A participatory and multi-format archive that examines cultural memory in the process of EU integration in the Western Balkans. This project documents what citizens think will change or disappear when their territory joins the EU, and marks the geographical location of each example with GPS technology.

The project aims to initiate inter-regional dialogue about the process of cultural change (seen through the immediate lens of EU accession) and entrenched regional preconceptions by assigning artists to collect the subjective views of citizens in a participating country that is not their own.

Historically, the countries of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo – collectively referred to as the Western Balkans – have been exposed to a constant redrawing of political, economic and cultural maps. Today these countries are again changing rapidly in an effort to satisfy the conditions of EU accession, reforms that demand adherence to the EU’s stringent economic, political, legislative, institutional and social norms. The citizens of the Western Balkans are acutely aware of the collateral cultural change that this process could instigate. Often, the traditional approaches of governments and institutions (media campaigns, informative brochures, workshops, conferences, travelling information buses, information phone lines) are incapable of initiating discussion about the process of transition and accession with the very people who will be the constituents of the EU, but also simply because of the socialist legacy of civil mistrust of government.

The photographs will become the basis of an archive of future memories of a particular moment in this region’s history, crucially providing local citizens the opportunity to participate in the creation of an alternative cultural history as an artwork in itself. The results will be produced and publicly presented online as an archive, a book, an international exhibition and a downloadable GPS map with which people will be encouraged to navigate the artwork (and thus the region) physically, enabling them to see for themselves if the phenomenon or locale that someone deemed culturally relevant has, indeed, disappeared or changed.