The central focus of this issue is based on a proposition by Mischa Kuball via the idea of how a possible new position of the artist as catalyst, and concurrently the curator as mediator, could emerge in an art-world saturated with celebrity culture where art institutions become landscapes of power and politics instead of contact zones and spaces for negotiation and exchange. As simple as it was, the idea of placing blank white walls in public spaces of different cities, symbolically referring to the concept of a gallery or museum’s white cube gives free access to the citizens to make their imprints on these walls and thus exercise their right to publicly comment on the issues that concern them. 

The cities and countries we have selected share a common history of socialism in the post WWII period. To an extent, it is a stereotype of Western perception that these socialist countries were “monolithic” behind the Iron Curtain, invented in the period of Cold War. It was exactly the opposite, most cities are from Yugoslavia, the country that did not belong to the Eastern Bloc and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Only Moldova was part of USSR, while Romania had a very peculiar position and was not in the epicenter of Soviet influence as opposed to other countries from East-Central Europe, a very useful geographical distinction by art historian Piotr Piotrowski. He insisted that a “romanticized” image of the region had to be replaced by an analytic approach to each socialist country and its social system with all its par­ticularities. To this end, he introduced the methodology for approaching the specific context of each country with the concept of framing to counteract the universalist perspectives, or Western hierarchical interpretative model. Through these lenses, the artistic context of East-Central European countries was positioned on the periphery without appreciation of the differences in the semiotic and ideological spaces where the art was produced. In spite of very different social transformations in the post-socialist period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian Revolution in 1989, as well as anti-Yugoslav wars starting in 1991 that ended in dissolution of the country, Piotrowski’s methodological tools for comparative analysis of the cultural and political context and all the nuances in each of the newly formed nation-states is still worth considering. While Romania, Slovenia and Croatia are already for some time EU members, North Macedonia and Serbia are in a very turbulent and complicated phases of accession, and Bosnia and Herzegovina only recently received the “candidate status”.   

In these quite different situations, we have now introduced white walls – walls which, of course, are not neutral in themselves, but rather carry with them a promise of (unfulfilled) universality and (im)possible equality. Whilst Brian O’Doherty, in ”Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space”, has already denounced the white cube as a place of pseudo-neutrality and commercial exploitation, here the white walls are brought out into the open, without shedding all their connotations. The empty white walls created an inviting, open, uncensored, yet largely pre-formulated space for a restrained form of expression, with the potential to give rise to a collective work of art from a polyphony of voices, drawings and graffiti. But perhaps, in the moment of collective action, the conversation about art, participation, and the political and economic situation was the true work of art? This issue is dedicated to this idea and the process by which it was realised – albeit with contextual differences – in seven cities and countries across the region.

Central to understanding how this project works and how this theme is shaped is the specific artistic position that we have defined as that of a catalyst. Mischa Kuball’s role in this project was not that of an author speaking in the first person, but rather that of a catalyst who creates a fixed practical framework whilst leaving the content of expression to those who engage with it. Acting as a counterpoint to the paintings on the white walls are, in particular, the contributions of the respective local curators and artists, who speak to participatory projects. This catalytic position differs from what Grant Kester, drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer, identifies as ‘false immediacy’, in which an attempt is made to abandon the space of representation in favour of direct political intervention. Kuball does not abandon the discourse on art, but strategically redis­tributes it by constituting the city as an arena and public space as a discursive field.

As previously mentioned, this takes place simultaneously on two different levels: on the one hand as the articulation of citizens, often surprisingly formulaic yet enriched with local knowledge, and on the other hand the artistic and curatorial contributions on panels. The latter reflect the respective possibilities and discourses within and through art.

This position generates a specific challenge and responsibility for the curator. If them artist functions as a catalyst, the curator’s role becomes one of mediator, building the networks of trust that allow the project to take root in each local context, facilitating the panel discussions in collaboration with the involved partner institutions that translate public inscription into civic dialogue, and holding open the space between the project’s conceptual frame and the unpredictable reality of what citizens actually write, draw, and paint. The curatorial labor in a project of this nature is largely invisible in the finished work, which was precisely the point. It consists of sustained relationships, institutional negotiations, ethical attention to whose voices are amplified and whose are not, and the willingness to accept that the project will take different forms in different places and that failure could be an inherent part of participatory artistic practice. This understanding of the artist-curator relationship, catalyst and mediator, shapes the editorial structure of this issue as much as it shaped the project itself.

