Adoption of Maribor 2012 Programme

Photo: EPK archive

November 2011

In the last week of October 2011, the team responsible for preparing the European Capital of Culture Maribor 2012 project reached the first summit of its intensive endeavours. It prepared a detailed programme which was, upon its adoption by the project council, also adopted by the council of the Public Institute Maribor 2012, the main project holder. In this way, a formal basis has been established to enable the Maribor organisers to commence with operational activities, e.g. detailed planning preparations and the entering into agreements with contractors or project holders.

Considering constant problems that accompanied the past preparations, this is a big success. The time of financial and economic crisis in which the preparations take place and which will obviously continue when the project itself is carried out, considerably reduced the possibilities and ambitions of the local community and also of the state to fund the project as initially planned.

The programme director Mitja Čander who has been engaged in the project only since the beginning of this year had no easy task: from an unclear and above all a very sizeable bundle of individual ideas, ambitious as well as trivial programme plans, he had to pull out what would give Maribor its unique character, an air of innovativeness, but also sustainability of at least some programmes which will remain after the end of the Capital. This is how he defined the essence of his work:

"A team had to be formed virtually from scratch and it had to be prepared to cope with relatively uncertain conditions. The first difficulty was the fact that this is a completely new institution which, by logic, would need its time to get tuned-up. Initially, the attitude of the environment towards the programme plans was distrustful and sometimes also negative. For most, the ECC is an empty label under which very different ideas can be jammed. In line with the vision that we should somehow be able to entangle the whole city or its very diverse citizens in the European Capital of Culture, interaction between designers of the programme and institutions, initiatives and individuals was gradually established. Throughout the process, we connected the width of the programme with its compactness in its basic outlines, otherwise it could never be fully expressed.«

412 projects included in the programme scheme Maribor 2012

Of these, 238 projects come from the City of Maribor and 102 from partner towns, mostly Velenje and Ptuj (24 each), 19 from Murska Sobota, 18 from Novo mesto and 17 from Slovenj Gradec. The programmes are divided into four basic programme clusters: Terminal 12 brings top-class art with a special emphasis on new approaches, as well as on domestic creativity. Keys of the City establish dialogue between the city and art, searching for new forms of creative existence. Urban Furrows point to the importance of co-existence through activist research of social and environmental issues, while it tries to show concrete paths towards creative and tolerant society by using examples of good practice. Lifetouch establishes multimedia space of reflection, from ECC events through the city and the region to the wider European area.

Unfortunately, infrastructure that would enable the implementation of especially larger, more spectacular project has not been agreed upon so far. There is no doubt that in the second half of the year, Maribor will receive the new Art Gallery which has been part of the cultural plans of the Slovenian state for decades. Everything else is somehow uncertain while for now it is agreed that large halls of the former railway car factory would be used for a central performance stage which means that for the time being, plans for the central performance stage named Max will remain in the drawers. A new Maribor library for which it has been known for decades that it can no longer serve its purpose is also finally planned to be built.

Text by Jože Osterman, Sinfo, November 2011