Sergej Goran Pristas

What kind of institutions do we need for new artistic practices? One thing seems certain, we do need institutions. In Zagreb we will have a new dance center soon; there are others in Tallinn, Ljubljana, possibly in Bucharest and Belgrade ...

But what is the relational character of all these smaller and bigger institutions which are trying to communicate the independence of individual artists or collectives but at the same time are under constant scrutiny from funding and ruling bodies? What links those institutions that are “presenting production” and “reproducing presentability” is, of course, most visible on a political level. Those who propose arguments to political structures stressing the necessity of the local dance center describe dance most often in terms of the perfect neo-liberal art form: communication without borders, mobility, representational adequacy ...
Dance serves to perfectly represent an openness of cultural context, therefore investment in dance equals investment in democracy. Let us forget the distinct, but in itself obscured language of dance, let us forget the abstract concreteness and translatory potential of movement ...
On the other hand, established and ...