The selection of cities, Sarajevo, Bucharest, Skopje, Chișinău, Ljubljana, Kraljevica, and Čačak, and partner institutions in them, was not chosen as representatives of a region that forms a kind of cultural touring map through Southeast Europe. The selection grew organically from Zoran Erić’s longstanding connections in the region, developed over years of collaborative work, combined with the artist Mischa Kuball’s own institutional relationships and the network cultivated by Simone Voigt, director of the Goethe-Institut Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, whose role was indispensable in giving the project its initial momentum.  

The map of the project’s progression is also a map of trust, built upon a single idea but sustained over time between specific individuals and institutions, thus forming the core of a micro-art community. At the same time, it is a map that confirms a political reorientation of the region and the influence of the European Union. Nevertheless, a sense of unease persists.

What the selected cities share, however, is a specific condition that makes that trust both necessary and meaningful. These are cities where the relationship between cultural institutions and their publics remain genuinely unresolved and often contested. The public discussions constitutive within the project’s idea were testing these exact sore points in each city and country. In Sarajevo, the future building of Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Renzo Piano after a long period of waiting, has only a single foundation stone at the moment. The area connecting it to the Historical and National Museums, envisioned as a future museum quarter, is threatened by a planned road that would permanently isolate them from one another. In Chișinău, there is no dedicated contemporary art museum at all, and the independent cultural scene operates through improvised partnerships, basement galleries, and civic negotiation. In Bucharest, one of the largest cities of the region, the vital but polarized art scene was not willing to engage any longer in the discussion about the still visible remains of urbicide that the socialist regime and authoritarian leader “performed” in the city. In Skopje, the Museum of Contemporary Art sits physically isolated on a hill above a city saturated with nationalist bronze monuments erected under the ideologically aggressive “Skopje 2014” project, built on the fake identity interpolation of Slavic Macedonian people within the period of Greek Antiquity. In a small place, Kraljevica, near the industrial and port city of Rijeka, the historical Frankopan Castle created a secluded but potent venue for interaction with the local community. In Čačak, the project arrived in the middle of the longest wave of students’ and citizens’ protests Serbia had seen in decades, triggered by the structural collapse of a recently renovated railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed sixteen people in November 2024. The ongoing civic unrest and blockades were strongly felt in the public space. In each case, the blank white walls did not enter a neutral but heavily burdened and contested space. (As publishers, we are aware that the complex history of East-Central Europe, with its many small states, can be difficult to grasp; we have therefore included a map with some information alongside the editorial.)

The project’s consistent premise, that (un)filtered public expression, despite the art world’s inherent mechanisms of exclusion, could catalyze genuine civic dialogue, was tested differently in each city. The texts gathered here emerged directly from those encounters. The issue moves between three overlapping registers: theoretical essays that situate the project within broader debates about participatory practice, commoning, and care aesthetics; curatorial and artistic reflections from contributors who engaged with the project at specific venues; and city-specific documentation sections, each combining a panel discussion proposal with invited responses from local voices. 

The essay “Participatory Art as a Practice of Commoning” attempts to trace the intellectual genealogy of the project and situate it within debates about participatory practice, commoning, and care aesthetics, drawing on the curatorial experience of the full project journey. One of the project’s strengths is that these claims are also put into perspective and, in some cases, refuted: Nebojša Vilić’s skeptical account of “cloud culture” and institutional dissolution, Ca˘lin Dan›s argument for the museum as Temporary Autonomous Zone, Predrag Živković’s visceral account of what it meant to host the project in Čačak, while city officials monitored the walls from the windows of the municipal building. The essay by Blanca de la Torre brings a broader curatorial perspective, tracing participatory and ecological practices across multiple exhibition contexts and situating Kuball›s project within a trajectory of socially engaged art. 

