A few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Europe Against the Current” challenged the conception of a divided Europe perpetuated by Cold War politics. At the same time, its approach diverged from the idea of European identity defended by agents and organizations then involved in setting up European institutions and infrastructures. This text revisits some aspects of the festival’s history and replaces it within a genealogy of cultural interaction between Eastern and Western Europe from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, with Amsterdam as a specific location. Along with “Europe Against the Current,” other more- or lesser-known events, initiatives, and personal trajectories addressed in this text contribute to draw this possible—and certainly incomplete—genealogy: the European Artists Forum (1987), the exhibition “Works and Words” (1979), as well as selected activities and works of Amsterdam-based artists Ulises Carrión and Henryk Gajewski. Without pretending to be exemplary, these cases invite reflection on the impact of East-West relations on the articulation of individual and collective identities in the changing European geopolitical and cultural landscape that preceded the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991. To what extent did the events, persons, and collectives evoked here react to or participate in this process and debate? What alternatives did they offer to a conception of European identity that was being discussed and negotiated at institutional and intergovernmental levels, and how was this response inspired and fueled by strategies inherited from the rich ground of social movements the Amsterdam local scene presented?
The text is divided into three interconnected sections that also function as autonomous units. The first looks back at the origins of “Europe Against the Current” and its relation to the situation in Europe after the Helsinki Final Act (1975), also known as the Helsinki Accords, which turned freedom of information and expression into a central issue in state policymaking, but also at a grassroots level. I argue that, while some initiatives participated in the institutionalization of certain idea of Europe that aimed to strengthen a sense of common belonging among the members and prospective members of the European Economic Community (EEC), others, such as “Europe Against the Current,” sought to resist this process by emphasizing plurality and heterogeneity. At the end of this first part, a closer look at the cohabitation of printed matter and incipient new technologies suggests that this singular combination of diverse languages and information carriers enabled the festival to become a vibrant space for community-building and resistance to uniformization. In the second part, we go back in time to consider “Europe Against the Current” in relation to another event, already known as a critical turning point in artistic relations between Eastern and Western Europe: the international festival “Works and Words” (1979). The notion of hospitality and its implementation are used to signal the presence of an economy of solidarity that facilitated encounters between protagonists from both regions but also, paradoxically, called into question the horizontality of this relationship. Finally, the text ends by evoking punctual aspects of the trajectory of artists and cultural workers Ulises Carrión and Henryk Gajewski, who both emigrated to Amsterdam. At different points in their carriers, being a foreigner was an essential condition (“foreignness”) and an impetus for creation and communication. Both had an interest in artists’ publications and new media in a way that returns to and engages with the issue of information carriers at the heart of “Europe Against the Current.”
From September 15 to 17, 1989, “Europe Against the Current” aimed to celebrate the free flow of information across Europe. For three days, several venues in Amsterdam hosted international visual and performing artists, musicians, alternative publishers, and activists, and visitors actively engaged in the production, dissemination, and consumption of information. A broad range of artifacts and practices were involved, all characterized by a significant degree of independence from official and institutional structures (fig. 1). The core of the festival, a fair of information carriers (sometimes also called “international meeting,” perhaps to avoid the commercial connotations of “fair”) in the Beurs van Berlage brought together participants from a broad range of countries. Right in front of the old stock exchange building, the Beursplein was a venue for performances and concerts. The cultural centers Paradiso and Melkweg respectively hosted the event’s inaugural concert, performed by the group Pop Mechanika/Sergej Koerjochin from the Soviet Union, and an evening titled Mid-Europee feest (Central European party), with bands from Czechoslovakia and Hungary.[3] Finally, several exhibitions were on view at the artist-run gallery W139.
Figure 1. “Europe Against the Current”, poster, 1989. Archief Europe against the current, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
The idea for a festival dedicated to alternative, independent, and radical information carriers originated from a group of volunteers at the self-managed bookstore Het Fort Van Sjakoo (The Fortress of Sjakoo). The history of this space, a squatted building located in the Nieuwmarkt neighborhood that was legalized in 1988, is tied to the squatters’ movement and the fight against the destruction of the oldest and most deteriorated parts of the city to build new infrastructure and housing.[4] Since 1977, Het Fort Van Sjakoo had been a central place for the dissemination and distribution of radical and libertarian ideas and publications in Amsterdam, with a marked international and plurilingual orientation.[5] Thanks to volunteers’ presence at local and international events, book fairs, and meetings, the structure had acquired a position on the map of countercultural and activist organizations in Europe and beyond, as well as an important directory of addresses and contacts.
Although publications from Eastern European authors and groups (underground press as well as periodicals published by emigres in Western Europe) could be found at Het Fort Van Sjakoo since its beginnings, its desire to support initiatives that challenged the restricted media sphere in socialist states reached a new stage in 1985. From October 15 to November 25, 1985, the Hungarian capital Budapest hosted a meeting of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the first to take place in a Warsaw Pact member state since the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. In a context of detente, the ratification of the Final Act by thirty-five states had marked a turning point in the relations between the Cold War blocs. Significantly, its famous “Third Basket” provided a resource for the self-organization of civil society, opening the possibility for publicly calling for respect for human rights and freedom of movement and expression in a way that pressured governments to apply its principles. Although it was a first step toward recognition of these rights, as a non-legally binding agreement, the application of the Final Act remained subject to the decision of governments which, in the case of the Soviet Union and the states in its sphere of influence, often disregarded these principles.
