B-Zone Becoming Europe and Beyond

This collaborative research and art project investigates ongoing changes to the social and political geographies of the land from southeast Europe (the Balkans) to Turkey and the Caucasus. Each of its three core projects follows the trajectory of a large-scale piece of infrastructure laid down in a former Communist state: "The Black Sea Files" explores the new pipeline connecting Baku, the world's oldest oil capital, on the Caspian shore, with the Mediterranean; "Timescapes" follows the EU-financed "Corridor X" along the Yugoslav "Highway of Brotherhood and Unity," the historic migration route connecting Germany with Turkey; and "Postwar Footprints" tracks telecommunications and satellite systems before and after the Balkan Wars. Each of the sites on which these projects are coming together, each backdrop to a new economic strategy, is a site of lived experience: each has seen mass migration and war. The creators of B-Zone consider the implications of the land as palimpsest. Their simple accumulation of information and facts--photographs, maps, words--is powerful, but B-Zone is more than a glossy dossier or an expose. Its artistic and theoretical approaches interlace the symbolic production of subjective and collective spaces of representation with the "silent language" of infrastructure.Franke, Anselm is the author of 'B-Zone Becoming Europe and Beyond', published 2006 under ISBN 9788496540057 and ISBN 8496540057.