We could consider that not only the walls could talk, but that everything is talking, whispering, twinkling, all the time. Twinkling words, images, faces, screams, you name it. Meaningful births and deaths everywhere. And also lightning, storms, explosions. Sometimes the message is sublime, but more often it is destructive. Even darkness still talks, and silence whispers something, just about all the time, sometimes as a resounding scream. Who is there to hear it? Who is brave enough to bring the overwhelming density of messages of the broken world into some kind of action or at least some sort of conscience, speaking meaningfully to us all?

Is this the question asked by Mischa Kuball's ambitious art project if walls could tell which, in 2024 and 2025, spread its conceptual wings from first, Sarajevo, followed by Bucharest, Skopje, Chisinau, Ljubljana, Kraljevica and Čačak? Each city received a few empty walls to erected in the public space and left there for some time followed by debates in museums or galleries, where the results of the spontaneous public creativity and interventions would be available to audiences to see and to critical eyes to evaluate and discuss. Joining the discussion initiated by this project in Ljubljana as one of the panelists, I was provoked to rethink and revaluate, not so much the ‘speaking’ walls in front of Vžigalica Gallery in Ljubljana, but my own memories and expectations. Belonging to the generation of the 1980’s, which was by necessity political, utopian and wonderfully naive, I expected the messages to be, if not openly political, then at least rebellious. Well, they were neither, although creative, expressive and beautiful in a surprising way, which speaks to the success of the project. It’s about time for me to grow up and accept that the world had changed. But more importantly, the map of the project brought into focus some more or less forgotten places in South Eastern Europe, or let’s call it “deep Balkans”, where five out of eight cities in play once belonged to a country now called the “former Yugoslavia”. That was also the country of my birth and I remember how, after its demise in the 1990’s, my generation embraced the utopia of art to (re)build, (re)construct and nourish broken relationships, not only between once culturally and politically connected ex-Yugoslavian nations and communities but also vis a vis Europe and the world as a whole.

The concept and ideology of ‘Relational Aesthetics’[1], which took over the art world by the end of 1990’s and the first decade of the new millennium, fueled this utopia until it dissolved into thin air. What Kuball’s post-Relational Aesthetics project revealed to me through its choice of cities and region is how little or nothing I know about the life and struggles in separate corners of this region now. Less than ever, I would say, which is quite an uncomfortable feeling, charged with shame and guilt even. But can museums, galleries and cultural activities in conjunction with linked networks fix the lack of connectivity and information available, that, as it seems, if walls could tell, wants to suggest? Or do we need something more that will unlikely happen after decades of EU enlargement? Something like the IENN (Independent European News Network), perhaps, that would bring stories and news from both larger and smaller corners of Europe as well as the World, stirring up new dynamics to build a new base on which art and culture can grow, thrive, reflect, structure and change. A new culture, awareness and conscience that we all need and long for.

Eda Čufer is a dramaturge, curator, writer and professor of contemporary art history and theory. In 1984 she co-founded the art collective NSK based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Between 2005 and 2020 she lived in the USA where she taught in the art history and liberal arts departments of the Maine College of Art. She is the recipient of a grant from Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital for a book project which is still in progress. The focus of her research and writings is concerned with the ideologies of contemporary art, especially with the relationship between political, technological and art systems.