An official initiative, the Budapest Cultural Forum proved indeed that, at the diplomatic level, a lukewarm and cautious consensus prevailed over a consistent denunciation of state censorship in socialist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In parallel to the official meeting, a three-day gathering was organized by the International Helsinki Federation with the help of members of the Hungarian political opposition and the unofficial cultural scene.[6] Despite its constant monitoring by the authorities, this Counter Forum attended by a hundred intellectuals, creators, diplomats, and dissidents from both sides of the Iron Curtain opened a space for discussions on topics like creation under conditions of political repression, human rights, and artistic freedom.[7]
The presence of a member of Het Fort Van Sjakoo at the Counter Forum was decisive in the decision to envisage intra-European relations in such a way as to escape Cold War dichotomies. Co-organizer of “Europe Against the Current,” Tjebbe van Tijen, recalled:
It stimulated us to pay extra attention to exchanges between those areas called Eastern and Western Europe and how these designations still convey associations and connotations of the Cold War period. By so doing we hope to bring home again that other, simply geographical, content of these words.[8]
Local participants in the Counter Forum would later take part in “Europe Against the Current,” like György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, cofounders of the Artpool Archive in Budapest and authors of the informative bulletin AL (Actual/ Alternative/ Artpool Letter, 1983–1985), as well as the members of the artists’ group Inconnu, whose visual and graphic work, particularly critical to the regime, circulated in self-edited magazines and samizdat publications from the Hungarian political opposition.[9]
Back to Amsterdam, two important steps led toward the implementation of “Europe Against the Current.” The first was the creation in 1987 of an eponymous foundation, the aim of which was to apply for public and private funding.[10] The second was the redaction of a one-page manifesto, also titled “Europe Against the Current,” calling “independent publishers, alternative culture makers, radical producers” to participate in an international meeting in Amsterdam and “have [their] creativities flow together.”[11] The manifesto was translated into ten languages and distributed with a registration form, in order to secure adhesions to the forthcoming festival and gather information for the constitution of a database of information carriers across Europe (fig. 2).[12]
Figure 2. One of the leaflets with the Manifesto of “Europe Against the Current” that called for participation (French version), 1987-88. The event was originally scheduled for May 27 to 29, 1988. Archief Stichting Europa Tegen de Stroom in, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
Cross-referencing of information and archives allows the identification of some of the organizers of “Europe Against the Current,” including Erik Neuwendijk, Tjebbe van Tijen, and Eef Vermeij. However, their names rarely, if ever, appeared on public documents and programs of the event.[13] The manifesto itself was anonymous and cited Het Fort Van Sjakoo as the main contact to send applications and inquiries. This absence of individual visibility reflected a sense of collective organization that fit with the spirit of Het Fort Van Sjakoo. At the same time, the mystery surrounding the identity of the organizers would become a source of misunderstanding for some participants to the festival, who formulated concerns and suspicions regarding the project’s financing and its supposed hidden intentions.[14] On a different register, anonymity certainly made it easier to get through censorship, especially when dealing with interlocutors whose practices were considered suspicious or hostile by the authorities of their countries and subject to surveillance. In June 1987 an agent reporting to the Hungarian State Security thus informed that visual artist György Galántai had been approached by “Het Fort Sjakoo” [sic] representatives “Eef Vermey [sic] and Erik Nieuwendijk,” who invited him to participate in a “large alternative book fair” and operate as a relay for Hungarian independent publishers. The informant also noted that Galántai had been asked to “research and collect information and documents on lesser-known or previously unknown radical groups operating in Hungary,” and even to represent those who would not be allowed to participate or travel to Amsterdam.[15] The use of the term “dissident” to refer to those items that would be exhibited in Amsterdam, presumably to accentuate the gravity of Galántai’s actions, is highly revealing of the risks incurred by participants from Eastern Europe who decided to take part in the event. Significantly, the term dissident was avoided by the Dutch organizers, not only aware of the serious consequences of its use for Eastern European participants but also of the fact that many of them did not identify with this label.[16]
In parallel to the preparatory works for “Europe Against the Current,” a follow-up meeting to the Budapest Cultural Counter-Forum was organized in Amsterdam, in December 1987. None of the organizers of “Europe Against the Current” took part in this European Artists Forum, conceived at the instigation of the German writer Günter Grass as a response to the failed attempt to assert the influence of the Helsinki Final Act in official cultural policies two years earlier. [17] In fact, despite their shared origins, the two initiatives had distinct approaches to the idea of a common culture.
The European Artists Forum brought together more than thirty artists, writers, and thinkers from Europe, including the Soviet Union and Turkey. Only Czechoslovakia was not represented; in a video recording sent to the participants, Václav Havel explained that he had declined the invitation at the risk of being deprived of his citizenship during his stay in Amsterdam.[18] The stated ambition of forming a pan-European cultural foundation (a Gesamteuropaische Kulturstiftung, in Grass’s words) marked a concrete shift from the sphere of independent and self-managed culture to the realm of non-governmental organizations, which agenda was oriented toward the institutionalization of a certain idea of European culture, possibly in dialogue with governmental agents.[19] As no surprise, the European Artists Forum progressed in this direction with the creation of Gulliver, described by its founders as “an informal working body” whose participants, all cultural agents involved in local scenes, would discuss the future of European culture.[20] The informal stage did not last very long: the year after, Gulliver was absorbed by another organization, the Felix Meritis society. Founded in the eighteenth century, the society resumed its activities in 1988, after a century-long interruption, with the claimed intention of promoting culture as an instrument of progress and social cohesion.[21] With its focus on Europe and its clear ambition of perpetuating “the values of the Enlightenment,” Felix Meritis participated, along with other non-governmental initiatives, in the process of manufacturing a conception of Europeanness based on the ideas of eighteenth-century humanism, albeit rapidly adjusted to economic realities that adequately accommodated a liberal rhetoric based on the promotion of diversity, interconnectedness, and free mobility.[22]
Before coming back to “Europe Against the Current,” we must add a further layer to this scaffolding of European cultural policy under construction. It is worth recalling, indeed, that the European Artists Forum formed part of Amsterdam European City of Culture, a bigger, umbrella event carried out over the year 1987.[23] The intergovernmental initiative of European Cities of Culture had been launched two years earlier to foster a sense of common historical and cultural belonging among the peoples of the Member States and, more generally, develop affinities through the awareness of “common elements and a richness born of diversity.”[24] Amsterdam was the third city to hold the title after Athens (1985) and Florence (1986), and while the 1987 event was aimed at reinforcing the idea of a shared cultural identity, it was also intended, as Ward Rennen has observed, to discuss the growth of media and cultural industries that could pose a threat to European cultures, like those of the United States and Japan.[25]
In this respect, the project behind European Cities of Culture can be seen as a cultural counterpart to the Single European Act, signed in February 1986 and entered into force on July 1, 1987. This act or treaty was designed to support the political integration of the members of the EEC through enhanced cooperation in the fields of foreign and security policy, and to promote economic and monetary union toward the completion of a single market by the end of 1992.[26] Basically, this strategic regionalism aimed to consolidate Europe’s unity and competitiveness in the face of historical and emerging players on a global scale. Although the prospect of an end to the Cold War did not seem imminent yet, reinforcing the EEC as a political, economic, and cultural force required cooperation with Eastern European societies to anticipate any possible change. Logically, then, the position of “a leading artistic, cultural, and intellectual center in Europe,” occupied by Amsterdam thanks to its title of European City of Culture, necessarily implied being the “ultimate location where artists from East and West could meet.”[27] The European Artists Forum, the foundation of Gulliver, and the timely reactivation of Felix Meritis should be seen in relation to these concerns for a reconfiguration of the geopolitical chessboard at the end of the decade, and culture’s instrumental role in this process.
Despite the promise of a positive impact on the economy of the city and its population, the attempt to mobilize a wide audience around the concept of Amsterdam as a European City of Culture partly failed because, in Rennen’s words, it “was perceived more as an event that suited the interests of the local Amsterdam and pan-European cultural elites than a manifestation that attracted the attention of a broad domestic and international public.”[28] In other words, the concept conflicted with the heterogeneous, much less consensual set of visions of a sector of society that comprised grassroots associations, social movements, and groups with different political sensibilities and approaches regarding the process of European unification.[29]
With its direct address to people who self-identified with “alternative radical and independent” production and behavior, the manifesto “Europe Against the Current” called for another kind of diversity. As Van Tijen retrospectively observed, the organizers strongly believed that only an unrestricted inclusiveness could “confront the mainstreams of European societies” and prevent “European unity to become European uniformity.”[30] On the one hand, the geographical scope of the event—from the Urals to Iceland and from the North Cape to Gibraltar—challenged the idea of a territory still divided between two blocs (fig. 3 and 4); on the other, the manifesto explicitly rejected the instrumentalization of identity as a cultural product used to increase economic and symbolic capital for the benefit of the elites:
In Europe, the birthplace of the nation states with their “national” cultures exchanged in the international markets like commodities another exchange has been going on for many years of another type of culture that exceeds the limitations of nationhood takes no account of the power blocks ignores the accepted norms[31]
Figures 3 and 4. Leaflet of “Europe Against the Current” (front and back, with the manifesto and program in Dutch language, 1989. Archief Europe against the current, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
We could be tempted to compare this position with that defended by philosopher and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis who, in the context of the European Artists Forum, referred to Europe as the place of origin of autonomy, freedom, democracy, criticism, and non-acceptance of authority. In insisting on the European heritage of the Enlightenment—as we have seen, a central reference in the production of this new European identity—and recalling its roots in ancient Greece, his vision did not escape the pitfall of Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, Castoriadis’s idea of self-responsibility as an instrument for the realization of an autonomous society also had strong connections with the position of radical and countercultural movements of that time.[32] From this side, it resonated with the logics that underpinned “Europe Against the Current.”
