Maribor 2012

http://www.maribor2012.info/en/index.php?ptype=3&ntype=1&id=84

New conceptual starting point of the European Capital of Culture
30. 8. 2010 We have gained a unique and unrepeatable opportunity in Maribor to conceptualize an exhausted and hopeless time from the start in order to find the direction of our future and start living in our own unique, unrepeatable way. We are the future, but only if we know how to be, and how to create a future within us. We need to wake up and be bold, ambitious and visionary. If we learned anything from the past, it is the fact that history has only been on the side of ambitious visionaries. Our vision is simultaneously our direction, pointing towards the time to come. It points towards the time, which exists, but is still unborn. It points towards the time, which is hypothetical, which is because it can be. And if it will be, it will grow out of the time missile that represents the year 2012. Have no fear it is not a destructive missile. The one, who is hit by it, awakens from a deep sleep. Maribor needs to wake up. It must alter. And it must become different among those, who dictate otherness. Who are other and different - who are not yesterday, who are tomorrow. Those are huge capitals. Huge because of their visionary spirit that moves creative energy around the networks of the city, that divides the city, its dreams and aspirations. Our aspiration is to start living our tomorrow, here and now. Our goal is to recognize sleeping potentials, to reveal the latency of the existing and to co-create it, to understand our destiny as an untapped possibility, to be the next, who is.

Let's think of small towns with ten and more thousand inhabitants, which experienced a renaissance miracle. Let's think of the cities, which forever changed the face of the world with their achievements in the field of knowledge, life manners, culture and openness. Let's think of genius individuals, who through their persistence achieved key changes in the way we see man and the world. Visionary creators, enlightened rulers and politicians who had a sense for unprecedented possibility. There comes a time, when it's possible to co-decide and live your own future. Now, today and here is that time. The year 2012 is that time. For those who are sleeping and are afraid of the exceeded, the future has already happened long ago. But for us it exists like an unprecedented possibility.

One of the greatest mysteries of human kind is how to generate development. Development is always unpredictable; the greatest discoveries that changed the face of the earth and our vision of the universe were usually not given birth there where the biggest economic capital and institutional harmony was accumulated, but always unpredictably from periphery positions. The history of development is the history of genial shocks from the sidelines. The destiny of the world's great metropolises is that they are absorbent and quickly recognize and adopt the substantial shocks in the field of science and art, shocks of knowledge. As a rule the shocks occur on the periphery.

The periphery can at the moment of shock change into the epicenter of some radical changes. In the year 2012, when Maribor becomes the European capital of culture, it must experience an incredible shift. Not a shift, more like turmoil. Maribor should move from the periphery into the very epicenter of change. We will experience turmoil and we will be revived. A shift that will take place at various levels and will change the face of this city well into the future: a change in level of perception in the city, activate its creative energies and set the conditions for change, either as a redefinition of the existing or as the establishment of new infrastructure opportunities. The shift must be such that it will not only move Maribor; the turmoil must be of unprecedented dimensions. It must be felt in the wider European culture and arts, which Maribor will throne. Museums and theatres, concert halls and universities, literary houses and exhibition centers, feuilletons and web portals, TV stations and canters of artistic pulsation all around Europe must look at the future, at the city, where some unprecedented turmoil comes from. They must look at Maribor.

In order to achieve a radical shock it is necessary to banish all idleness, stuffiness, all uninventiveness, all false modesty and intimidation, all casualness and superficiality, all clientelism, all ignorance, all resentfulness and self-offence, all nepotism and all false self-love. Maribor deserves a variety of until now unprecedented possibilities. Unprecedented content and unprecedented events. These will be generated thus from content potential, which Maribor and the remaining partner cities are capable of, as of course in a broader European and a global perspective. Global perspective is a perspective originating from specific vision that is by no means arbitrary: to know who, why, how in the broadest possible sense.

It should never be overheard. It should never be forgotten. Let it seduce us and activate all creative forces within us. Therefore we repeat once again: the European Capital of Culture should not be just looking back into the past, its ultimate goal is unprecedented change, a different future based on knowledge and unbridled creativity. Only knowledge produces new content that does not extinguish like New Year's fireworks and blow away like sensational news on the front pages of yesterday's newspapers, but is capable of a long-term structural vitality and redefines the way we live.
To be truly the European Capital of Culture and not a self-sufficient promenade of known spirits of the past, Maribor will have to become bold and visionary, a missile directed towards tomorrow, a seismograph of still non-existing shift, a shipwreck of mediocrity and a vision of the awakened and creative. We need to recognize, activate and orientate all our forces, our dreams, all our energy. We need to recognize and trust in our fears and forever alter their dark image into the light of possibilities of their change. Maribor must offer a visionary pulse, stimulation, shift to the worlds of culture and art, which for one year it is allowed to throne.

We repeat: European Capital of Culture should not try only to summarize and repeat the current, that is to say the past, as it interweaves in an actual moment, but should build a city's missing thirteen or null pair of nerves, the nerve that in man directs his future. Maribor should in year 2012 become a city of possibilities, speculation, exceptional intellectual forces gathered at a point, focused on tomorrow. Not only a platform of the present time, not only an analysis and a settlement with the past, but also an oracle whose prophecies direct the flow of history. Thoughts are forces and history is their inevitable intertwining. Therefore it is so important to be there, where thoughts germinate and form the first outlines of what will be tomorrow a reality.

In order to make the tissue of our city grow thirteen pairs of nerves, the nerve which in man orientates his future, Maribor will have to become a different city, a different body, which is coming towards us from the most daring future, of which we are an inevitable part, if that unprecedented and always present possibility is recognized as our own. A body which discovers the unprecedented activities of its sleeping parts, a body which is aware that it is a matter of its spiritual and intellectual survival to tear a membrane that makes it sleepy and an umbilical cord that makes it repeat old patterns and mistakes; a body which is orientated and made for exceeding the horizons of the known and achieved. Therefore it is necessary for all parts of our city to act harmoniously, driven by the vision of the metamorphoses. We repeat: the change must be irreversible. After year 2012 Maribor should never again be a city without a defined future. Maribor should never again lament its destiny. We want Maribor to start living its tomorrow. To do it's utmost. To become a different Maribor - a city of future. Therefore it is necessary for the missile of our vision to punch the membrane in our eyes and open them for the unprecedented. Unprecedented must be the spatial and architectural projects that enable the happening of the unprecedented. And unprecedented must be the inventive, visionary and energy input of everyone who will make the European Capital of Culture happen.

Submited: 30.8.2010