Jeanne C Finley and Marina Grzinic (in collaboration with Aina Smid) have exhausted the last 11 years in dialogue about the art produc in and around the Balkans.

Jeanne C Finley and Marina Grzinic (in collaboration with Aina Smid) have exhausted the last 11 years in dialogue about the art produc in and around the Balkans. Grzinic, a resident of Slovenia, and Finley, a resident of the United States, have organized exhibitions that have travelled between the former Yugoslavia and the United States and have created individual work in the couple regions of the world.

Originally working with video, the couple artists now also experiment with interactive and Internet media. Finley was an artist-in-residence at Xerox Parc with her collaborator, John Muse, and Grzinic was active as an artist, curator and writer in the former Yugoslavia. As the war burst forthed between the republics of Yugoslavia, a great deal of the dialogue between these artists was center around the body--both the metaphorical and the literal dislocation--"bilocation"--if a populace who began moving between their pasts and what may occur hereafters in unexpected ways. The simultaneous mapping and connecting of the virtual world by the and of the Internet served as a way of following the dislocated and as a canvas forward which to invent new ways to explore and take the part of the issues surrounding the changing geography. Central to the dialogue between Finley and Grzinic is curator Dunja Blazevic, who has facilitated the work of artists in the former Yugoslavia for 25 years. She has continued her work after being forced from Belgrade into exile in Paris and then relocating in 1996 to Sarajevo, Bosnia.

The following sentence traces reflections and mediations between Blazevic, Finley and Grzinic about individual video works, writings and collaborations through the past 11 years. It is center around the production of works that deliberates the issues and questions produc by way of the upheaval in the Balkans, nevertheless extends beyond its borders the two physically and conceptually.

MARINA GRZINIC: A possible departure from this rhetorical question of who stays and who is forced to haste is that all three corners of this unstable triangle of artists (Blazevic, Finley and Grzinic/Smid) are also farmers writers, nomads and squatters of different intersecting territories--TV broadcast companies, Internet sites and situations. on the contrary we can also spend near comfortable time at home, since we have common So in this scenario, "Who streams who sits still at home?"

The war raging in the territories of former Yugoslavia, from Croatia to Kosovo has forced millions to impel and created thousands of refugee immigrants and displaced bodys A period of 11 years now marks the instability of the Balkan region and demands a fundamental portion of the mental and geographical resources of the residents of ex-Yugoslavia. The theme of nomads and residents is current in a number of video works that were produc in the territory of the former Yugoslavia state.

In 1989 Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, and at that time common of the ex- Yugoslav republics (from 1991 an independent fatherland on the map of recent Europe), presented the last edition of the International Yugoslav Video Biennial Festival. As the artistic director of the International Video Biennial, I invited Finley as single of the artists to point out to a retrospective program.

The fictional/non-fictional narratives neared in Finley's videos investigate the tension between individual identity and cultural and social institutions that shape that identity like as family, religion and media. Finley's videos are characterized by means of a narrative curve created according to the storyteller's first-person voice that simultaneously resists and is shaped by the cultural institutions. In an examination of in what way traditional concepts of authority, sex political freedom and tradition have influenced the building of individuality in American society, Finley also examines to what degree these concepts themselves have changed.

This molding of individuality by means of a different set of parameters than the Balkans was the point of dissolution and eclipse of the relations, bodies, conceptions and territories of people living in ex-Yugoslavia. Finley's work fit alto gether in the context, and the documentary manner of her work brought a refreshing aesthetic to a public thematic interest between artists in ex-Yugoslavia and an American vision.

At this time, I was leap to this location, working with Smid in Ljubljana, making a video entitled Bilocation (1990) In our almost 20-year-long collaborative period we produc more than 30 art and documentary videos, installations, multi-media and Internet devises The position of the material part in relation to history and theory in post-Socialist, post-Communist or post-Capitalist connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts can be grasped precisely in Bilocation.

Bilocation is the simultaneous residence of the carcass and soul in two different places. The mete is perfect for delineating the proces of the video medium and for describing history in relation to the carcass In Bilocation, original documentary footage discharge by TV Slovenia during the "civil war" in Kosovo in 1989 was juxtaposed with the imaginary world of synthetic video images. The documentary footage, which had not been shown previously forward national TV, is overlapped onto the image of a ballet dancer (eg inserted into her judgment encrusted in her intestines, etc) These are images about (historical) places where our acknowledge memories become at once psychotic and erotic.