More than reclaiming the status of intellectuals or creators, the organizers considered themselves mediators in charge of facilitating the “free flow” of information through multiple supports. Bookfairs were their main source of inspiration; established ones, like the Frankfurter Buchmesse, or alternative ones, like the Gegenbuchmesse (Anti-Book Fair) in Frankfurt and the Black Third World and Radical Bookfair in London.[33] The Gegenbuchmesse had surged in response to the increasing attention paid to revolutionary and Marxist literature by commercial publishers, and the necessity to reaffirm the position of independent press as a breeding ground for radical thought. Also focused on radical ideas, with particular emphasis on racism and racial issues, the Black Third World and Radical Bookfair was open to multiple forms of creation, including music, performance, and poetry, among others.[34] Both constituted models for “Europe Against the Current,” which wanted to push pluralism and interdisciplinarity further, giving space to a wider range of languages, cultural expressions, and ideological viewpoints or positions (fig. 5 and 6).[35]
Figure 5. Contact sheet with views of the fair “Europe Against the Current” at Beurs van Berlage and the public on the Beursplein, 1989. Photo: Pieter Boersma.
Figure 6. Contact sheet (detail). Photo: Pieter Boersma.
The understanding of “information carriers” as “the whole field of objects that carry information” enabled a wide range of expressions and sensibilities to coexist in the festival, from material objects like books, periodicals, posters, and postcards, to records, sound and video tapes, or computer systems, and “the more ethereal media of radio and television.”[36]
Printed matter (including books, periodicals, posters, and postcards), however, was undoubtedly the main protagonist of the fair and exhibitions at gallery W139. The main one, “Europe Against the Current: 25 Years of Experimental Printed Matter,” focused on innovative forms and techniques and gave protagonism to the object’s visual and material properties. “What starts as information can end up as “art” in a shop window,” the organizers argued, recognizing the aesthetic dimension of the production and, curiously, alluding to its commercial potential.[37] Among the exhibited objects, an important place was given to contributions from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with exhibited items ranging from silkscreen frames from Hungary, hand-painted posters from the Soviet Union, and Czech samizdat periodicals. Some of these items came from the Department for the Documentation of Modern Social Movements of the University Library Amsterdam; others had been brought by some of the festival’s participants.[38]
Like the whole festival, the exhibition was the result of teamwork involving many contributors, some of whom had collaborated in previous or parallel projects from which “Europe Against the Current” drew inspiration.[39] A distinctive feature of the exhibition was its display system, created for the occasion by the designer Frank Hoogveld. It consisted of a series of modular cases formed by suspended rectangular metal units, horizontal and vertical. The metal was reminiscent of the supports and tools of the first printing presses, as was the curved shape of the horizontal modules, which also facilitated the visibility of the displayed pieces by visitors, who were expected to manipulate and interact with certain materials (fig. 7 and 8). A previous description of the structure referred, in fact, to small bookcases containing photocopies of the documents to encourage the public to “do more than just look at covers.”[40] To further enrich the public’s experience, each showcase had to be accompanied by an original “soundscape” composed by an assemblage of “spoken texts, fragments of music suited to the display, speeches, tapes of demonstrations, etcetera.”[41] The exhibition thus provided a stimulating, multisensorial environment in which visitors experienced a sensible approach to reality embedded in printed objects, sounds, and images.
Figures 7 and 8. “Europe Against the Current. 25 Years of Experimental Printed Matter”. View of the exhibition system and exhibited artworks at gallery W139, 1989. Archief Europe against the current, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Photo: Pieter Boersma.
Figures 7 and 8. “Europe Against the Current. 25 Years of Experimental Printed Matter”. View of the exhibition system and exhibited artworks at gallery W139, 1989. Archief Europe against the current, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Photo: Pieter Boersma.
A significant aspect of “Europe Against the Current” was its combination of high and low technologies, in accordance with the organizers’ interests.[42] This presence of electronic and technological devices cannot be evoked without recalling developments that had placed Amsterdam not only at the European forefront of new technologies but also their alternative uses by independent media communities. Only a few weeks earlier, one of the venues of the festival, Paradiso, had hosted the Galactic Hacker Party (GHP) and the related International Conference on Alternative use of Technology Amsterdam (ICATA 89), that both problematized the situation of digital culture and the issue of free flow of information versus control.[43]
As various authors and actors involved in this scene have explained, new media and technologies were a crucial agent in the articulation of individual and collective representations in the city in the 1980s; after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this particular environment kept growing and building new ramifications in the early 1990s.[44] Analyzing Amsterdam’s unique position as Europe’s first “gateway” to the Internet and independent media cultures, Carolin Nevejan and Alexander Badenoch have pointed at the importance of the city’s countercultural sphere, as well as grassroots and squatter movements, for the flourishing of these communities. In their words, “Creating new media spaces was part and parcel of the movement—and the struggles—to create new forms of urban space.”[45]Amsterdam’s independent media communities are a good example of the back-and-forth between a localized activism, committed with concrete spaces and infrastructures, and a delocalized digital sphere, the expansion of which relied on international networks.
Most of the projects relying on technology designed for “Europe Against the Current” sought to encourage interactivity, public participation, collaborative work, and free circulation. Some were realized; others remained in the project stage due to a lack of money or equipment. If the means did not always match the ambitions, interest in new forms of digital socialization and dissemination was present. In addition to public demonstrations of reproduction techniques that ranged “from the low-tech to the ultra-high-tech,” visitors were expected to participate in the creation of an interactive slide show based on computer programming. From a personal selection of keywords, dates, and locations, images from a database of a thousand posters from 1986 to 1988 would have been projected onto six screens in the Beurs van Berlage by means of twelve computer-controlled rotating projectors.[46] Another initiative was the “Trans-European radio telephonic installation,” consisting of the eight-hour radio broadcast of a collaborative “sound collage.” It was simultaneously retransmitted by radio stations across Europe, in line with the spread of independent and pirate radio stations.[47] The most ambitious project, however, was a European database of information carriers, created over the past years. If the digital version of this “polycentral database”—with copies operational in Italy, Yugoslavia, Germany, England, and Switzerland, according to the organizers—was never fully completed, it partly materialized in print, with the catalogue Europe Against the Current. The publication included a list of 988 of the 4,370 entries, classified by country. Descriptions of individuals, groups, or organizations, along with their respective activities and media, were translated into pictograms accessible to a wide audience across language barriers.[48] Contact information was included but, in the case of some Eastern European organizations, not always complete to avoid official sanctions. The printing process for the catalogue had represented a challenge because of the composition (text and graphics) and multilingual character of its contents, which required a different code than usual.[49] As introduction, an alphabetically arranged “overview of viewpoints” reflected the large variety of positions these organizations identified with, from Absurdistic to Zippy, passing by Anarcha Feminist, Antimilitarist, Cross-Cultural, Decentralist, Erotic, Extreme, Futurist Primitivism, Non-Discriminatory, Lesbian, Magical, Neo-Conservative, Provocative, Small-Scale, Social Ecologist, Subcultural, Third World, Translocal, Undogmatic, and so on (fig. 9 and 10).[50]
Figure 9. Against the Current. Catalogue on Alternative Independent and Radical Information Carriers, ed. Tjebbe van Tijen (Amsterdam: Foundation Europe Against the Current/ID Archi vim IISG, 1989).
