Bturn is an international online magazine exploring the new frontiers of Balkan and eastern European culture, arts and society. Focused on all things intelligent and creative, audacious and subversive, borderline and bizarre. We want to offer a fresh, straight-forward approach to the complexities of this disparate cultural space in a way that’s at the same time entertaining, educative and engaging.
Our goal is to provide information, but above all to present you with something we perceive as a specifically Balkan experience.
For more then a century now, the very term ‘Balkan’ has perpetuated within a multiple stream of references – geographical, cultural or political – whose parameters have remained fluid and inconsistent, to say the least, but nevertheless related by a set of historical and contemporary facts, making the life experience in the entire area from Ljubljana to Istanbul, distinctively ‘Balkanian’.
So far, Balkan has been known as a terrain of struggle, not only as in military conflicts and wars, but as in the struggle of projected images and desires. The Balkans are always ‘imagined’, from the outside and from within, its mental and geographical boundaries somehow doomed to sliding into the sphere of the obscure Other, that dark subcontinent of the civilised European world. As our favorite stand-up philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains in this clip:
Many would argue the Orientalist Balkan paradigm today has far from disappeared. Does it now lay hidden behind the transglobal exotic, bouncing the Western tourist’s gaze back to himself?
Honestly, we don’t care. For us, the Balkans are where the shit happens. And we like it!
The list of artists and places you see in Bturn database is by no means exhaustive. It is not an all-inclusive list, just our own humble selection we think reflects the richness of the region’s contemporary urban culture. This is just the beginning. Bturn is in the process of building a network of regional partnerships with an aim to become the ultimate online and on-the-spot resource for anyone wishing to visit the area and take part in its diverse culture.
If you want to get in touch, send us your stuff or just tell us how great or shit we are, please use the address below:
editorial [at] bturn.com
