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I call all my multinational projects “no más fronteras”, dealing with the problems of the border in its broadest meaning, helping to overcome situations of conflicts, wherever they are.
The method of the Société Imaginaire to overcome cultural differences continuously develops in its various applications. As an extension from the first no más fronteras project realized in Gualeguaychu and Frey Bentos, Batuz began to organize in 2002 a project this time to be carried out on the border between Germany and Poland. As with all projects of the undertaking, when dealing with a specific frontier between two bordering ideas, the Société Imaginaire involves the international community in order to raise the subject from a local to global dimension. The idea of bringing people together from Germany and Poland gains greater success when associated and interrelated with others, so that all then can exchange their own ideas and thus come to share a common understanding. In the spring of that year, Batuz began to discuss with former General Hans-Peter von Kirchbach certain preliminary sketches to carry out the project. It was these discussions which initiated General von Kirchbach to involve the German Bundeswehr. He began by writing to the commanders of the 13th and 14th armoured infantry divisions to inform artistically interested and creative officers and non-commissioned officers about this project and further gave those interested the leave necessary to participate. Various ranking members of the German Bundeswehr took up the offer. Their participation was of particular importance as it helped to further illustrate the message of the project. Donating 200 helmets for the production of the project, they not only provided an essential part of the material through which the message would be visualized, but participated in every stage of its production, without which the project would not have been as successful. With people around the world from various faculties already visiting the workshops based in Altzella, who came to participate through other projects associated under the heading principle of all the undertakings projects, communication through art, enthusiastically joined in the creation and application of this project. To find out what happened please look through the various informative materials we provide here in this section. Though this was a project born through an encounter with several interested parties who made it possible to physically realize it on the Neiße river, its theory has been worked on for many years. We can see this in its relation to many other projects of the undertaking but more specifically this close relation with the border which Michel Butor first noted in his Meditación sur la Frontier. Since which Batuz has associated himself with many other like minded people who have dealt with this phenomena throughout their careers, one of which being a close friend and collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz, who for long had been writing about this theme. Much of his work concentrates on the peripheries and how culture supercedes borders. After various encounters with Batuz, Milosz offered to illustrate the idea of no más fronteras by writing excerpts from his greater works in manuscript form to be collected in another portfolio. The Batuz-Milosz Portfolio gives us a concrete example of the problems of the language and the cultural frontiers in the town of Vilnius where, in the early thirties, Czeslaw Milosz grew up and studied in its university. His contribution, together with others who represent the various cultural groups of the time recreates that time in history after seventy years. |
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