Soon after the Amsterdam getogether, the stage 1 ALMOSTREAL participants met again in Zagreb in August 2005 and decided to reinitiate the discontinued Prelom magazine by doing the necessary administrative groundwork to build an indepedent organisational platform for Prelom magazine. Prelom kolektiv and its website were subsequently developed in the period between August and October 2005.

Belgrade-based magazine PRELOM was initiated in 2001 as a unique platform for discussing the role of contemporary art and culture in creating radical possibilities for a new emanciaptory politics. Between 2001-2004 Prelom existed as an aggregate of individual contributions, but by 2004, it could no longer secure the continuation of the magazine. With the support of ALMOSTREAL, PRELOM was regenerated as an independent organisation in mid 2005 - this time as both a magazine and a collective named PRELOM kolektiv. With this revival, PRELOM established its administrative base as a publisher and for expanding other activities beyond the production of the journal such as exhibitions, conferences and presentations.

The decision to establish this new organisation as part of ALMOSTREAL was a direct consequence of the ALMOSTREAL incentive to support models of cultural collaboration, particularly where infrastructural needs are lacking. After a period of research and negotiation, and based on this ‘criteria’, the stage 1 participants decided to form a collaboration between Prelom and the 3 existing organisations. This new strategy for cooperation between Prelom, kuda, WHW and SCCA/pro.ba would involve sharing and thus broadening one anothers access to resources, as well as potentially drawing new cultural relations between the emerging Prelom kolektiv in Belgrade and the different cultural and systemic contexts of the other organisations in Zagreb, Novi Sad and Sarajevo.

"In the summer of 2004 the Centre for Contemporary Art collapsed and Prelom lost its former institutional backing. The editorial board entered a long period of discussion on how to proceed further. Analyses of the situation have shown that the type of the publication we produced is usually connected either to art or academic institutions or to the temporary artistic projects (exhibitions, art manifestations and events, etc.) that provide the basis for production. Alternative to this was a kind of “separation strategy” which could take the form of what is nowadays called an “alternative economy” – either through the model of collective subscription by the readership or through the transformation of the journal’s form into a fanzine, a leaflet or various internet-publishing projects. The majority of the editorial board finally agreed that this would deprive us, in most of the cases of the possibility of intervening within the already existing cultural or art projects . Therefore, we were – in a certain way – forced to start up a non-governmental organization – Prelom kolektiv – as the necessary tool for providing publishing and other activities. Actually, we decided to take the challenge head-on and to confront the perils of succumbing to – what was named in our discussions as – the “NGO logic"."

Excerpt from “The Neo-liberal Institution of Culture and the Critique of Culturalization” by executive editors of PRELOM, Dušan Grlja and Jelena Vesić (published online for 'Transversal' eipcp).