AbstractsHistory

There are two distinctly different ages in Eastern Europe; their distinctions manifest simultaneously in attitudes toward the body, toward communication, toward taking action. My thesis is a beginning of a genealogy of the crowd form: from the military marches and stadium spectacles characteristic of the hard totalitarian era of Eastern Europe to the crowd of the students' and citizens' protest in Belgrade 96/97. The protest persisted for four months and, in its creativity, managed to transcend the self-referential mechanics of a resistance project. The formal manifestations of the general and specific attitude shifts toward the regime and toward the city make me believe that it is possible to visualize social phenomena and practices as 'drawing machines,' working at various scales, drawing the way that a dancing body describes its kinaesthetic sphere, by intervening in space. I have been drawing the protest event primarily in video, in order that the experience of these mappings always fits the basic definition of an event.