Lopud Seminar – Imagine Lopud
September 20–23, 2007 | Lopud Island, Croatia

The Lopud Seminars are conceived to create an impetus for innovation, dialogue and exchange by bringing together cultural practitioners of different fields in small enclosed workshop-like Debate Sessions to interconnect different agendas and practices, that we have identified and localized in individual and institutional efforts and talents in the respective fields of contemporary art, architecture, preservation, performance, theory. In the light of an expanding international horizon, we plan to endorse and pave the way for alternative co-operations based on ongoing negotiations of the production of cultural meaning and spatial practices within sites of transformation.

The opening of Your black horizon Art Pavilion in June 2007 has been accompanied by a series of Seminars investigating the activities and future possibilities on the island of Lopud compared to a variety of diverse artistic and institutional practices. With the encouragement of Jorge Otero-Pailos to let our guard down right from the very beginning, we enjoyed the most vivid exchange of ideas, and many projects and collaborations were born as a result. A follow-up meeting took place during the weekend of the 20th to the 23rd of September.

Revitalization of the island of Lopud as a venue for interdisciplinary dialogue and projects
By establishing the art pavilion as a temporary site of display and the gradual use of the Monastery-Fortress complex of Lopud as a site of discourse (laboratory, archive, seminar, retreat, residencies) and performance, TBA21 proposes to create a context which can be dedicated to ongoing dialogue, research, and programming. The structure on the island can produce a diversity of public forms of engagement and create an artistic space, an architectural space, a space of diffusions, allowing for interdisciplinarity and experimentation. 
Based on the results of the meetings and discussions in June and September 2007 and the projects in development (with artists Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Catherine Sullivan, Russell Haswell and architect François Roche), we wish to formulate proposals for change and transformation considering the concrete situation in Lopud and the planning of an ongoing programming of the monastery complex and the contemporary art pavilion. Issues to be considered are the sensitivity and respect towards existing structures and the attempt of implementing change that sometimes demands a more radical gesture or action in order to achieve the projected new situation as well as making space to the imagination. With Konstantin Akinsha, Artnews magazine, Budapest, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, chairman TBA21, Vienna, Louis Benech, landscape designer, Studio Louis Benech, Paris, Dinko Peračić, architect, Platforma 981, Croatia, Kristina Leko, artist, Zagreb, Sejla Kamerić, artist, Berlin / Sarajewo, Russell Haswell, artist, London.

A Late Breakfast at the Monastery brought together Fulya Erdemci, curator, Santral Istanbul, Igor Eskinja, artist, Rijeka, Ivana Franke, artist, Zagreb, Danica Dakić, artist, Sarajevo / Düsseldorf, Daniela Zyman, curator, TBA21, Vienna, Boris Ondreička, director tranzit dielne, Bratislava, Nadija Mustapić, artist, Rijeka / University of Iowa, Intermedia Department, Iara Boubnova, curator, ICA, Sofia
presenting Initiatives and Projects by the participants coming from diverse backgrounds, talking about their experiences as cultural practitioners/operators.

Alternative Practices and new institutional Forms 
was a continuation of investigation and analysis of alternative practices and institutional formats of practitioners and producers within the field of contemporary art, which interconnect both thinking/exchange and practice/realization, demanded by changing or imagined realities. The aim was to look at alternative and new patterns of collaboration and engagement that actively deal with and respond to environments in change and to foster a demanding program for contemporary art understood as cultural practice. We were particularly interested in finding appropriate ways in which ambitious individual and institutional efforts are localized and brought to the fore without falling into the trap of ethnicized branding strategies and or the production of any national identity displays. We explored forms of self-organization, impermanent interactions, the interstitial space of disciplinary engagements, “social project spaces”, sites of archival and scholarly research, and many more contemporary formats of institutional / individual action. With Iara Boubnova, curator, ICA, Sofia, Nina Magnúsdóttir, Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Boris Ondreička, director tranzit dielne, Bratislava, Ana-Marija Koljanin, independent curator, Osijek, Emre Baykal, director of exhibitions, Santral Istanbul, Daniela Zyman, curator, T-B A21, Vienna, Kutluğ Ataman, artist, Istanbul, Igor Eskinja, artist, Rijeka, Iva Prosoli, curator, MSU, Zagreb.

Strategies and Performatives in contemporary Sound Productions 
with Florian Hecker, artist, Vienna, Nadija Mustapić, artist, Rijeka / University of Iowa, Intermedia Department, Danica Dakić, artist, Sarajevo / Düsseldorf, Ragnar Kjartansson, artist, Reykjavík, Russell Haswell, artist, London, Cerith Wyn Evans, artist, London. In this session, the complex, at times ambivalent, relationship between space and sound / location and sound and the production of spatial meaning through sound was further investigated. Is sound the actual space that can be superimposed to any given form? What are the parameters that actually effect the ‘sound-space’ and its qualities? Does the context/locality (such as Lopud or the Renaissance Fortress) add something to the actual piece or is it rather the performative aspect or the strategy itself that produces a change in reception? Examples of the role, use and function of sound in diverse artistic practices.

The Proverbial Breakfast focused on Collecting Ideas / Unrealized Projects with Brad Kahlhamer, artist, New York, Cerith Wyn Evans, artist, London, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, chairman TBA21, Vienna, Kutlug Ataman, artist, Istanbul, Fulya Erdemci, curator, Santral Istanbul, François Roche, architect, R&Sie(n), Paris, Florian Hecker, artist, Vienna. Imagining the unrealized, speculative, utopian, visionary, searching for the avatars, the frankensteins, the ghosts in the shell - artistic work and its relationship to that which remains unrealized/unrealizable, unspoken, unthinkable, unsellable.