ENGLISH.

1. What is the concept of Béton Bleu?

Ana-Marija Cvitic: Béton Bleu is an art magazine that interviews artists, creatives and political activists on three thematic fields: The political aspects of art, the cultural governance of the European Union and the cross-boarder cooperation between artistic projects. A wide range of protagonists are invited to the discussion: Visual artists, curators, gallery owners, scholars, representatives of classical institutions, political activists, politicians on the European level. Since Béton Bleu Magazine sees itself as an urban platform for the European public, all publications will be at least bilingual.

2. Which aspects are particularly important to you?

Apart from the language-aspect, which is a study how to create an European public where we don’t speak the same language, I want to focus on the debate towards the cultural policy in the EU. In the past, the EU has set wrong priorities when it came to the negotiation of budgets and cultural funding and I would like to address this together with other creatives from the EU. Even if I consider myself as pro-european, Béton Bleu remains an independent, non-partisan magazine and research project.
Another aspect that is extremely important to me personally - given my own biography - and that is that there is a gender balance and that many young people from the former Eastern Bloc countries and Yugoslavia have their say. And, where possible, to portray educational achievers. After all, it is extremely difficult to gain a foothold in the cultural sector, this is similar throughout the whole EU. We need as well working class kids in the cultural field, this class-division is a big problem in my opinion.

3. Why do we need another magazine on art?

Béton Bleu portrays how artists position themselves when it comes to the EU. Even if they don’t - and that’s my thesis - they still do. Our everyday life in Europe is closely interwoven with all aspects of globalization. We travel, we consume, we think internationally - not only because we have a new 'space of consciousness' that comes with digitalization and the Internet. I think we need a platform with a contemporary design language to speak about crossboarder cooperation in the cultural sector. And then: We see extreme identity debates both left and right of the spectrum all over Europe; about who is who, who may be who and who can say what. What role do artists play in this?
The project "EU" is was actually only meant as an economic project. But it has since - probably even unintentionally - unleashed something worthy of closer examination: a kind of hyphen identity. A kind of common "umbrella citizenship" that especially the digital natives share. I am particularly interested in how this is reflected in the creative sector or how the creative sector contributes to this sense of identity. For me personally it’s a research project.

4. What is your initial thesis to start this research project?

I personally believe that two people in their late twenties with a similar level of education in Krakow and Madrid have more in common than two people of the same age with different levels of education who are from the same country. This has a lot to do with the spirit of our times and the phenomenon, as sociologist Cornelia Koppetsch describes it, of "global citizens" in the neoliberal era.
At the same time, we are seeing global migration on the rise so I find the question of how children of second and third generation migrants think about this identity-topic extremely important. Migrants have some best-practices for the European citizenship, I’m sure of that. The “beton”, which means concrete in mostly all of the language on the European continent, stands for that: I am interested in the young urban generation, most of them know nothing other than multiculturalism. I want to know the stories behind the statistics.

(c) 29.01.2020

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