The city introductions and panel descriptions, which frame each section of the issue, carry the specific socio-political context of the venue in question. They were written as curatorial proposals for the panel discussions held in each city, and they retain that character: partial, situated, oriented toward the urgent questions of each local context rather than toward any overarching thesis. To illustrate this, we have included visual representation of the numerous projects that were mentioned by the participants and, in some cases, curated by them. In art, we are always operating within a discursive field that creates the very subject of which it speaks.

The questions if walls could tell raise about public space, institutional responsibility, and the capacity of participatory art to build or repair social bonds are not questions exclusive to Southeast Europe. But they have a particular urgency here, in cities where those bonds were violently broken within living memory and where the institutions charged with holding cultural space open remain fragile, underfunded, and sometimes directly threatened by the political systems.

This issue thus occupies an uncanny position, a kind of “in-between” space within the editorial profile of the Journal. It is not a conventional thematic intervention in curatorial discourse, but closer to what the project itself produced on its walls: a layered, contested, sometimes contradictory record of what happens when art enters public space without a predetermined script and when curating accompanies that process with sustained attention rather than institutional control. All this gives an honest account on how an idea can evolve, and reimagine both the position of the artists and curator, as well as formation of organic institutional networks based on principles of solidarity and commoning in the arts. With this fragmented picture, we hope to reach out to other regions with multi-ethnic, multinational contexts where art operates in uncertain times.

Zoran Erić is an independent curator and Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Media, Bauhaus University in Weimar. His research fields include art theory, museology, human geography, urban sociology, and political ecology. He curated and co-curated numerous projects in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the USA, etc. He contributed to different international art magazines and academic journals including Artefact (guest editor of the 4th issue Glocalogue); Umelec; Manifesta Journal; Praesens; Third Text; A Prior; OnCurating (guest co-editor of “Precarious Labor in the Field of Art”); Hermeneia, Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory and Criticism Journal of Museum Education; Museum Management and Curatorship Journal, etc. He published papers in edited volumes with the following publishers: Routledge, Springer, JRP Ringier, NAi Publishers, Phillip Editions, Sternberg Press, Hatje Cantz, DISTANZ Verlag, Revolver Verlag, etc. He was a member of the IKT Board (2005-2008) and the President of the Serbian Section of AICA (2008-2010). He serves on the scientific board of MNAC, Bucharest, and the advisory board of IVAM Valencia, and is a member of CIMAM.

Mischa Kuball has been working in the public and institutional sphere since 1977. From 2007 onwards Kuball has been a professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, and from 2006 to 2008 professor of media art at Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM, Karlsruhe. Since 2015 he has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, Düsseldorf. In 2016 he was honored with the German Light Award. Since the spring of 2024, he has been an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Matters of Activity. Image Space Material’ at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Dorothee Richter is Professor in Contemporary Curating at the University of Reading, UK, where she also directs the PhD in Practice in Curating programme. She previously served as head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (CAS/MAS) at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she initiated the Curating Degree Zero Archive and was a curator at Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated various symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, as well as an archive on feminist practices entitled Materialien/Materials. Together with Ronald Kolb, Richter directed a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now, Fluxus Explored with a Camera. Her most recent project was Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone, a collaborative exhibition at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, in 2024. This project was co-curated by OnCurating (Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb) and ARKO (curator Haena Noh, producer Haebin Lee). Richter is Executive Editor and Editor-in-Chief of OnCurating.org, and recently founded the OnCurating Academy Berlin.

Simone Voigt studied business administration at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Berlin as well as Russian Studies, Sociology and Political Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Moscow State Lomonosov University. Following her studies, she headed the coordination office for the Robert Bosch Foundation's lecturer programs in Moscow in 1999/2000 and taught German as a foreign language at the Faculties of Journalism, Economics and Law at Moscow State Lomonosov University. From 2002 to 2009, Simone Voigt worked at the Goethe-Institut Moscow. She was first responsible for cultural programs and later for language course cooperation. After serving for a year as a lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) at the Institute for State and Law at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, she returned to the Goethe-Institut Moscow in October 2010 and took over as head of the Press and Public Relations. In February 2016, she was posted to the Goethe-Institut Hong Kong as deputy director and head of language department. Since April 2021, Simone Voigt has been working as director of the Goethe-Institut Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo.