In September 2003 I was the only delegate from Eastern Europe at the World Creative Forum. During that week, the whole of the world’s creative elite seemed to have moved to London, and not only self-declared creatives or the idea-men of the advertising, delightful as much as uproarious, but also the genuine manufacturers, as Ron Arad dubbed them in his opening speech: city planners, architects, designers of all orientations, artists, historians, venture capitalists, experts on communications, engineers, who presented a whole bunch of things: from the first presentation of the Liberty Tower by Daniel Liebeskind, to the Bloomberg worldwide CEO Lex Feniwick’s expose ‘What Makes a Business Creative’, and Andrew MacDonald, producer of the Trainspotting… It helped that the entire city of London backed the week by calling it the London Design Festival, fusing into 7 densely packed days the famous London Fashion Week, “100% Design” furniture fair, “World Creative Forum” and a sea of exhibitions, discussions, seminars in each relevant creative school, museum, gallery in the town, moderately declaring London to be the center of the world in those seven day.
I submitted reports about what went on to friends in the Moscow “Shtabkvartire”, at that moment probably the leading design magazine between Berlin and Tokio, and with easiness arranged cooperation with the above mentioned Ron Arad on the new pack for Davidoff cigarettes, with Ilsa Crawford, the global editor-in-chief of the ELLE, a visit of her sensational exhibition of Swarowski chandeliers, made an interview with Wally Olins who had just founded a new company Saffron and called him to partnership on the project of new branding for our old client Yukos, than the fifth oil company in the world. I remember thinking, what an incredible atmosphere for meeting people, making contacts, for exchanges. By pure chance, I kept my material for meeting with Wally in the ‘Tax’ folder, the name of our small branding project for the Ministry of Finance of the small country of my origin, Serbia, utterly invisible to the above-mentioned crowd, and noticeably untouched by the above-mentioned topics, at least it was then, two (light) years ago. Wally, the man who introduced the notion of branding in the worn out Europe of the 70’s, had the discerning eye to notice the ‘thing’ and later on included our ‘Tax’ campaign conducted in Serbia, probably as pure exotica, in his new book On Brand published in 2004, in the section dealing with future of the global branding. Within a year, this book became the chief textbook on branding globally.
Why this introduction? Because it was then that it first occurred to me, owing to Willy’s ‘discovery’ and act of appropriation, that it was possible for Belgrade and Serbia to get noticed after roughly 20 years, and at long last not by the CNN and the politicians in charge of crisis management, but precisely for the topics that may not be the most sophisticated of the human endeavors (let’s leave that to the art), but by all means the most valued as the engine of the new economy – the question of strategies, creation, communications, planning, spirit, style, and why not say, of taste. That Belgrade should become a host of such a gathering, Belgrade Design Week.
A year later and Serbia discovers the word “branding”. With all the charming exaggerations that come with each new toy, for the first time televisions rotated excellent clips of homemade products and services, Wally Olins made a personal appearance at the first and excellent branding conference, organized by an agile agency, Profile, there was the first Belgrade BRAND FAIR, and it seemed that for the first time our country took an interest in doing something about its image. In other words, Serbia was about to experience ‘Market Economy’, the younger brother of ‘Democracy’, basic chemical provision and ingredient for the survival of creatives as a species. And, dare I think, the return to the country of our own top creatives that work abroad, an incentive import of the most interesting international creatives. Belgrade Design Week intends to become a traditional regional annual event, at equal footing with the FEST, BITEF, BEMUS (international film, theatre and music festivals taking place in our capital)… And why Belgrade of all places?Because Belgrade is a city of high festival culture!! More precisely, Belgrade used to be the city of high festival culture during the seventies of the previous century, back when it was the third-world metropolis and managing to gather at one place the New York underground scene that NY was not aware of itself, the Soviet policy level theatre production barred from the eyes of the West, dissident Polish and Check theatre – the battleground of the fight for freedom of artistic expression in real-socialism, ethnic theatres from China, Japan, Nigeria, Bolivia as proponents of emancipated anti-colonial movements of the Third World, or when the American underground film was every Belgrade adolescent’s commonplace motif and cultural marker, back at times when the opening nights of authors unrecognized in the mainstream cinema market gathered tens of thousands of viewers…
Obviously, those times are irrevocably behind us, but the horizon of expectations of a big event remains. Belgrade Design Week is to a large extent a response to this yearning for festival events. It is paradoxical that in country as impoverished and traumatized as this one someone dares to arrange a festival of design, advertising and branding, top disciplines of modern communications intertwined with modern business making, and this can only be explained by the fact that the matrix of the seventies festivals is still today an abundant spring of event invention.
Very much like the seventies, Belgrade today is ready to establish and affirm a festival in the field of design, unique for gathering top international creatives and give them roles of educators rather than producers and manufacturers, but a festival that at the same time aims to create a quality space for emergence of modern production worthy of its name. The exclusive message of the Belgrade Design Week to those who work exclusively for live business and production systems, to pause and reflect on their practice, makes this festival a huge and unique workshop of ideas, concepts, contemplations, and an opportunity to decisively influence direction of development of a whole generation of experts in areas of communications and business.
Finally, the topic of this opening festival has to be distinctive, and it is: reflection on life in a democratic, post-Milosevic Serbia: BRANDSCAPING SERBIA, calling for an expert gardener-brand architect to carefully plant, gently dibble and robustly cultivate the tender bulbs and seedlings of fashioning Serbia.
Beside its four section topics: Design2, Brand2, Market2 and the traditional 19th Belgrade Fashion Week, the creed of the festival is most expressively reflected in the fullness of accompanying program of exhibitions, opening nights, presentations - Beograd2 – created with helping hands of over 50 partners, all of which would transform our capital into an international hub of design for the duration of the third week of April. Let us celebrate the new, democratic Serbia, by presenting the Belgrade design festival as a place to democratize the design itself, and without design there is no democracy!
Welcome to the first Belgrade Design Week 2006!
Respectfully yours.
Jovan Jelovac
Chairman of the Belgrade Design Week
Founder and partner of the trans:east agency