Peripherie 3ooo

Together with the Ruhr Region, Essen is bidding to be named European Capital of Culture for 2010. But why? The essential things, so the project Periphery 3000 – Strategic Platform for Networked Centers, no longer take place in the national capitals but, for some time now, wherever peripheral positions facilitate a perspective on social and cultural foundations. The periphery, and not the center, is a position of productive uncertainty.

Periphery 3000 is a project of the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund in collaboration with the Croatian network Zagreb – Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000 (ZCK3000) and relations; the project investigates structures and cultural production beyond the centers in the Ruhr Region.

ZCK 3000 is a heterogeneous network of originally four, today eight independent Zagreb culture initiatives active in the areas of visual arts, media art and theory, collective curatorial praxis, software design and development, theatre and performance, and urban planning and architecture. They have been collaborating for just over two years. During this time, ZCK 3000 has delved intensively into the relationship between independent culture and institutions – and done so under the aggravated conditions of so-called normalization, i.e. the transition, accelerated by the increasing pressure of globalization, to a neo-liberalist system.

Together with the Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, various cultural institutions and initiatives from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and relations, the project Peripherie 3000 – Strategic Platform for Networked Centers was developed. It takes place just prior to the decision-making process and eventual announcement of which German city is to be European Capital of Culture in 2010.

While the number “3000” in the title of Peripherie 3000 clearly refers to Zagreb Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000, the concept of the “periphery” plays on an understanding of a (cultural) capital as a center and expressly counters it: the periphery as a position on the outskirts or a site of frayed edges that allows a different perspective on shifting social and cultural foundations.

The Ruhr Region as a poly- or non-centric urban network is made up of continuous transitions between urban and non-urban areas. To speak of a center here would be to misjudge the peculiarity and the quite unique quality of this specific structure: “the edge is everywhere,” is how the Dortmund project orange.edge formulates it.

Peripherie 3000 takes this permanently “peripheral position” to be a positive and productive vehicle and makes it the starting point for a meditation on structures beyond centers. This entails a fundamental revaluation of the concept of “periphery”: it is no longer understood as a negative term, as a designation for something secondary or unimportant, but as a position of fundamental uncertainty undermining those binary oppositions which we have become so used to that they slip through our perception.

In the framework of Peripherie 3000 four joint projects tackling these themes were developed by groups from different disciplines from North Rhine-Westphalia and Zagreb. From April 21-23, they will be presented to the public in the form of artistic-urban interventions and a colloquium.

(Inke Arns)

Participants:
Klub Peripherie 3000 (u.a. Thomas Köner, Klaus Heid); Public symposium "What kind of cultural institutions do we need? On the (political) effects of structures" (englischsprachig); Trio Pajo & Labosh & Kovac (Concert); Projects in public space: stadtraum.org (Düsseldorf), orange.edge (Dortmund) & platforma 9,81 (Zagreb); Dance performance by Zeljka Sancanin, presented by MeX (Dortmund), Center for Drama Art (Zagreb) und Multimedia Institute (Zagreb).

A project of Hartware MedienKunstVerein in cooperation with Zagreb Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000 und relations

Program
Programmdetails Peripherie 3000

Supported by:
relations
relations is a initiative project of Kulturstiftung des Bundes