What does the term third culture exactly mean? What does the term third world mean today in the 21st century where we live?

From my own perspective being born in Belgrade after the Second World War I was exposed to European and American culture from second hand information. The results were often complete mystification, over-glorification, mis-information and nostalgia for a better world.

I remember as a young student of art looking at a new print glossy Russian book on Impressionism. Confronted later on with the original works in the museums round the world, I remember being completely disappointed with the originals. In the books they had looked so colourful.

In Yugoslavia, at that time, two cultures dominated: French with the language, poetry, music, art and America with the way of life, cars and money.

Working as an artist in a third world country meant being confronted with all kinds of restrictions, mainly political and social.

When I left Yugoslavia and connected to the so-called mainstream culture for me personally it was a very dramatic and painful experience.

Living and working outside the boundaries of your own culture and finally being free of restrictions my work stopped having a meaning and became lost completely outside the third world context.

I had to reconstruct my own universe, pose my own rules and build my own restrictions to be able to function again. This was how it was in the 70s and 80s but now from 1990 to 2001 this whole problem has a different look. The third culture helped by constant political problems and wars starts to become the mainstream culture.

Today it's fashionable to go to the Tirana (Albania) Biennale when 10 year's ago in the west only a few knew where Tirana was. A very in word to use for everything today is globalisation.

I see globalisation as a new monster swallowing third, fourth and fifth (is there any?) cultures.

The final product is the great cultural mix that brings the danger of loosing the fragile identities.

In my opinion the real value and power of the third culture's was in their own restriction and their own not easily accessibility. There are less and less pleasures of discovering because globalisation makes everything look the same.

As being a sentimental pessimist with nostalgia I think on the very night that Columbus spent on the little island El Hiero (Canary Islands) with his crew before sailing to look for another way to get to India. I think on that evening how did the dinner look, how they felt, what they talked about knowing that they were going in a unknown direction. The scientific truth at that time that the earth was a plate and the danger is that you can fall off it. I am thinking how much courage they must have had to confront the unknown. In the end they didn't discover a new way to India but they discovered America.

For me that was a more heroic act than century's later landing on the moon.

In some sense the third cultures had that flavour of romantic possibilities of discovering which we are, unfortunately, rapidly loosing today.



Marina Abramovic was born in 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She began in the early 1970s initiating a series of performances and radical actions which sought to push the limits of her body in an ongoing investigation of herself and the relationship of the artist to society. Abramovic’s recent work has turned to an interest in the spiritual qualities of various materials such as crystals and furniture through which she produces situations of healing, meditation and waiting. She is currently a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunstein in Braunschweig, Germany. Some solo exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum, Bern (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art , Valencia (1998); Kiasma, Helsinki (1998) and the Kunstverein, Hannover (2000). He group exhibitions include the biennial exhibitions of Istanbul (1995), Lyon(1995) and Venice(1997).


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