Figure 10. Catalogue cover and page with “Overview of viewpoints”.
Despite the varying degrees of achievement of the proposals, the participants and public who attended “Europe Against the Current” could appreciate the contribution of new technologies to the articulation and distribution of free information. Observing the importance of “networks beyond Amsterdam including Eastern Europe, where a vibrant, independent underground culture was flourishing”, Nevejan and Badenoch referred to “Against the Current” as a significant crossroad. Among its attendants, they cited the then Berlin-based media theorist and critic Geert Lovink, whose contacts with artists and activists from Eastern Europe would flourish and develop in the framework of events he organized or participated in in the 1990s.[51] The festival created an environment which, while not directly responsible for their creation, has anticipated the formation of digital communities bringing together agents from former Eastern and Western Europe.[52]
The attempt to create spaces for transnational confrontation and dialogue, with a focus on Eastern Europe, inevitably resonates with an initiative which, ten years earlier, had brought artists and cultural operators from both sides of the Iron Curtain to Amsterdam. The International Art Manifestation “Works and Words,” organized by De Appel from September 20 to 30, 1979, brought together artists from Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands in a series of events across the city, including performances, workshops, lectures, screenings, and exhibitions (fig. 11). Initially involved, artists from Czechoslovakia did not make it to Amsterdam, since their visa to travel was denied. The event drew some lessons from the international performance festival “I AM,” held in 1978 at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw under Henryk Gajewski’s direction. First imagined as an “Oost-Europa Project,” the Amsterdam event marked a turning point in the history of East-West artistic relations, since the protests of participants from Eastern Europe against the perpetuation of a one-sided, condescending view of an entire region and its related artistic practices often simplistically identified with dissident behavior, ultimately led the organizers to reconsider their proposal and change the project’s orientation toward a more horizontal format.[53] For this reason, the history of “Works and Words” has been considered paradigmatic of the (mis)conception of what Eastern European art represented for interlocutors on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In the words of art historian Jelena Vesić, the event anticipated “the re-introduction of the critique of the discourse of Eastern European art in theoretical and art-historical overviews of the exhibition history and art history that emerged after 1989.”[54]
Figure 11. “Works and Words”, poster, 1979. Published by de Appel, Amsterdam. From de Appel Archive, Amsterdam.
Rather than rediscussing here the case of “Works and Words,” the intricated history of which has been subject to in-depth studies and reconstructions, I propose to replace “Europe Against the Current” within the same genealogy of events that contributed to problematizing and “denormalizing” the usual relational dynamics between East and West (especially in a European context) during the late Cold War and afterward. Despite their different roots (one in the art world, the other in social movements and militant publishing), the two events and their history, in fact, offer a great deal of material for a comparative reflection. I will focus here on one aspect, hospitality and accommodation, to address the invisible economies of solidarity that—also—sustained international events.
Both “Works and Words” and “Europe Against the Current” were ambitious projects that took place in various locations and welcomed many participants from abroad. They implied significant organizational efforts and costs. While most of the material and infrastructure costs were supported by institutions and organizations of different kinds (public and private, national and international/non-governmental), in both cases the welcoming and accommodation of foreign participants partly relied on the generosity of local volunteers (cultural agents or ordinary citizens) who accepted sharing their living space. In her memories of “Works and Words,” art historian Marga van Mechelen made clear that, beyond its economic nature, this system of civic hospitality was also intended to strengthen ties between different communities, fostering dialogue and collaboration:
[…] every effort was made to ensure personal contact was as vibrant and dynamic as possible—just as it had been during the I AM, by organizing communal dinners at De Appel in the evenings and by putting up the guests from abroad in the homes of people from the Dutch art world.[55]
This initiative, part of an economy of solidarity not unusual at the time, can be seen as a way of taking advantage of the short time at the disposal of artists who were eager to share. Peer hospitality indeed turned time off from scheduled events, and even time for basic needs as resting and eating, into another dimension of creation and exchange. A social time with no tangible records or traces, in which domestic rules replaced those governed by institutional and event schedules. We may wonder, however, to what extent this informal space of hospitality was totally free of power relations.
One year after “Works and Words,” this issue was addressed in a work by Czech artist Jan Mlčoch that revisited and reverted the practice of local hospitality. Mlčoch, who had been denied the visa to participate in “Works and Words” in 1979, was invited to exhibit individually at De Appel in 1980. His answer, Free Dormitory (1980), was the artist’s last action before he ceased doing performances. Not allowed to travel to Amsterdam this time, either, Mlčoch sent instructions to turn one of the exhibition rooms into a free hostel. He decided to transform a place he did not own, offered to him for artistic purposes, into an open shelter providing the basic equipment for a safe rest and hygienic needs (fig. 12–14). This time, the unrestricted access to Free Dormitory was directed at vulnerable collectives: homeless, migrants, in general, the most precarious lives. It was no longer directed at those Eastern European artists who, in a way, “paid back” their stay by bringing and offering their exotic cultural capital to Western colleagues. Another important element was the removal of hospitality from the safety of the private sphere, installing it (literally) in the middle of a public institution, in a way that questioned the art world’s claimed openness and capacity for social engagement.
Figure 12. Jan Mlčoch, Gratis Slapen – Free Dormitory Project Proposal, 1980, de Appel, Amsterdam. From de Appel Archive, Amsterdam. Courtesy of Jan Mlčoch.
Figures 13 and 14. Jan Mlčoch, Slapen II – Free Dormitory II, 1980. Installation shots. de Appel, Amsterdam. From de Appel Archive, Amsterdam. Courtesy of Jan Mlčoch.
