EUROSCOPE is a project that should facilitate residence of young artists in Belgrade, with continuous presentation and public discussion of their works. The project is planned to be realized in Rex. The BELEF organizers have been informed about the preparations in order to possibly gain additional financial support. When Darka and I met and discussed her festival concept, with which she applied for the position of the director at the time, we realized that a few works could be well integrated in the subject "Prostori pregovaranja" (Areas of Negotiations) and so she included them in this part of the exhibition. Given the fact that the project was supported by the European Cultural Foundation, this is its unofficial opening in an environment that would make it more or less competitive in due time course. One thing was in common for most of the EUROSCOPE works. Their authors have expressed a strong desire to work and exhibit in Belgrade, but they could not fulfil their wish and intention, something was standing in their way.

Let us see how and why their wishes are fulfilled now, interwoven with our desires for a future enlarged homeland. Is it possible to detect, to everyone’s satisfaction, the ratio and contents of a false-bottom of European ideas and projects, by ambitious cooperation, freedom of artistic expression and freedom of interpretation of artistic work? This false-bottom is constitutional for European Union of the present day, because the day it celebrates as its holiday – the 9th of May – is in fact the Day of Victory over Fascism, the day of foundation of European Coal and Steel Community.

The work of Anne Verhoijsen, "Confinding", deals with the research and visual presentation of secrets and secret places of Belgrade, as reported or confessed by Belgraders themselves, selected and artistically processed by the author. Why would someone wish to show a secret place or to confess to a visiting artist? In our confusion regarding issues that refer mainly to ourselves, sometimes our only hope is that there is someone, somewhere, a big boyfriend or girlfriend who is entitled to learn about our pains and to consequently define our place and importance in the world and its immanent system of values. Except for associating in an embarrassing way with collections of mystic ritual items of peoples of colonized countries in the museums of colonizers, this secret collection presents us in positive light, as a society ready for certain introspection, if it is provoked by an external intervention. It remains to us to consider whether these are secrets only for the external world, i.e. intended for the external world or the "goats’ ears" of a damned well known country – secrets disclosed and reported to that country. Let my intention of saying this remain a secret.

The work by János Sugár "Time Patrol" is evolving by collecting and keeping stories of accidental passers-by, on a busy place in the city. Any passer-by interested in and willing to tell any ten-minute story into the Dictaphone will be awarded with 500 Dinars. The selected stories are published in the form of a newspaper and sold on the same spot where they were collected – recorded. So far, this has been realized in Budapest, on the Moscow Square, and in Zagreb, outside the Railway Station. In Belgrade, the stories will be collected on Kalemegdan. What are the motives of people who participate in this project by telling their stories? It is difficult to say that they do it only for money because it seemingly is not big money; however, it is important to understand that today even this could be a possible and adequate explanation. Also, our curiosity regarding the contents and manner of individual interpretation of the time in which we are living indicates the opportunity for profit. The publishing of these stories means sharing the booty of this patrol that is intercepting and catching seemingly someone else’s non-lost time – theirs, but from the moment of reading ours as well.

If in Romania today you buy a bottle of juice or rolls and buns you will not get a bag, while in a supermarket you will probably have to pay for it. Until recently, any goods in the countries of the "Eastern Europe" were considered to be so valuable that everybody carried around simple net-bags all the time. In our country, at the time, a nice bag was the matter of prestige; therefore it was neatly stacked up in wardrobes together with the rest of clothing. A good strong plastic bag was much more in than the most expensive school bag. The bag rustled for you about the places you visited and shops in which you made your purchases; the bag was transmitting information on your standard and taste. We may suppose that the present mass consumption of billion simplest plastic bags over here resulted from such different consumer’s experiences. Su Tomesen proposed to make a tent of this bags.

The bags today are available always and everywhere. Therefore they are piled up in specialized home waste disposal sites, in pigeon-holes of kitchen elements and in drawers, or in some place suitable for putting bags aside, in some dead angle, or simply behind radiators. And they are piled up on the municipal waste disposal sites, for instance in Grocka, from where, during certain seasons, the southeast wind called košava from time to time moves them like flocks of birds back to the City, to their concrete litter.

Some people already got an idea and started making of these bags – what else but – market bags; two or three hundreds of plastic bags are built into such a multicoloured bag, in which you can put as many things as in two plastic bags. Just like in the case of production of a bag in which two hundred bags are standing in for two bags, this tent, too, in a way stands in for two bags on citizens’ heads under the rain. These proportions are strange and threatening: in order to reduce the pollution produced by plastic matters that do not dissolve before eight decades have passed, regardless of any inventiveness or chemistry, it is sufficient to use only two plastic bags for a waterproof cap, instead of a couple of thousand of bags that Su needed for building this tent. It is quite clear that a plastic bag on one’s head is not as comfortable protection from the stormy weather as a tent. Nevertheless, the logics and the quantity of material and work interwoven and invested here, the ratio between functionality of each component’s unit and the final result, in an unpleasant manner remind of the painstaking handwork that will have to be put into unpolluting of the environment. Let us say that, after moving over fences, wires, antennas and trimmed trees, those plastic bags start to dissolve, each of them into ten or hundred pieces. In order to collect the remains of just one half-dissolved bag we will have to – threatened by the competent EU Commission – make up to one hundred of those thoughtless movements that we made when taking the bags from salesmen. Su is telling it in a nice way, characteristic for artists.

What else is there to say? Due to this useful meeting with people, the opportunity to ask the artists: Why do you want to exhibit here, what are your motives? Due to the privilege of being called by Anne from Amsterdam to give her someone’s phone number in the Netherlands, due to all of that we have to form a centre for artistic residence, a steady residency programme in Belgrade. In that way we would be able to regularly observe their, that is our European characters, through more or less indicative artistic production. Imagine someone who is always here like a free-style ambassador, a correspondent without the portfolio, with nothing better to do but to observe us and shrewdly create an interface-confrontation of our and their characters. I hope to be a well-meaning usurper of that agency.