Installation View at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2007


(excerpt)
The B Zone is a complex project, with many different entries and exits. It was in 2002 that the Transcultural Geographies network began to take shape, on the initiative of Ursula Biemann who had already decided to document the construction and the human environment of the 1750-kilometer BTC oil pipeline running from the city of Baku in Azerbaijan, through Tbilissi in Georgia, to the port of Ceyhan in Turkey. To enlarge the scope of this investigation, she invited two other women into the project. One was Lisa Parks, a media researcher who would analyze the destruction of the former Yugoslav telephone system during the civil wars, then map out its replacement by a web of transnational satellite services. The other was Angela Melitopoulos, who wanted to make a road movie about the present realities and historical memories of the integrated system of highways, rails, ports and telecommunications cables stretching across Southeastern Europe, from Salzburg and Budapest to Thessaloniki and Sofia. This multi-modal system is Corridor X, the tenth Pan-European Transport Corridor, running along a route that partially overlays the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity built by Tito’s Yugoslavia, but also the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad constructed with German capital in the early twentieth century. At stake here, as curator Anselm Franke noted in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, is the “silent language of infrastructure.”

"...Yet this is a project that speaks. To instill a dialogical character into the very production and editing of the investigation, Angela Melitopoulos constituted the group Timescapes, including the VideA collective from Ankara, Freddy Vianellis from Athens, Dragana Zarevac from Belgrade, and the German video-maker Hito Steyrl who filmed the European summit in Thessaloniki along with Melitopoulos herself. Another participant was the professor of media art and cultural studies, Ginette Verstraete, who accompanied the project of Transcultural Geographies from its inception, along with numerous other artists, theorists, inhabitants and experts who contributed their images, their voices and their texts, or who participated in one of the four project seminars held in Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Istanbul and Zurich. All this was documented in a book, and given spatial expression in the two exhibitions of the project mounted in Berlin in 2006 and in Barcelona in 2007.3 It was, to date, one of the most searching and insightful projects of what some people are calling visual geography... " text by Brian Holmes from Differential geography

01:19:00
Double channel projection
Related press: B-Zone, Becoming Europe and Beyond