Lebensraum / Living Space — a public performance :: January 18, 2009; 2:00 - 4:00 pm :: Starting from and returning to Project Space 176, 176 Prince of Wales Road, Kentish Town, London, we will be walking along Prince of Wales Road.

Lebensraum is a series of movies dealing with ‘living space’. Through case studies of specific places and historical events, the filmmaking process is used as an intervention. A dynamic relationship is established between the spaces of: 1) research (scriptwriting, archive work); 2) staging (performance, re-enactment); and 3) presentation (screening, discussion).

You are invited to interpret and give voice to a diary about the dissolution of Yugoslavia in response to the streets of Kentish Town. The performance will consist of three strands:

1) Participants will be invited to take turns in interpreting a diary written in 1992 by the anthropologist Ger Duijzings during his travels through Yugoslavia. The diary is a quiet record of the solidarity and resistance to nationalism and ethnic violence, as well as an account of the unmixing and tearing apart of individuals, communities and a nation. It consists of a series of encounters with different groups, movements and organisations.

2) Participants are invited to provide and read their own choice of texts. Please email us materials on mass behaviour, mass organisation and accounts of local and global mass movements. Theoretical texts, pamphlets, as well as poetry, fiction and newspaper cuttings are all welcome. The texts can be current or historical. Please keep them short.

3) The project film crew will interview the participants and passers-by. The crew will pose questions about our understanding of and attitude to mass organisation and gather responses to the collision of different histories being performed and the landscape we will be moving through.

What is the role and importance of mass action and mass organisation? How can we claim history from the rhetoric of the mass media? What kind of space can we imagine, perform and inhabit that acts as a combination of the public and private, the personal and the collective, the historical and the materially present?

Everybody is welcome and your presence and any contributions will be much appreciated. Please send texts to: rastko.novakovic [at] gmail.com.