"Views: Personal histories of Serbs and Albanians" (View from my window) is a project which aims at enabling Albanians and Serbs to tell their life stories to each other: stories from the past and from the present, always told from a subjective perspective. We believe that a great deal of misunderstanding, distrust and hate between Serbs and Albanian is based on generalized perceptions of the other ethnic group which creates prejudices and keeps them alive.
If on the opposite the stories are clearly marked as subjective, it expresses, that a story from one side can be true, even if the other tells a story that is different. In this way, both sides are able to accept and listen to the stories of the other. This project is aiming at involving especially young people. Telling these stories and listening to them will be done in two different forms: oral history interviews and a transitional theater play.
The cultural communication between Kosovo and Serbia in the last 20 years has stalled. The project aims at exploring our history through personal stories and testimonials of ordinary people and to create a theatre play that will reflect the relations between Albanians and Serbs; differences and similarities. Children and youth used to be educated through a certain history and art that drew its inspiration from wars and battles between people, an art with a patriotic spirit, which inspired and cultivated hatred and the call for revenge. The bloody wars in the Balkans are the aftermath of a very complicated previous conflict, a conflict that artists failed to make all efforts needed to prevent it. This maybe is out of the reach of art, while, on the other hand, this is the mission of art as a reflection of the present and as a vision of the future. We propose a project where young people in collaboration with experts from the field of culture and theory of art take the critical approach to our “under construction” identities. The project partners believe that 10 years in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo, it is time to give the world a success story of fruitful cooperation between artists from Kosovo and Serbia, cooperation that yields positive results and that should be treated as an example by others.
The project will be implemented at a time when Kosovo and Serbia are expected to be candidates for EU accession. The implementation of this project under these specific conditions may facilitate the relaxation of Albanian-Serbian relations as well as create a debate platform about these relations. If this assumption proves to be true, the spillover effect may be intensified communication and cooperation on the two sides of the border.
