The 5th getogether was held in the City Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia 6 - 8 May 2007. This first objective of this getogether was to reflect on the activities that have been supported by ALMOSTREAL providing an occasion for participants to exchange their working processes. The second objective was to introduce ALMOSTweb as a database-in-the-making that relays the different 'knowledges', insights and intuitions emerging from ALMOSTREAL practices and activities.

The 2-day meeting was attended by participants from ALMOSTREAL stage 1: Ivet Curlin (WHW), Dusan Grlja, Jelena Vesic (PRELOM kolektiv) Asja Hafner (SCCA/pro.Ba) and Zoran Pantelic (kuda.org) — and stage 3: Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori (the Blue House and Maze Corporation), as well as ALMOSTEAL advisors (Sher Doruff and Maria Lind), the ALMOSTREAL project team (Igor Dobricic, Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen, Auke Touwslager and Wietske Maas) and ECF head of Cultural Cooperation, Taja Vovk.

On the first day, the participants from stage 1 spoke about their collaborative work on "Political practices in (post) Yugoslav art/Today for Yesterday". The main aim of the stage 1 organisations is to draw links between the work and movements of artists of the modernist Yugoslav heritage and contemporary art practice. WHW, kuda.org, SCCA/pro.Ba and PRELOM kolektiv are working together to look at and realise new possibilities of cultural production and to retrieve positive alternative knowledges from art practices of the '60s, '70 and '80s Yugoslavia.

"...There is also a collaboration between us and the artists from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Together we are we able to talk, listen and to collaborate further. In a society beset by a lack of dialogue [...] dialogue becomes revolutionary."

Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori then spoke about the Blue House and the proposal so far stage 4, which concerns the theme hospitality, especially in the Dutch context. The Blue House is a meeting place for local residents and a temporary house for artists, creative thinkers, philosophers, architects among others to consider and realise new community structures. Through its activities the Blue House tries to create new possibilities for public life on the island, to create conditions for a more inclusive form of urbanism within the heavily predetermined urban regulations common to Dutch urban planning projects.

On the second day, the discussions pivoted around the issue of funding and to what extent the funder could develop and engage in a discourse with artists about the issues involved in the artistic production and processes it supports. This discussion was met with contradicting opinions: On the one hand, there was a clear preference for ALMOSTREAL to maintain an arms length distance from the practice it supports. On the other, culturing a communication with the artists allows for a more nuanced and dynamic in the representation of supported work which is necessary to affect political processes — especially since all too often, the representation of art to policy makers is divorced from the practice, which leads to inaccurate recommendations toward future policies.

Maria Lind raised the importance of considering how the artistic collaborations developed and supported through ALMOSTREAL could be turned into propositions that affect a European cultural-political discourse: “…one of the most crucial qustions right now is funding and how funding is changing…it hasn’t happened before to bring together different cultural producers and policy makers, especially since cultural policy is (mostly) narrowly bound up with national funding. However, what’s very important is how cultural producers can use these situations...[and to ask ourselves] why do we want to change [cultural] policies in Europe, and then what do we want these policies/ funding structures to be like?” —Maria Lind

“…the schmooze factor between the individual and the funder is not explicit in the current European trend (which is increasingly blurring the public and private models of funding) because the individual in Europe is situated within a particular governing structure and therefore there are many more layers and implications.”