Facebook relationship status

I open my FB account and  the first news feed that I see there is that J. K. just got married to B.K. Next what I can see is a silly diamond ring icon and their picture together. Immediately underneath it, another news-feed is telling me that B.K got married to J.K. A silly diamond ring icon and the same picture again. I know that they got married. I am one of her best friends. Few days ago we talked for a while on skype, all excited about it, laughing, a bit crying. Happy. I just  wonder what was the need for both of them to make that announcement as public as possible, immediately after they got back home from the ceremony? 
My friends here are not an exception. Many FB users regularly update their FB relationship status, as they pass from one small to another bigger fight with their partner, moving slowly, with full tension from “in a relationship” to “it is complicated” to “single” status in few weeks or so.

Personally, I perceive FB primarily as a useful tool. I like to use it as an info sheet for cultural and other kind of events. It connects me with a wider circle of “friends” that share same interests. 
However, as for any other social network, the public profile, the public representation of my personality must exist. Besides putting a nice, decent profile picture, I have to fulfill a summary of personal information that would give a complete shape of my image. The list of these information that create my public profile includes: family names and connections, name of the institutions where I study or I used to study, where I live or used to live, favorite books, movies and music, and the most valuable, precious, and important feature that gives such an elegant glimpse into the privacy of everyone - the relationship status.

There are 9 categories on my FB list that I can choose. I read an article on this topic some days before, and there it was written that there are 6 categories. So, things evolve! (meaning: these categories evolved from 6 to 9!)
What I can choose among the categories is that I am: “in a relationship”, that I have a “fiancé” that I am married or divorced or simply separated. In the Macedonian FB transcription, someone got really creative, so besides “it is complicated” (as one of the most interesting categories)they also suggest options like: “civic union” and “domestic partnership”. The most irritating category is the one that says “it is complicated”. Like it is not always like that?! The sense of promiscuity that goes along with such a statement makes from one love relationship a cheep version of a Spanish soap-opera (that infinitely occupies public’s attention with the “complications” of the lovers). It is an announcement of a possible infidelity, possible break up. It involves me as an audience into someone’s private life. At the end one can simply conclude it functions as every other market place. Sometimes I really feel embarrassed to see my friends selling themselves on the FB love market. A friend of mine told me that nowadays young boys asks young ladies in clubs “if they are on the market?” Such question brings up so many layers of meaning behind. However, youngsters just paste what they copy from the social networks. Because everybody is on the market, and they seem they like it. 
In fact, being in a relationship is a matter of constant change. Relationships are, by definition, states of constant mutation and transformation. As long as one is in a relationship it is in a constant move. Things are always complicated in a relationship. People constantly get involved with new people, they constantly fight and love passionately, they have heavy talks, they bring decisions to have children or to get divorced. Someone dies, so the next day you become a widow/er. 
All FB users, however, are so eager to define their statuses so they can belong to a category, to make it stable, to confirm it. They feel the need to be defined, to have a complete public profile, to have an identity that is recognized as such by the circle of 300 FB friends. It is a parody of life, if you ask me!

The Garden - One Man's Land

Traveling through Switzerland with SBB is the ideal travel, seen from a tourist point of view. In a safety environment of the cozy, fancy and expensive train-compartments, the tourist is able peacefully to contemplate the idealistic Swiss landscapes. These landscapes look almost unrealistic as they fit perfectly into the organized and super-clean urbanized areas where usually tourists end up their tours.

Coming from a country where one of the prevailing nature attribute is certainly wilderness, I always have problems to accept, with complete adoration, these perfectly organized landscapes. Not that I don’t agree with the sense of proportion, where the ratio of the parts to the whole reflects harmony. But, somehow, in perceiving the Swiss harmony, at the bottom of the capture, there is a sad recognition that nature has been subjugated to humans. The submissive human influence, behind the idealistic Swiss landscapes, is hidden, along the same analogy, as the tourist experience is hidden behind the windshields of the train. I have the impression that Swiss people (or should I say authorities) have designed the landscapes, so that they can offer the perfect tourist product.

However approaching cities, the trip introduces the tourist with the industrial areas of the country. These areas are somehow magically and in a perfect balance with the rural and wild regions. I have never witnessed such sense of balance in any other place of our planet. Approaching cities, besides the urban seaside of smaller and bigger factories, workshops, shopping malls or recycling stationeries, every city has its own gardening area. It is an area highly regulated within the organized whole, as everything else. The special thing about these areas is that I really, really love them. They are the only space that I somehow perceive as authentic and free. With other words, whenever I see them, my first immediate perception, translated into words is: home! It looks like back home!

These areas are somehow part of the urban paradox. They are restricted by fences, divided in small parcels, and they all belong to someone, who I guess pays money for owning his/her private small garden. Yet, they breathe with individuality, or one can say authenticity, that is not common to see on other places in Switzerland. The love and dedication that each one of these owners invests in his/her private gardens spreads the feeling of something worth to enjoy it, much more than any perfectly organized tourist tour. They all look similar, which is the repeating step, but at the same time they are somehow different. This difference, again in a highly controlled space, attracts attention, first of all because it radiates imperfectness. It shows the naïve abilities of the owner to create its own garden.