Pointing out the implicit critique addressed to the benevolent and generous organizers, Klara Kemp-Welch has observed that
Mlčoch’s action offered an interesting microcosm of the power dynamics he perceived in the exhibition structure itself, effectively testing the extent of the generosity of the hosts by asking them to open their doors to those less fortunate than themselves tout court, not limiting the good will toward the less fortunate East European “other” of the art world but asking that it be extended to those on De Appel’s doorstep.[56]
As in “Works and Words,” participants in “Europe Against the Current” from Eastern Europe and other less wealthy countries were offered free accommodation in private houses. They also benefited from free stands and free admission to the fair. Significantly, other participants who did not benefit from these measures and had to pay for a stand and an entry fee felt that it was unfair, especially because, for them, the very nature of the event made it incompatible with any form of economic solicitation. Their protest was less about the “special regime” enjoyed by peers who benefited gratuitously, neither criticized nor questioned, than about their conviction that an event dedicated to independent, alternative, and radical carriers should automatically operate outside a capitalist framework, hence without economic transactions. These debates show the halo of idealization and romanticism that accompanied the idea of radicality and independence for many participants from Western Europe who identified with left ideas and positioning. In response to claims that “everything should be ‘free,’” and to defend against the accusation of a lack of transparency, the organizers made the balance of costs and receipts public.[57] This disclosure also served to refute the myth of self-organization as an uncontaminated practice in the face of a capitalist system, which was simply not an option for events of a scale like “Europe Against the Current,” and the need for pragmatism. Just as the festival’s funding, based on public and private support from various organizations and sponsors, was essential, so too were the economies of solidarity and informal networks a major factor in its success. The controversy surrounding the funding made invisible the whole web of collective, volunteering work and solidarity that laid behind it and was, undoubtedly, one of the initiative’s strengths.
Over the centuries, several migration routes (many of them related to the Dutch colonial empire) contributed to making Amsterdam a point of arrival and crossroads for a variety of cultures and communities. The multiple origins of this “breeding ground” were well explained by the organizers of “Europe Against the Current”:
The Netherlands have a tradition of international orientation both economically and intellectually still strengthened during the 60s and 70s by the influx of workers from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, North Africa and Turkey, not to forget the immigration of inhabitants of the former Dutch colonies Indonesia and Suriname and the arrival of a growing number of political refugees from all over the world during the last decade. In the relatively small city of Amsterdam (750,000 inhabitants), this cosmopolitan atmosphere is extra strong by the phenomenon of the “cultural exiles”: people fleeing cultural restrictions at home or looking for new creative opportunities.[58]
Although the issue of migration was not directly addressed in “Europe Against the Current,” in this last part I would like to connect central elements of the festival, like material and immaterial information carriers, to the trajectories of two artists who settled in Amsterdam in the 1970s and ’80s. Both experienced the condition of foreigner, and in their respective artistic and relational practices in which publications and new media are central, the question of creation and cultural belonging is present.
Writing about the practice of poet, writer, artist, and cultural worker Ulises Carrión, art historian Maike Aden has noted that “nothing is further removed from the avowed “native foreigner” than the creation of a culture-specific art.”[59] Following this thread, we can suggest that the experience of exile or migration brings a sense of dislocation and impermanence that sometimes prevents the adoption of specific cultural codes as one’s own identity. Carrión left Mexico in the early 1970s and settled in Amsterdam in 1972. In 1975, he opened the bookstore Other Books and So, which turned into an iconic venue where international artists’ books were sold and exhibited, until its closure in 1978. Years before the exhibition Europe Against the Current: 25 Years of Experimental Printed Matter and the organizers’ effort to provide a material, tactile approach to information carriers, Other Books and So provided a space for admiring and touching books (fig. 15). It was a place that, in publisher Guy Schraenen’s words, “Immediately invited the visitor to look at and make contact with the books”.[60]
Figure 15. Ulises Carrión at Other Books and So, Amsterdam, 1976. Photo: Guy Schraenen. Courtesy of Maike Aiden.
Facing the obligation to travel light, books and printed objects adapt to mobility while, at the same time, they conserve their materiality. They are traveling objects that, alone, can cross borders their authors are not able to cross. The reputation of Other Books and So exceeded the frontiers, and Carrión received letters and materials from many origins. He was personally engaged in the “follow-up” of each correspondence and annotated the date of his replies and relevant information on each letter. Many artists sent their books by post to Carrión, who put them on sale in the library. When international monetary transactions were not possible, he agreed to implement an alternative system to pay them back.[61] This system, which we could describe as another economy of solidarity, was used with artists like Jaroslav Anděl, J.H. Kocman, or Petr Štembera, all from Czechoslovakia. In exchange for their books, they requested books (often of non-artistic type), tea, tobacco, and even a pair of blue jeans. Kocman’s correspondence with Carrión reveals his fascination with paper, which he was eager to acquire in all its forms:
You wrote: “Tell me something that you want from here.” My love is paper, good, various sort of paper, that is my permanent wish. (Especially paper to “end-paper,” elephantenhaut [sic], Ingere…).[62]
Correspondence, in this case, operated as the thread of a minor economy in which friendship and materiality intermingled; its contents also recalled the inequal distribution of access and privilege from one interlocutor to another, and the way this balance was discretely, yet continuously, altered by informal transactions such as the shipment of goods across borders. Carrión may have been particularly sensitive to these problematics because he considered himself a “native foreigner” who felt that “not being at home” was his natural state.[63]
The issue of migration and culture-specific art appeared in a distinct manner in the work of Henryk Gajewski. He and Carrión had coincided at the abovementioned performance festival “I AM,” which Gajewski organized in April 1978 at the Remont Gallery in Warsaw and in which a significant number of artists from the Netherlands participated. Carrión took part in the event with the first public reading of his text “Mail Art and the Big Monster” and by launching the Erratic Art Mail International System (EAMIS) project, which reflected his interest for challenging official and institutionalized communication channels. Later the same year, he organized a collective exhibition titled “From Bookworks to Mailworks”, first at the Young Artists Club in Budapest and then at the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. Gajewski’s bookwork Eliza Gajewski was exhibited on this occasion. The book, dedicated to his daughter born in 1974, was a work in progress intended to be completed every year until 1992, with photographs sent by Gajewski to the owner that would be placed on the appropriate page. For Carrión, Gajewski’s bookwork incorporated elements that questioned “the existence of the book as objects [sic] limited in space and time.”[64] The finalization of the book, in fact, depended on the continued action of both parties, and their joint compromise to reach the complete version of the photo album, when Eliza would turn eighteen.
In 1982, shortly after martial law came into force in Poland, Gajewski left for the Netherlands. A few years later, the artist realized the video Identity (1985), in which he addressed issues such as migration, interculturality, and identity building in the context of Amsterdam in the 1980s. Identity was a singularly undramatic and anything-but-victimist account of Gajewski’s condition of migrant in the Netherlands, with identity markers of a Polish man, a father, and an artist. While Carrión’s condition of “native foreigner” was a pretext for fluidity and dilution, Gajewski’s Identity explored cultural stereotypes and their influence in the process of one’s (self-)identification in a new context.[65]
The video showed the filmmaker in different settings, performing a simple action or addressing the viewer. It was structured as a glossary of concepts that formed independent episodes; together these told a story—not necessarily the unique, true one—about the artist’s life and experience of migration. First-person testimony, bound to specific topographies and times, became transposable to other spaces and times when it referred to abstract concepts such as Language, Country, Religion, Family, Home, Work, Friends, and Image (fig. 16–18). Gajewski consciously played with binary views and comparisons, like in the “Country” entry, in which he humorously demolished patriotism or national pride, with a nod to socialist Poland and its relation to the Soviet Union: “‘Do it for your country!’ What does my country look like? Does it have nicely shaped legs? Where is the brain of the country located? In F-20 or in the White House? In the Kremlin? How can I kiss my country?” He also pointed at contradictory messages vehiculated in liberal democracies, with direct allusion to a provocative poster produced in the Netherlands that compared the process of unification of Europe with the territorial expansion of Nazi Germany.[66] He lucidly showed that the thirst for independence and radicalism could lead to counter-productive, even perilous short-circuits, as would happen occasionally in the context of “Europe Against the Current.”
