Held in Zagreb between 16-19 January 2006 in the Showroom space which ajoins Gallery Nova (run by curatorial collective WHW). The gathering included most of the artists-participants who were involved in stage 1 as well as potential participants for stage 2 and advisors to consider the recent and future developments of ALMOSTREAL.

The first day was spent with artists of stage 1 to talk about the visible and less visible instances of collaboration between their 4 organisations unfolding since July 2005, and the good and bad of ALMOSTREAL's unusual support strategy. The next day was dedicated to talking with potential participants from Beirut who shared their concerns, ideas to take place in Beirut, Lebanon. The third day was spent with advisors to discuss how ALMOSTREAL and its web database can become instrumental as a public research tool that shows the textures of difference and open possibilities of cross-cultural relations created by artists working together. And not least, what and how ALMOSTREAL can better adapt its support and research and presentation of the details and difficulties of experimental art practices that are being done as part of ALMOSTREAL. How to implement a bottom-up conversation between artists and art funding programmes that could influence the decisions made in cultural funding incentives?

In overview, the discussion points of the second getogether were:

What are the possibilities for processes and production that the ALMOSTREAL project could support in/from a Beirut and its regional context?

The general conceptual framework of the ALMOSTREAL project: to recapitulate stage 1 (confrontation) and to introduce stage 2 (storytelling) through the perspective of the ALMOSTREAL framework.

Introduction and discussion of the ALMOSTREAL knowledge base, and its development as a base structure for researching, documenting, transmitting, and consolidating specialised knowledges emerging from the practices supported throughout the ALMOSTREAL project.

Establishing a realistic framework for possible formats of production, setting up a preliminary timeline and identifying how to proceed in the immediate future.

Where are we going from here? What are the next concrete steps which should be taken? Could the continuation of the stage 1 in the Balkan links to the development of stage 2 in Beirut?

"… We can not speak about collaboration on the level of production, but more about the infrastructure that can be made. The overlaps created between different capacities and formats, the gallery run by WHW, the journal, the radio, the television programme, distributing certain contents which we could share. [This support enabled us] to formulate a collaboration together and to allow more spontaneous cross-overs to occur, in contrast to how foundations usually give funding… This spontaneity is a great value of the project."