Project
European Artists Forum 1987 / Launch of the informal working body 'Gulliver'
The European Artists Forum (EAF) took place from 11 - 14 December 1987 in Amsterdam. It marked the end of the one year lasting activities of the manifestation: Amsterdam Cultural Capital of Europe, a future for ideas (ACH ‘87). At the same time it was the beginning of Berlin Cultural Capital ‘88. The EAF was the result of a close cooperation between the organisers of ACH ‘87 and the Berlin Cultural Capital team.
The organisers of the EAF were driven by the idea to refresh the debates around the Helsinki Final Act, more in particular to implement the proposal of Günter Grass to establish a "Gesamteuropaische Kulturstiftung" launched at the "European Cultural Forum" in Budapest in 1985. As an official meeting of the CSCE it gathered artists from all over Europe as well as politicians from the 35 states that signed the Helsinki Agreement.
The organisers of the EAF wanted to refresh the debates around the Helsinki Final Act. Authors and artists from all over Europe were invited by Günter Grass and Steve Austen with the intention to fuel the bottom-up process of building a European society. As Grass put it, the Forum was an attempt "to halt the paralytic effect of the political division of Europe into East and West and hence to encourage cultural exchange and détente". The meeting again lighted the hopes for a European future beyond political boundaries and gathered 28 artists and intellectuals from 20 European countries. It ended with the formation of Gulliver.
In the following year Gulliver got a secretariat and address at Felix Meritis Foundation in Amsterdam. And thus started through Felix Meritis to organise gatherings, launch publications, video's and presentations and widen the activities through mobility and exchange programmes of various formats and content.
EAF was co-organised by the Netherlands Theatre Institute, the Akademie der Künste, and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. Also involved were Elsevier (publishers) and the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel.
Quotes:
"We were looking for a name... The word Europe is so misused that we thought it would be helpful for us and others to look for a name which is able to express our visions, our hopes, and also a foolish part; still alive, controversial, with very ironic proposals for society." Günter Grass
"The name Gulliver was partly chosen in honour of the great polemicist who had turned against the pretensions of human institutions and in doing so can be regarded as an early opponent of bureaucracy." Cornelius Castoriadis
"It became clear that the discussion would have to take place in the greatest possible freedom. No spectators would be present. No agenda would be fixed in advance. Everyone would speak on his or her own behalf and not as representatives of a group or a country. The last guarantee of everyone's freedom to say what they wanted was that no minutes would be made, while there was as little place for a tape recorder in the meeting room as for representatives of the media." Henk van Galen Last
"The EAF was to mark the start of a far-reaching exchange of ideas, which could and should partially serve to inspire the official conference on culture and human rights under the auspices of the Helsinki Agreement. Now, more than ever, it is important for artists and intellectuals to say what they consider absolutely essential to the future of European culture. It is a question of art, a question of involving the whole of Europe, a question of European culture and of cultural identity." Steve Austen
