GO_HOME

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The collaborative project go_HOME explored physical, cultural, and psychological dislocation and strategies for rebuilding and renewal in the aftermath of ethnic conflict and war in the former Yugoslavia. In September 2001, artists Danica Dakic and Sandra Sterle, two women of different ethnic backgrounds from former Yugoslavia who maintain homes and careers in both East and West Europe, relocated to New York City to live for four months in an experimental, "open-door" home. The artists utilized this residence experience and their website - a virtual home on the internet - as a common meeting ground for creating and presenting video work, photographs, installations, and to engage interested participants in an "open-door" dialogue around issues of exile, national identity, technology, and globalization.

The go_HOME website features interactive works of art, video, and sound diaries, recipes, texts from the US and from Eastern Europe, a bibliography, archives, chatrooms, and a guest book. The project was expanded as artists Marjetica Potrc from Slovenia and Milica Tomic from Serbia joined in the process for shorter periods. In addition to the open-home discussions and on-line art making, the artists and the project directors collaborated to hostess four evening dinner discussions with immigrant and native US invited scholars, artists, and neighbors. The dinner discussions were webcast, with one of the dinners point-to-point streamed to the new media center Mi2 in Zagreb, Croatia and another point-to-point streamed to Radio B92 in Belgrade. These sites organized parallel, interactive dinner gatherings for their evening of web-streamed dialogue with New York. New York's Location One produced the internet broadcasts of these events through its network of international affiliates.

The themes for web-streamed dinner discussions interwove an exploration of the impact of the internet on culture and community with topics including: the language of home, the architecture of migration, globalization and nationalism, and the role of women in building home during and after a time of war.

go_HOME was an ArtsLink Special Project funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Kettering Family Foundation, CEC International Partners, Franklin Furnace's Future of the Present Program and the Animating Democracy Project, a program of Americans for the Arts funded by the Ford Foundation.
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Danica Dakic and Sandra Sterle