Figure 16–18. Henryk Gajewski, Identity, 1985, video stills, 11 min 53 sec. English language with Polish subtitles. Courtesy of Henryk Gajewski.
A few years before the festival of alternative, independent, and radical information carriers defended its vision of a plural and expanded Europe as a collage of viewpoints, Gajewski’s seemingly candid assertions highlighted the constructed nature of intercultural relations and the genuine performance of self any appearance in the media sphere implies. The filmmaker was particularly explicit about the fictional character of self-representation, pointing out the instrumental role of the media in this image building.
Although neither Gajewski nor Carrión were directly involved in the festival in 1989 (Carrión died of AIDS in October of that year), both artists and cultural producers developed practices related to the materiality of the medium, whether book, printed matter, or video, and its capacity to produce and communicate at a distance. From the founding of Other Books and So onward, Carrión was an essential mediating agent for the work of Eastern European artists and their visibility. Gajewski first actively contributed to this network from Poland and, once installed in Amsterdam, put into perspective the question of transnational relations and the reception of one culture by another.
On different registers and modes of expression, Carrión and Gajewski’s practices had in common a refusal to take on the role of representative of a cultural identity, to exoticize themselves and other subjects who experienced conditions of border-crossing, whether personally or putting their artistic and media production in circulation. Their singular work, which is only dealt with in a limited way here, contributed to the non-exhaustive map of exchanges this text has proposed, with Amsterdam as an epicenter connected to an expanded Europe, against the backdrop of the late Cold War.
One might ask to what extent East-West encounters in the limited context of Amsterdam may constitute a specific subject for study. Is it really worth reflecting on these possible commonalities, beyond each specific case? If we examine the various examples discussed in this text in greater or lesser depth, several possible paths emerge. The first is the possibility of a space for reception and transaction in which alternative and non-quantifiable economies—non-financial exchange, hospitality—flourished. Moreover, the use of these economies did not necessarily eliminate the need to rely on other, more conventional forms of funding, which, as in the case of “Europe Against the Current,” were not always well received by their audiences. The second, more specific to the 1980s, was the convergence of aspirations inherited from the Helsinki Final Act, which primarily affected players in the socialist countries, on the one hand, and the discussions related to the structuring and enlargement of the European Community on the other. While the former were gaining ground in a European public sphere already determined to move beyond Cold War binarism, European identity was becoming not only a cultural but also an economic issue and a trademark in the service of a centralized vision. Amsterdam was an essential venue for this correlation, where European identity was negotiated and shaped but also strongly challenged in its neoliberal model. Paradoxically, it became a laboratory were these different models or proposals developed and sometimes entered into negotiation, in a context traversed by the currents of social and media activism, independent publishing, and print and digital cultures. In this context, the arts, exhibition techniques, and independent media and forms of communication played a crucial role of counter-power and alternative representations. In a radically different present context, where nationalisms, xenophobia, and neoliberalism permeate political and social spaces across Europe, a return to practices and events that problematized and questioned the idea of a common culture in a still-divided world helps to shed new light on the endless debates about a hypothetical sense of belonging and shared identity.
Juliane Debeusscher is an art historian, currently a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her work addresses transnational artistic exchange and exhibitions in Europe. Her writings on these topics appeared in Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Institute of the Present online platform, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, ARTMargins online and Afterall, as well as edited books. She is currently working on her book Negotiated Encounters in Cold War Europe: Networks and Exhibitions, to be published by Liverpool University Press. She is an associate researcher of the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA) and a member of the international platform Decentralized Modernities (MoDe(s)).
[1] The expression “Eastern Europe” in this text is not taken for granted, but rather as a construct based on geopolitical and economic circumstances crystallized during the Cold War. In this text, it refers to the widespread use (present in the reviewed sources) to designate the socialist state members of the Warsaw Pact and also often, and inaccurately, Yugoslavia, despite its non-aligned position in relation to the Soviet Union. The use of this expression in art historiography has been the subject of many important critical discussions, which cannot be addressed here. See, among other sources, Edit András, “The Obscure Object of Desire: Is there any place for Eastern Europe on the Map of World Art or Global Art (History)?,” Mezosfera.org, August 2020, accessed July 5, 2023.
[2] I first learned about “Europe Against the Current” during a research stay the Artpool Archive in Budapest (2010–2011), which led me to consult its archival fund at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. I would like to thank Tjebbe van Tijen for his patience in answering my inquiries and sharing his memories of the event. I am also grateful to the reviewers for their helpful comments, the institutions and archives which provided images, as well as the authors (Pieter Boersma, Jan Mlčoch and Henryk Gajewski) and right holders (Maike Aden) for authorizing their reproduction. Research for this text was supported by a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral contract (2022–2024) at the Department of Art History and Theory of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spanish Government/ NextGeneration EU).
[3] Bands from Czechoslovakia were Mch-band, E, Dunaj; bands from Hungary were Lois Ballast, Sandor Bernath(y) & Matuska Silver Sound, Endre Szkarosi & Konnektor Rt. An anonymous report (presumably from the organizers) stated that 350 groups from 21 countries had taken part in the event, and 6,000 visitors had visited the fair. Anonymous, “Basic Facts,” Schwerpunkt (supplement of the West German magazine CONTRASTE) (January 1990): 7.
[4] On the movement’s history, see Eric Duivenvoorden, “The Battle for the City: Activism and Protest Against Decay and Urban Redevelopment in Amsterdam in the Sixties,” essay published in conjunction with the exhibition Amsterdam, the Magic Center, Stedelijk Museum, July 27, 2018, accessed May 22, 2024, ; Eric Duivenvoorden, Een voet tussen de deur: Geschiedenis van de kraakbeweging 1964–1999 (Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers, 2000).
[5] See Anonymous (PanDam), “Ideas for an alternative world – for an alternative Amsterdam? The history of Het Fort Van Sjakoo,” PanDam Magazine, September 20, 2020, accessed July 5, 2023.
[6] The International Helsinki Federation was created in 1982 to monitor the compliance of the accords. It was constituted by local and regional committees that reported on human rights violations in their respective environment.
[7] COURAGE Registry-Béla Nové, “The Documents of Cultural Forum and Counter-Forum Budapest 1985,” 2019, accessed July 05, 2023; András Mink, The Defendant: the State – The History of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (Hungarian Helsinki Committee: Budapest, 2005).
[8] Tjebbe van Tijen, “Introduction to catalogue,” in Against the Current: Catalogue on Alternative Independent and Radical Information Carriers, ed. Tjebbe van Tijen (Amsterdam: Foundation Europe Against the Current/ID Archi vim IISG, 1989), III.
[9] See Kristóf Nagy and Márton Szarvas, “Left Turn – Right Turn. Artistic and Political Radicalism of Late Socialism in Hungary. The Orfeo and the Inconnu Groups,” Contradictions – A Journal for Critical Thought 2–5 (2021): 57–85; Juliane Debeusscher, “Mediating Alternative Culture: Two Controversial Exhibitions in 1980s Hungary,” in Media and the Cold War in the 1980s: Between Star Wars and Glasnost, eds. Henrik G. Bastiansen, Martin Klimke, and Rolf Werenskjold (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 161–188.
