the European Union; even Serbia is sure to get the nod before us. So my kiwi perspective on the Trans-European Picnic, held to mark to accession of ten new countries to the EU, is pretty unique. Not completely unique, as much to my surprise there was another New Zealander at the picnic; someone I knew, someone from my home town even. Running into Caroline McCaw in the Balkan wilds and in the face of the expanding EU empire threw our own adolescent cultural identity into sharp relief.

The Trans-European Picnic aimed to bring artists and theorists together for two days of discussion, debate and creative reflection on what the growth of the EU means for artists, particularly those in the ever-shrinking non-EU Europe. The programme included a workshop, artists’ presentations, forums, film screenings, performances, a visit to the Chapel of Peace, a handbook and the picnic itself.

The serious part – forums around the themes of standards and mobility – asked questions like: would the EU might result in a monoculture; what are the implications for artists; and what will happen to small organisations? At some point someone asked why the EU needed to expand–a good question but one we didn’t manage to answer, although the speakers touched on everything from smelly French cheese to pornographic billboards in Bulgaria.

The language of EU documents came under scrutiny; Bojana Petric (HU/SCG) found that the word “culture” is generally associated with one of two words: “common” or “diversity”. Her analysis revealed that the EU aims to “develop”, “promote” and “bring to the fore” common culture, while cultural diversity is to be “protected” and “preserved”. This implies that cultural diversity will be relegated to the status of a museum object, while common culture is something that doesn’t exist yet so it must be invented and promoted.

Going a step further, Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria) declared that the EU doesn’t care about culture at all, and is merely using the language as a tool to sell its concept. He then suggested that on the evening of 30th April, refugees would flood across the Serbo-Hungarian border, and proposed that we drive up there to welcome them into the safety of the non-EU; this seemed like a practical idea to me, but I guess I missed the bus for that adventure.

(There were a few things I missed, such as the streaming technologies workshop – due to the diversity, as opposed to commonality, of programme information and the incompatibility between the Picnic’s web site and Serbian dial-up connections. Another was the passports and soup of the SOS Immigration Office–no idea where that happened.)

The discussions took place in the Novi Sad Cultural Centre’s Veliki Sala (Big Hall), curiously arranged with half the audience on the stage and half in the auditorium, the speakers in the middle of the stage and video screens offering a variety of perspectives. This resulted in a multi-layered visual experience for the audience to explore when the speakers drifted into theoretical netherworlds.

I was drifting away myself when the phrase “equal playing field” caught my ear and threw me back ten or 15 years to New Zealand’s days of unrestrained privatisation and new right economics, when “level playing field” was the popular method of linguistically erasing unpleasantries such as institutionalised racism, post-colonial trauma, discrimination and so on in favour of an artificial commonality. For a moment I was lost, hovering in a timeless void of political jargon and trendy platitudes, where language is twisted beyond meaning and people exist only in degrees of diversity and commonality.

Back on the ground in Novi Sad, an artistic programme accompanied the theory. I confess to skipping the artists’ presentations in favour of food, but I diligently watched all the films screened over two nights: a truly diverse programme of experimental and political videos from Turkey, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia, Poland, and the Netherlands. One western European’s whimsical journey in a wood-powered car offered an interesting contrast to “Shoes for Europe”, documenting the changing of railway carriage wheels at the Moldavian border, where the differently-sized train tracks of Russia and Europe meet: these two films gave starkly different illustrations of mobility, standards and choice. Other films dealt with topics ranging from animated 3D cockroaches to the return of Roma refugees to Serbia. Friday night culminated with an intense “multimedia pseudo-opera”, Turkish techno duo Anabala and a welcome opportunity to chill out in a yurt complete with cushions, incense and DJ.

On Saturday, two busloads of festive folk set off into a hot spring day, destined first for Sremski Karlovac and the Chapel of Peace, where in 1699 a treaty was signed between the Turks, Venetians, Austrians and Russians (the Serbs being still enslaved at the time). From this historic town we continued on a much longer than expected drive through the flat Voyvodina countryside to Fruska Gora. Caro and I could have been anywhere in the world, discussing the people and politics of Aotearoa and idly wondering where we might be being taken as we passed a duty-free shop in the middle of nowhere. Eventually, we arrived at a forest lodge where a huge meal had been prepared. Eating and socialising were prioritised and, after a quick vote, the final discussion was abridged to speed-talks and a half-hearted suggestion of a game of football. What was that about the expansion of the EU …oh, never mind!

On the journey back to Novi Sad we were treated to a spectacular lightning display – nature’s multimedia opera. We said hasty goodbyes and the bus spat me out into a torrential downpour. At a friend’s party later that night, I performed my impersonation of a New Zealand tourism promoter for an audience of Serbs, Austrians, a French guy and a Montenegrin, while thinking how nice it is to be from somewhere so remote that we can almost believe it really is a digitally-enhanced landscape filled with happy hobbits and enough magic to make dreams come true.

The desire to dream is what’s common; the dreams themselves are diverse.