AUGUST IN ART 2008

HOW LOCAL IS
THE GLOBAL?
HOW CLOBAL IS
THE LOCAL?

Back in the times is Classical Antiquity the inhabitants of the Mediterranean called the world they knew oikoumene, meaning the inhabited part of the earth what equaled our world or the civilized world, the part of it blessed with benefits of statehood, culture and finesse beyond which only where savage barbarians, ferocious amazons and mysterious hyperboreans dwell and what lies farther are impenetrable deserts and misty seas. But at the same time across the vast deserts and seas other great civilizations existed believing that beyond their realms lived pale or dark skinned “barbarians”. All this is transforming the term oikoumene into something closer to “known world” or the “comprehensible world”, the center of universe from which if you move away things and events diminish their value. Interestingly enough, whenever it
occurred in history when some “barbarians” would conquer “civilized” they would always identify themselves with the conquered civilization becoming its guardian
against other “barbarians”.

In times closer to our own, with the disappearance of white spots on the map or the world and the global spread of Western civilization another term came into existence: global, meaning globally accepted, equally important for anyone anywhere and local, bearing significance for its region only, which in most cased is identified as periphery. With the constantly increasing pace of processes in the “global” society of the 20th and 21st c. the ideas of which values or events are of global and which ones are of local importance all too often shift or change, sometimes becoming more of a fashion's last cry or the trademark for a certain age. In that sense there is even something
more: the flexibility of the “local-global” formula is turning it more of method for self-knowledge that just knowledge because it offers the chance for simultaneous observations of one event from different standpoints and in more that one context. In the age of globalization preserving local values become the last safe haven against total, “global” deprivation of individuality. In the same way as in Antiquity local values judged with no comparison or from within, get global self appraisal.

Philip Zidarov
Curator of the August in Art Biennial