De Balie, centre for politics and arts, presents from November 28 through 30 the ROUGH GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM, a three day manifestation in Serbia’s capital Belgrade
De Balie produces a programme with video diaries, debates, music, films, photography, theatre, video art and graphic design in cooperation with several partners. Through art and discussion, De Balie wants to attack the existing clichés. Not the differences, but the similarities between Serbia and the Netherlands are the main focus. Both countries show cracks in their national self-image and in both countries, ‘national identity’ is currently a hotly discussed topic, as is the question of how to relate to one’s country’s past.
Part of the Rough Guide is, among other events, a debate between Euro-believers and Euro-sceptics, programmes on human security and the globalisation of a criminal network, and a closer look is taken into the Balkan’s border regime in Border Inquiries.
Besides organising these events, several artists have been asked to join De Balie. The bands Room Eleven and Aux Raus perform in Belgrade; theatre maker Jetse Batelaan (TgMAX.) delivers his play The Raised Finger; and Edit Kaldors performance Point Blank will also be shown. Graphic designer Annelys de Vet creates, together wit Serbians, a Subjective Atlas of Serbia, as she did before of the Netherlands and Palestine. Film director and recent winner of the Dutch film prize Het gouden kalf, Hanro Smitsman, shows his work, and so does photographer Mark Nozeman.
The Dutch partners of De Balie are the Amsterdam-based cultural centre Melkweg and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, while in Belgrade De Balie cooperates, among others, with the cultural centre Dom omladine and the Centre for Cultural Decontamination.
Two years ago, the festival took place in the opposite direction: artists, thinkers and practitioners painted a clear picture of important Serbian issues in both Melkweg and De Balie to a large and diverse audience.
De Balie has always had an international focus (Sarajevo, Sofia and Riga, among others) and aims at increasing this. The coming years, De Balie will team up with several international hubs, to open new windows to each others audiences, and to introduce different activities in the fields of art and debate and all the mixtures in between.