[10] The executive committee of the “Europe Against the Current” foundation was composed by Piet van Harn (Chair), Paul Kuypers (Secretary), Tjebbe van Tijen (Treasurer), and Marjet van de Berg (Member). Erik Neuwendijk and Eef Vermeij were secretaries and coordinators of the festival. Anonymous, Letter of presentation in “Application Dossier for Financial Assistance for an International Festival and Gathering, to the European Youth Foundation,” Archief Europe against the current ARCH02409 (International Institute of Social History [IISH], Amsterdam), n.p.
[11] According to an early version of the Manifesto, the festival was initially planned from May 27 to 29, 1988. “Europe Against the Current” (Manifesto), Archief Europe against the current ARCH02409 (IISH, Amsterdam). English translation in Tjebbe van Tijen, “Going Against the Grain: Europe Against the Current,” accessed May 13, 2023. Original in Dutch language: Tjebbe van Tijen, “Tegen de stroom in/Europe against the current,” de Gids, May 1990, 466–471.
[12] Anonymous, “Justification,” in Against the Current: Catalogue on Alternative Independent and Radical Information Carriers, VI.
[13] One exception is the introduction to the catalogue, signed by Tjebbe van Tijen. Van Tijen, “Introduction to catalogue,” III.
[14] Anonymous, “Basic Facts,” 7.
[15] Éva Oláh, “Napi Jelentés” (Daily Report), June 5, 1987. Agent report from György Galántai’s dossier “Festö” (Painter), Historical Archive of the Hungarian State Security, made publicly available by Galántai. Accessed May 20, 2024. Translated from Hungarian by the author.
[16] Van Tijen, “Going Against the Grain.”
[17] A member of the delegation of the Federal Republic of Germany at the Budapest Cultural Forum in 1985, Grass had defended his proposal for a pan-European cultural foundation, eventually vetoed by the United States and Romania. The Amsterdam gathering was conceived as a new opportunity for discussing this idea, without politicians. Steve Austen and Karolina Nowacki, “Paradigms of Culture and the European Unification Process,” in The Myth of Europe, online publication (European Alternatives, 2007), 170–171.
[18] “Gulliver 1987,” edited video of the European Artists Forum (Amsterdam, December 13, 1987), undated, Felix Meritis, accessed May 22, 2024.
[19] Participant Hans Magnus Enzensberger clearly expressed this hope during the Forum. See “Gulliver 1987,” undated.
[20] Co-founders of Gulliver were Steve Austen and Günter Grass. Participants in the European Artists Forum held at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam included Austen (Netherlands), Hans Magnus Enzensberger (West Germany), Cesc Gelabert (Spain), Pierre Vago (France), Maria Noordman (Netherlands), Tadeusz Konwicki (Poland), Danilo Kis (Yugoslavia), Augustin Buzura (Romania), and Pal Lederer (Hungary), among others. See personal report of Romanian poet and critic Ion Bogdan Lefter, “Informal Working Body Gulliver,” 1998, accessed May 22, 2024.
[21] Steve Austin, co-founder of Gulliver, has become a permanent member of Felix Meritis. In 2014 the society became Felix Meritis Connecting Cultures. A more in-depth analysis of the society’s discursive strategy, from the historical motto “Happy through Merit(s)” to “Connecting Cultures” and the more recent strategy group “A Soul for Europe” remains to be done.
[22] On the process of building European identity, see Johanna Turunen, “Mapping the Idea of Europe – Cultural Production of Border Imaginaries through Heritage,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 38, no. 3 (2021): 397–416. doi:10.1080/08865655.2021.1918569. See also Monica Sassatelli, Becoming Europeans: Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Oriane Calligaro, “From ‘European Cultural Heritage’ to ‘Cultural Diversity’? The Changing Core Values of European Cultural Policy,” Politique européenne, 45 (2014): 60–85.
[23] Steve Austen was also a co-organizer of Amsterdam European Capital of Culture.
[24] Resolution of the ministers responsible for Cultural Affairs, meeting within the Council on June 13, 1985, concerning the annual event “European City of Culture,” Official Journal, C 153 (1985): 2-2. See Monica Sassatelli, “A Simple Idea and a Vision: the ECOC Programme,” in Becoming Europeans: Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 79–108; Kiran Klaus Patel, ed., The Cultural Politics of Europe: European Capitals of Culture and European Union since the 1980s (London: Routledge, 2013).
[25] Ward Rennen, CityEvents: Place Selling in a Media Age (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA/Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 160.
[26] Single European Act, Official Journal, L 169/1, vol. 30, June 29, 1987, 1–28.
[27] Rennen, CityEvents, 162.
[28] Ibid., 163.
[29] Protests against the event included a manifestation of students from the Rietveld Academy on May 18, 1987, who occupied a square with Rietveld chairs to protest against budget cuts they blamed on the City of Culture initiative.
[30] Van Tijen, “Introduction to catalogue,” III; and Van Tijen, “Going Against the Grain.”
[31] Manifesto, “Europe Against the Current,” 1987.
[32] Cornelius Castoriadis, statement at the Forum of European Artists, 1987, accessed July 5, 2023. See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Power, Politics, Autonomy,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 143–174.
[33] Anonymous, “Basic Facts,” 7; Van Tijen, “Introduction to catalogue,” III.
[34] See Timothy Scott Brow, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116; Sarah White, Roxy Harris, and Sharmilla Beezmohun, eds., A Meeting of the Continents: The International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books – Revisited (London: New Beacon Books/George Padmore Institute, 2005). Sharmilla Beezmohun has analyzed how the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books constituted a forum for debating on racial inequalities and the condition of migrants in Europe. She has described the 1984 fair as the first to establish “a European perspective on the struggles for the non-European population.” See Sharmilla Beezmohun, “A timely intervention–or Before its Time? A Short History of European Action for Racial Equality and Social Justice,” in Afroeuropean Cartographies, ed. Dominic Thomas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 19.
[35] Van Tijen, “Introduction to catalogue,” III.
[36] “Basic facts,” Schwerpunkt, 7.
[37] “Europe Against the Current,” document including manifesto and program, in “Application Dossier for Financial Assistance for an International Festival and Gathering, to the European Youth Foundation,” Archief Europe against the current ARCH02409 (IISH, Amsterdam), n.p.
[38] After Amsterdam, the exhibition toured in Germany in 1990 (DEU Dortmund, Bibliotheka: Westphalen Halle; DEU Hamburg, Hochschule für Bildende Künste). “Europe Against the Current: Radical Information Carriers 1989–1990,” accessed May 13, 2023.
[39] See the list of collaborators in “Europe Against the Current: Radical Information Carriers 1989–1990.” Tjebbe van Tijen has stressed the importance of the “Imaginary Museum of Revolution 1988–1989,” a project developed in parallel by Jeffrey Shaw and himself, with the participation of members of Het Fort van Sjakoo. This unrealized exhibition proposal for the Bicentenary of the French Revolution was conceived as a collection of “two hundred years of ‘revolutionary moments,’” in which the French Revolution represented one episode among many. It had in common with “Europe Against the Current” the focus on a phenomenon from a broader point of view rather than a specific one, the use of multimedia installations, interactive and reproducible works, and the creation of a database and maps. Tjebbe van Tijen, conversation with the author, June 2024; See “Imaginary Museum of Revolution 1988–1989,” accessed June 17, 2024.
