About Us

PUBLICATION IN PROCESS AND GROUP TERMS

Terms is a group that trough the process of self-education studies terms in the field of contemporary artistic, theoretical, cultural and educational practice from the perspective of practitioners active on the independent cultural scenes of Skopje and Belgrade. The aim of the group work was not to create yet another glossary, vocabulary or lexicon, but rather to establish a relational web of concepts in most frequent use. We either comprehend them differently or are, simply, unaware of the different readings according to one’s assumed theoretical (or ideological) position. Investigating the origin, epistemology and the politics of a term, we come to a non-implied, non-colloquial – anti-jargon term platform. By jargon we imply fast, specialized communication, with implied meaning but is actually completely empty. There is no implied meaning behind used terms, instead they only represent an affiliation to the moment, profession, ideology… This position is not a result of some kind of idealistic search for ‘authentic’, ‘original’ meaning of the word. On the contrary, it is a search to establish the term and the politicality of its use in the contextual, historically-materialistic sense. In addition, our intention is not only to detect and demonstrate the mechanism of jargon or to claim that we are excluded from it. The work on de-jargonisation we also view as affirmation of new terms. The new terms can be subjected to de-jargnisation as a prevention.

Veliki najlon 2

working process

In this publication we offer the registry as a format for de-jargonisation – it is a simple table that is also one of the algorithms for usingthis publication. Origin, history, utilization, references and ‘description’ are determined for terms used in this table. ‘Description’ can be a note, artistic statement, a list of other terms, or something close to a lexicon entry. The entries in the table link to texts in the publication and outside of it – and thus create relational network of terms and definitions, virtually unlimited hypertextual structure. Publication is open in content and structure, and its real purpose is achieved if the users – editors/authors/readers – continue to work on it: filling in, adding, reediting and using it. That’s why we leave the registry unfinished, demonstrating the possible ways and formats of its use, and invite you to cooperate with is on making it grow.

Veliki najlon 1

working process