A Pilgrimage Through the Balkans, Looking for Dots to Connect NYTimes

A guard approached a vehicle on the border of Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Something was slightly suspicious. He asked the occupants to get out. A Catalan wearing a multicolored beanie, a Korean-American with longish hair and a camera hanging from his neck, a blonde from Finland and a Serbian girl with a yellow towel wrapped around her waist emerged from the small Volkswagen. The occupants of the three cars behind them — four Americans, a Slovenian, two Serbs, a Dutchwoman, a Spaniard and an Australian — started laughing at the improbable sight. Pretty soon the guard was laughing, too.

“We have here a Chinese, a Tunisian and a Serb,” he said. “And behind us is what, a Palestinian?”

The small caravan — along with a half-dozen other equally eccentric assemblages — was on the last leg of the Lost Highway Expedition through the western Balkans, a collective pilgrimage of local and international artists, architects, sociologists, art historians, curators and Web site producers that ended here on Thursday with a ceremonial finale.

The journey roughly traced the route of the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, a Yugoslav state-building project begun in 1948 and intended to connect the federation’s capitals. The highway was never completed, and various improvisational pathways are used to travel between the now-independent nations. Taking this discontinuity as its cue, the expedition has plunged into the complex region looking for signs of an emerging common identity in the informal, ad hoc architectural forms that have sprung up in the years since Yugoslavia began breaking up, in 1991.

“So far, Balkanization was always considered as a negative term, and very often was used as metaphor,” said Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, a New York-based architect who helped organize the expedition. “But our aim is to look for positive aspects of Balkanization. Our journey here is in a way a search for a Balkans that is beyond metaphor.”

The project was conceived by Kyong Park, a founder of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in Manhattan, and Marjetica Potrc, a Slovenian artist-architect who creates installations about illegally built housing.

“The architectural landscape of these cities was quite interesting to us,” Mr. Park said, recalling a trip the two made a year and a half ago. “We felt that there were tremendous changes taking place since the breakup of Yugoslavia, and we also noticed an emerging cultural scene — the beginning of a new kind of a network developing between these cities. We met with very interesting intellectuals from different fields — artists, architects — and somewhere in Skopje, we said, ‘You know, it would be great to do a project together with these people.’ ”

After discussing the idea with colleagues in New York, Rotterdam, Belgrade and Sarajevo, they began establishing a network of artists and architects in the region. They made arrangements to link up with cultural spaces in the various cities: the Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Galerija Nova in Zagreb, Croatia; the Rex cultural center in Belgrade, Serbia; the Press to Exit project space in Skopje, Macedonia; and Kuda.org, a group that is converting a handball court in Novi Sad, Serbia, into a new-media center.

Eventually the group set up a Web site, europelostandfound.net, to attract others. Some 300 participants from across Europe, the United States, the former Yugoslavia and Albania have joined the journey since its beginning in Ljubljana on July 30. They have passed through Zagreb; Novi Sad; Belgrade; Pristina, in Kosovo; Skopje; Tirana, Albania; and Podgorica, Montenegro, on their way to Sarajevo.

The caravan at the Bosnian border had just navigated dangerous, twisting roads through the stunning mountains of Montenegro from Podgorica, where impromptu presentations by local preservationists, architecture students and artists had been organized at the Karver bookstore, a cultural center named after the author Raymond Carver and installed in an Ottoman bathhouse by the Ribnica River.

Two years ago, the municipal government lopped off the top of the bathhouse to build a bridge over the river but preserved the structure beneath, and three Montenegrin artists turned the ground floor into a bookstore. It was a characteristic site for the expedition, a hybrid of modern engineering and historic monument that unexpectedly produced an independent cultural zone.

“In this bookstore we have books from Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Serbia,” said Varja Djukic Popovic, an actress who is a founder of the bookstore and is one of the main forces behind the bathhouse renovation project. Read the article NYTimes