The Centrifugal Book of Europe

In Eurosis, Mitja Velikonja argues that Europe has become a totalising, umbrella-like meta-discourse that addresses everything. In doing so he argues that Europe offers a kind of ‘state-formative and corporate platform of national unity’. Centrifugal departs from another position: the so-called peripheries of Europe, sites that have sometimes been formed through colonial relations with the ‘old Europe’, and that are now structured through a complex web of desire, resistance, adaptation and at best, oblique relations to the phantasm described by Velikonja.The Centrifugal project from which this book arises is a loose grouping of artists, educators, architects and theorists who have come together to develop mobile, speculative methodologies for investigating the spatial, political and economic forces producing contemporary ideas of Europe. The project is particularly concerned with finding resonances and affinities across the diverse spaces, histories and political imaginaries that inhabit the edges of Europe. So far the project has convened in London (Winter 2006) for a closed workshop, with exhibitions and other public programme in Zagreb (Spring 2007), Helsinki (Autumn 2007), and Belfast (Spring 2008); a further sequence is planned for Belfast in March 2010. Previous stages are documented at http://centri.wordpress.comThe Centrifugal Book of Europe is an elaboration on this process, with text and images from the group and from specially invited contributors. The book constitutes a 'map' of the social, cultural and political space of contemporary Europe - and of the phantasmic Europes that may yet be called into being. Guest contributors have been invited to participate in two ways: first, by invitation into this process described above, where they have been asked to refer to and reflect on the work produced by the core group of participants; secondly we have invited writers to re-print texts that have been pivotal to the group’s work.The book is organised in three sections:MONSTERS: Who are the new aliens in a Europe that is constantly redefining and extending its geopolitical reach, and who are the groups or individuals whose existing 'monstrosity' is reaffirmed in the European ideal?ECONOMIES: What are the effective routes (formal and informal) of capital, of instrumentalised knowledge, of labour and of 'resistance' within this shifting territory?TERRITORIES: You Are Here - Where? How have the plans, textures and ideologies of particular urban spaces been developed in relation to ideas of Europe, peripherality and ‘the outside’?