MoneyNations

The project MoneyNations first took place in 1998 at the Shedhalle in Zurich. The focus of the discussion was Western Europe’s restrictive border politics toward Central and Southeastern Europe, which is debatably the result of both cultural and economical circumstances. The other major emphasis was on the heightened increase in discrimination against non-EUropeans. Over the course of a year we built up a correspondence network. This correspondence network consisted of theorists, media activists and artists from Central and Southeastern Europe, who specifically challenged the Western-centered European approach to the construction of borders. The exchange process brought about video productions, photographic work, installations, theoretical texts and narrations.

MoneyNations2 at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna October 2000 focused on EU internal racist policies, inner European forms of resistance and the normalization processes of the countries directly bordering on the EU, such as Central European countries and ex-Yugoslavia. New correspondents (artists, media activists and theorists) have been invited to extend our experience focusing on „East/West“ as a problem of all of Europe. The second MoneyNations Congress focused on the fact that the binary construction of the West as the center and the East as periphery can no longer coherently explain the existing relations of power. On the contrary, new points of power have apparently been constituted in Central and Eastern Europe restating that racism and sexism are not purely Western phenomena. Beyond this, the current political situation in Austria has strengthened the need for the development of new political concepts. In dealing with the increase in right-wing politics inside and outside the EU this congress introduced and discussed critical approaches ranging from forms of political activism to cultural and media strategies.