Igor Dobricic:
"If contemporary Europe is a laboratory, than the field of arts is one of its most sensitive cultural communication instruments. Intense, imaginative, provocative, considerate, informed, persistent dialogue with and about otherness and actively negotiating personal freedom versus freedom of the others in an act of public exposure, give to the field of the arts particular insights about the limitations and extremes of the communication process. "
Charles Esche:
"Why 'laboratory'? The best laboratories are secret and we want this to be open. I see contemporary Europe as riddled with inconsistencies, but broadly a very frightened and frightening place. It is terrorising its new immigrants, it is closing its imaginative borders, it is replacing its imperialist mission with tight parcohialism. If it's a laboratory then the experiment is failing. If we speak about emerging Europe now it seems to have more in common with the mid to late nineteenth century than any other time — with the EU performing the role of a failing internal empires of Austria and Germany. Fortunately the EU does'nt have an army! But in the 19th C, there was a flowering of local cultural expression in many arts of Europe and experiments were carried out in the teeth of political conservatism. That's what the ECF could clearly encourage — a kind of cultural experiemntation in the face of globalist economics and the EU — provocative, depressive, ironic as well as optimistic and progressive. But I think that experimentation has to go on in what remains of the public sphere rather than the laboratory. It should even try to create new public spheres (as you suggest) through technology, exchange, discourse etc. I could see the ECF being concerned especially with this idea of a new public sphere in Europe. So how about 'contemporary Europe needs new and experimental public spheres to develop an intense discourse about its contemporary culture and politics. Through this initiative, the ECF will help develop them.' "