Still today the views both inside and outside the Balkans consider this broken-up region as a zone of confrontations between territories. Indeed during the Balkan wars in the ’90s, the notion of confrontation was irrefutably territorial: one ethnic regional division against the other. Yet beyond the tribal contestation of space, there is a different though less spectacular set of confrontations at stake. These are not confrontations in space, but confrontations in time: between past and present and future ideals. The confrontation between the utopia of the former Yugoslavian Socialism for instance is the confrontation between a set of ideals which have cancelled out the complexity of the region’s history. These less perceptible confrontations led to the blatant regional antagaonism. The upshot of this came upon the Balkans in the most violent and reactionary confrontation of war. And now that the region is becoming part of a global stage, there are newly felt confrontations between economic ideals of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism and the region’s former ’social’ economy.

The 4 ‘Balkan’ organisations selected for stage 1 are dealing with a confrontation in time. Together they are researching the history of artistic production in the former Yugoslavia and how artists working in the ’70s were creating and imagining social alternatives to the dominant regime of that time. Kuda.org, WHW, PRELOM and SCCA/pro.ba continue to excavate the history and to prise open which elements of the forgotten hopes and the propositions developed by these artists can be revived, artistic imaginings which today could become a positive confrontation against the ‘normalising’ effects of contemproary capitalism and increasing spread of nationalist rather than social engagement and to create instead a succession of necessary confrontations between yesterday, today and tomorrow; between history and utopia.