"BLOK70“

Dont Rhine/Ultra-red

The sound piece and performance “BLOK70” is named after a “shopping mall” in Novi Beograd, a district of Belgrade. Here Chinese immigrants, Roma (many of them deported from Germany to Serbia) and Serbs work together. So far, migration policies in Serbia and Montenegro are largely undetermined; an asylum law was first passed in 2005. The legal conditions for immigration are relatively unclear, which leads to permanent economic and legal uncertainty. The effect of this uncertainty formed the starting point for the sound piece and performance “BLOK70”. It was created in collaboration as part of the sub-project TRANSIT MIGRATION by the scholars Manuela Bjadzijev and Rutvica Andrijasevic and the musicians Elliot Perkins and Dont Rhine from the audioactivist group Ultra-red from Los Angeles, investigating the situation of various migrant groups and what they have in common in Novi Beograd in a combination of field research and cultural practice. The attention to noises and acoustic spaces calls attention to the often neglected aspect that these always also form experiences, memories and collective action. The audio project “BLOK70” condenses sound spaces in the shopping mall. Sounds and everyday noises from shops, residential housing corridors, restaurants, travel agencies or the office of the Chinese Merchants Association are played in fragments in real time, combined with spoken words, rhythmized and electronically mixed. The production of a new acoustic space gives a voice to the Belgrade Blok70 in a different place. The pieces will be released on the Ultra-red Internet label “Public Records” (www.publicrec. org) at the end of 2005. Performance November 10, 2005, in the context of the symposium “transnational europe II” (www.transitmigration.org) at Kölnischer Kunstverein.

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