The garden becomes an escapist project for each of these individuals, which try to balance the necessity of modern everyday experiences in the urban cities. These gardens, where the individual expression of the owner can cope with the nature, mark the space as authentic. They are not typical for Switzerland, situated at the margins of the prevailing vision of the authorities, how to organize and sustain successful interaction with nature.

The most interesting parts of these gardens are the small and unpresentable, noteless huts and national flags next to them. The garden areas represent the essence of the marginalized groups of immigrants. Thus one can see in space, smaller than a football stadium, dozens of flags from Mexico, US, Spain, Albania, Russia, Serbia etc.  The garden parcels become national spaces of the immigrants. They deliver the vital touch with the soil that gives the notion of connection with the roots, one left in search for better life. Gardens become materialization of the feeling of nostalgia. They are small, pleasant oasis nourished by owner’s sentiments for the country he/she left. Paradoxically they are the most beautiful part of the landscapes SBB offers me through the windshields, during my rides from one city to another. 

New Identity Cards

Few weeks ago, via Facebook, I received an invitation for a promotion of new IDs in Macedonia. “Not again?!” -was my immediate reaction that comes as a reflex of any kind of governmental PR propaganda. My country passed through many transitional phases since the break down of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The formation of a new independent state brought necessary change of all possible forms of documents including: passports and IDs, driving licenses and many others. Such “transitional practices” have affected citizen’s sense of belonging to a community, nation, ethic group, ghetto, family and so on, until infinity.  

Thus, when I first saw the invitation my immediate reaction was that I don’t want to change my IDENTITY card AGAIN! As a side effect of all possible campaigns for strengthening the national feeling and feeling of belonging to a European community, many citizens, and here I am not an exception, would react with resistance. Leave me alone with your PR propaganda!

It is not only the PR propaganda that gets on my nerves, the one that instructs me constantly to whom I should belong, to how many children should I give a birth, how rich and eternal Macedonia is, but it is the actual visual and architectural reconstruction that takes place nowadays as a materialization of this propaganda. If you ask me, not a big difference from any previous fascist propaganda of any dictatorship. A quasi  “Goebbels” PR machinery that is zealous to determine us, the folks! As a matter of fact, they are doing quite good.

Acctually, this invitation was of a different kind. The invitation, definitely didn’t belong to the PR activities govern lately with great firmness by the governmental apparatus. The invitation is part of an independent artistic projects, that tries to “use the strategies of the creative activism”  to draw attention upon very serious political issues in Macedonia. Thus, the organizers of this absolutely marginalized and side-off event, with almost sect flavor, won my sympathy. Firstly, because of the nostalgic moment connected with the old IDs that have marked my personal transition into full age (and leaving the fool age). Secondly, because of the humble effort to join together the sense of socialist brotherhood with the new age spirituality vogue.

When I asked the artists (using FB of course, I didn’t go to Macedonia to attend the event, which would be rather DADAistic stroke to pull up) is there a deliberate intention to connect the notion of socialist “brotherhood and unity” with the symbol of the radiating heart, they didn’t confirmed it directly. Irena Petkovic, one of the artists that I have talked to, instead made emphasis on the effort to create a contrast between the “ideal past” and the “reality”.

Firstly, the artists, try to create a virtual state, using an esoteric aesthetics, as a “contrapunkt of the public sphere which is largely occupied with the discourse of hatred, discrimination and social exclusiveness” (Irena Petkovik). Their intention is, through resisting the “reality” they are not willing to belong, to create a contrastive STATE of Love and Equality. In such a state, the differences are not repressed but celebrated, and the marginalized groups are the heroes of the community! They have created blank pages in the IDs where each of the participants could write all the heroic deeds he/she have done in life. These two pictures can show you the resemblance between the Pioneer Booklet, that each one of us possessed it as a Pioneer (in the ages of socialist Yugoslavia), and the concept for new Identity Cards.               

Here I would like to stress out the importance of naming these marginalized groups, that are of central interest for this project! They are named as follows: single mothers, unemployed, lesbian and gay population, atheists, sexual workers, drug addicts, Gypsies! Please take a look at this selection and imagine, just imagine the “Macedonian reality”, that these artists are trying to change.

Why would a single mother be a marginalized group? Why would that be one sexual worker?!!? And the atheists, are they serious?! Is it possible that atheists, nowadays, in a country that has EU integration aspirations, are treated as marginalized group? Unemployed, as statistics shows in the last 15 -20 years, are THIRD of the population (and the other third have left the country because they can’t find jobs)! They are not marginalized; they are the majority of the population!

Ok. I’ve read Gramschi, and Marx, Neruda and Racin (Macedonian leftist poet from the beginning of the 20^th ct.) and I am still confused: how is it possible that the apparatus of hegemony works so smoothly each time?! Simply incredible! The above mentioned groups are the absolute margins of the Macedonian reality, although they are more than third of the population. The abyss between the normal-successful-manager-antic-Macedonian—Orthodox- Christians and the Losers is strategically fostered by the neo-liberal radical politics that leaves no space for compromises. I don’t know if the overarching radiating heart of the IDs will help to slow down the radical RIGHT flowing river, but I am sure is not able of stopping it.