The international conference Words Room will take place in Zagreb (Croatia) at November 26 and 27, 2010 in the framework of the project Continental Breakfast which is supported by Central European Initiative (CEI). The conference is organised in collaboration of Continental Breakfast, Trieste Contemporanea, Institute for Contemporary Art – Zagreb and Read Art program. 

In order to find inferences with regard to the contemporary state of European society and looking for the best tools for safeguarding the European intangible cultural heritage, Words Room aims to compare how are defined in the European dictionaries some particular concepts dealing with art and culture and the 'relation with the other' - according to their specific significations in each country and its historical development.

Are there important or small differences in the European languages with regard to the definition of selected words, or about the relations between them and about the ideas which they express? And if yes, what does that mean?

As one of the most impassable pass for communication is the lack of understanding of the number of European languages, the starting step of the project will be to translate in English some selected keywords from other European ordinary dictionaries.

With regard to the chosen words and their correlative terms, the study will also enlarge to some European languages the comparative search of certain existing opposed ideas or intermediate ideas or deficiencies, which one can already remark in a particular language.

The objective is to make a generally understandable compilation of a collection of words coming from a multilingual territory: a sort of Virtual European Thesaurus in visual arts, the organisers hope, can help practice and strengthen human sodality.

The conference will focus on question - Are the arts the best storage for the memory? Namely as Andreas Huyssen stressed "today, we seem to suffer from a hypertrophy of memory, not history." In the sea of scholarly memory researches, we have chosen objectives of tracing intangible values of this word and of language, and intangible as well as often tangible objects produced by arts and cultures, objects that store and transmit memory between the past and the future. Is it a chance that the Muses were daughters of the Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and time?

The memory, as Julian Bonder stressed, "in its many forms, has become a marker of global culture: in historiography, psychoanalysis, visual and performing arts, and media - and particularly in urban studies, public art, landscape design, and architecture. The pursuit of memory is evident in the way real and mythic pasts are re-presented, remembered, or forgotten, marking contemporary politics and global culture."

The Words Room will trying to consider some of the following questions: How do we remember?, How do we manipulate memory into a physical or any other form?, Today, how do we interpret collective history through a personal memory?, How do we record personal history and death?, How memory relates to space and/or landscape?, What kind of memory we find in the museums?, How does the state manage memory?

The Program of the international conference Words Room can be seen here.