As reading of Christian Schweitzer’s Some Thoughts on a Manifesto inspired a thorough discussion in my team in charge for the Montenegrin National Pavilion, I feel free to make a proposal for all of the interested individuals and parties in our Curators’ group to join our cause.

From all that’s been said at the previous curators’ meetings, the idea of sharing and interrelating is what resonates deeply with our feelings and thoughts about the topics involved. We find an absolute truth in Jesus D’Alessandro’s words that indeed we ‘are already a statement!’ by conducting and maintaining this type of conversations. We feel that ‘a collective voice rather than an individual one’ is the only right kind of voice, but we’d like to keep it diverse in its complexity. We’d feel most comfortable with openness and sharing of the ideas, taking parts in one another’s projects, promoting national representations into mutual efforts of understanding, supporting and shared creation.

Rafal Silwa’s idea of the ‘conversations among pavilions’ is highly appreciated by us and we have decided to open doors, not only to our pavilion, but to our full project to all of the countries involved in the Biennale. As we nurture the written word and firmly stand by the idea of an unbreakable, reversible and a cyclical relation between theory and practice, we have, in January 2020, opened an interdisciplinary call for contributions for the invited authors in domain of our thematic framework, which accidentally and intensively reflects our current situation. Towards a Transactive Spatial Perception, which is set to be our national reply to Hashim Sarkis’ question, but it is also planned to go beyond that in a form of a book of diverse thoughts, statements and opinions on an inevitable spatial shift we are facing, that has already been accepted by one of the leading publishers.

Now, we would like to open a discussion on a possible joint publication that could evolve from these ‘conversations among pavilions’ in any acceptable format. Likewise, we would be more than willing to contribute to any written manifestations of our current work in the Curators’ group that all of us agree upon. We feel that this type of an invitation and a collaboration could contribute to our mutual voice(s) getting a wider spread. Moreover, coming from the university backgrounds, we feel highly obliged towards the younger generations in providing them a lasting trace of our actions and interactions in handling and eventual overcoming the current crisis.

We feel that this is just a perfect moment to share and think together.

Svetlana Perovic, Montenegro August 5, 2020