a little bit of the balkans in NL

Even though I missed out on Hallowe'en this past weekend, I had a lot of fun learning a little bit about the Balkans at the Balkan Snapshots Film Festival. It was held at a cool little theatre called Kriterion, and also featured music, lectures and debates, and had a nice cafe with good coffee. The whole thing was presented in English (i.e. talks, debates and film subtitles), which is kind of interesting in itself, and seems to be the way that events get marked as international.

The most interesting film I saw was part of a short documentary programme called Blue wall red door, by Alban Muja (who was at the screening) and Yll Citaku. In the city of Prishtina, like many other areas in Kosovo, the street names have been changed so often by each different regime since the war that the names themselves no longer have local meaning. The street names had been changed and rechanged to reflect the language and public figures important to each sucessive regime - basically every few years - that each street now has at least three different names. Besides being incredibly confusing in terms of reading a map, the result of this rapid renaming has been that locals have just stopped trying to learn the names of the streets - leaving the rebranding efforts of each regime to fall on more or less deaf ears. In effect, for the past 15 years or so, people haven't bothered to use the street names, and often have no idea what the official name of even their own street is (street numbers are a whole other issue). Rather, people locate addresses through the use of local landmarks - things like well known restaurants, the (former) homes of famous people, or even places that were well known but no longer actually exist: like a place known as the 'blue wall' which is actually painted red now, or an old mill that is now the site of a new hotel building. The film traces how people navigate and negotiate public space in a place where maps are pretty much useless and finding an address means knowing the social landscape, or finding locals who do. (For instance, mail carriers who have to deliver letters where the address is written something like: So and so, blue wall red door, this neighbourhood, near this other neighbourhood. Or, ambulances and firefighters who are directed to the nearest minimarket, or just have to follow the smoke.) The conflicts and political shifts have cultivated a whole, seemingly makeshift culture around understanding the city space.

I think most people, even if they are sticklers for navigating by compass, do use certain landmarks (places of personal or more widely social significance) to relate to and understand their surroundings. But to have to rely solely on landmarks - places that might have more longevity than the streetnames, but are still likely to change over time (consider that political monuments were only slightly more permanent than street names during this period in this place) - I can only begin to imagine how that reshapes your relation to your home. Anyway, it is an amazing film that has given me a lot to think about in terms of how people relate to the social landscape of their city or neighbourhood.