[40] “Annex #5, Estimate/Budget Festival Europe Against the Current 1989,” dated February 1989, in “Application Dossier for Financial Assistance for an International Festival and Gathering, to the European Youth Foundation,” International Institute of Social History Collection (Amsterdam). See also Van Tijen, “Going Against the Grain.”
[41] “Annex #5, Estimate/Budget Festival Europe Against the Current 1989.”
[42] Van Tijen, conversation with the author, June 2024.
[43] The GHP took place August 2–4, 1989. See Caroline Nevejan and Alexander Badenoch, “How Amsterdam Invented the Internet: European Networks of Significance, 1980–1995,” in Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, eds., Hacking Europe: History of Computing (London: Springer, 2014), 200–203.
[44] Important events in the early 1990s included the international festival and conference “Next Five Minutes” (1993–2003). See also Nevejan and Badenoch, “How Amsterdam Invented the Internet,” 189–217; Sanneke Huisman and Marga van Mechelen, eds., A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands (Prinsenbeek: Jap Sam Books, 2019); in the same volume, Sven Lütticken, “Talking Back and Looking Ahead: A Critical History of Media Art in the Netherlands,” 342–356; Clemens Apprich, “Remaking Media Practices: From Tactical Media to Post-Media,” in Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology, eds. Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles, and Oliver Lerone Schultz (Lüneburg: MuteEditors/Post-Media Lab, 2013), 122–140; Brian Holmes, “Tactical Television: Movement Media in the Nineties,” Regarding Spectatorship: Revolt and Distant Observer, 2015, accessed May 22, 2024.
[45] Nevejan and Badenoch, “How Amsterdam Invented the Internet,” 193.
[46] This ambitious proposal eventually took on a reduced form, due to technical restrictions. A description of the original project can be found in “Annex #5, Estimate/Budget Festival Europe Against the Current 1989,” 1989.
[47] “Europe Against the Current,” information sheet including manifesto and program, in “Application Dossier for Financial Assistance for an International Festival and Gathering, to the European Youth Foundation,” Archief Europe against the current ARCH02409 (IISH, Amsterdam) n.p.
[48] “Justification” and pictograms legend, in Against the Current: Catalogue on Alternative Independent and Radical Information Carriers, VI.
[49] Van Tijen, conversation with the author, June 2024.
[50] “Overview of Viewpoints,” in Against the Current: Catalogue on Alternative Independent and Radical Information Carriers, VIII–IX.
[51] Nevejan and Badenoch, “How Amsterdam Invented the Internet,” 197–198.
[52] One of them was Syndicate, the first exchange network (a mailing list) between new-media artists from Eastern and Western Europe, founded by Andreas Broeckmann in 1996 as the communication extension of the V2_East network. Broeckmann worked at the new-media arts organization V2 in Rotterdam (also designated as the Institute for Unstable Media). See Geert Lovink, “Deep Europe and the Kosovo Conflict: A History of the V2_East/Syndicate Network,” My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011), 67–105.
[53] The project was initiated by the artist and art historian Franck Gribling, with a working team composed by Wies Smals, Josine van Droffelaar, Aggy Smeets, and Piotr Olszański. One of the triggers for the controversy was a letter from artist Goran Đorđević from Yugoslavia that denounced a “‘ghetto’ exhibition […] mainly reduced to its political dimension (dissident, exotic).” See Zsuzsa László’s detailed analysis of the event, Zsuzsa László, “Works and Words: The Invention and Renunciation of the Concept of East European Art,” Institute of the Present, November 2018, accessed July 5, 2023; see also FOOTNOTES #3 Works and Words, De Appel Archive, 2018, archive presentation (2018–2019 and online), accessed July 5, 2023.
[54] Jelena Vesić, “Works and Words – Early critiques of the discourse of Eastern European Art,” in Parallel Chronologies: Collection of Exhibitions in Eastern Europe 1950–1989, accessed July 5, 2023.
[55] Marga van Mechelen, “Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978),” in L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986, ed. Christian Höller (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2012), 320.
[56] Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 364. The limits of apparently disinterested benevolent hospitality in a post-socialist context would be spectacularly exposed in 1996, with the exhibition INTERPOL at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, 1996. See Eda Čufer and Viktor Misiano, eds., Interpol: The Art Exhibition Which Divided East and West (Ljubljana/Moscow: IRWIN/Moscow Art Magazine, 2001).
[57] As published by the organizers, expenses (162,000 guilders) exceeded receipts (143,000 guilders), leaving the foundation with a deficit of 18,000 guilders. They also gave the names of organizations that provided subsidies and donations, a mix of governmental and non-governmental institutions, political groups, private foundations, and companies, including the Dutch Ministry of Culture (for the exhibitions), European Cultural Foundation, Algemene Spaarbank Nederland, Elisabeth Catharina Fund, Rainbow Fraction European Parliament, City of Amsterdam, Amber Travel Agency, Alsterdam, and EXIS Youth for Europe. Anonymous, “Basic Facts,” 8.
[58] Ibid., 7.
[59] Maike Aden, “The posthumous reception of Ulises Carrión,” in Dear Reader: Don’t Read, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2016), 61.
[60] Guy Schraenen, “One thing I know…,” in Dear Reader: Don’t Read, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2016), 17.
[61] Although the situation differed from one country to another, the possession of foreign (Western) currency was forbidden by the authorities in the Eastern Bloc. J.H. Kocman to Ulises Carrión, letter dated May 18, 1977, Other Books and So Archive, Archivo Lafuente/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Santander/Madrid.
[62] J.H. Kocman to Ulises Carrión, letter dated February 15, 1978. OBASA Archive, Archivo Lafuente, Santander/Madrid.
[63] Ulises Carrión, “Ik ben een geboren buitenlander,” VPRO gids 52, 1983. “I always felt that ‘not being at home’ was a state I was naturally in,” retrieved from “‘Ik ben een geboren buitenlander’: Stop 08 Ulises Carrión,” SoundCloud playlist released by the Stedelijk Museum on the occasion of the exhibition I am a Native Foreigner, accessed July 5, 2023.
[64] Ulises Carrión, “From bookworks to mailworks,” in Van kunstenaarsboeken tot postkunst = From bookworks to mailworks, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Other Books and So/Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar, 1978), 8.
[65] The video Identity (1985) and its transcription are available on Henryk Gajewski’s website, accessed July 12, 2023
[66] Concretely, Gajewski referred to a libertarian poster diffused around 1977 by an “Anti-Verkiezings-Komité” in Tilburg and Utrecht, with a photomontage showing Adolf Hitler declaring that the idea of Europe’s unity was his. Anonymous, Verenigd Europa… ? Mijn Idee !!, poster, FICEDL (Fédération internationale des centres d’études et de documentation libertaires), accessed July 5, 2023.
Debeusscher, Juliane. “Against the Current: Negotiating European Identities in a Still Divided World.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
