The network made it possible to establish a form of communicative continuity across the new borders. The geography of the performance therefore did not coincide with the political geography of 1998. It corresponded to the geography of the connections reactivated during the event.
In this sense, Mondo Ex belongs to an early phase of artistic research into telematic networks. In 1998, the Internet was still a relatively young technological environment and live streaming was an experimental practice. In the preceding years, L’Arte dell’Ascolto had developed a sustained investigation into the relationship between radio, sound, remote communication and networks; Mondo Ex brought this research into a historical situation in which the possibility of communication acquired a precise political dimension. Paci Dalò’s documentation also recalls 1998 as a moment of technological transition, when streaming, uploading and downloading were still relatively new and experimental practices.
The presence of Predrag Matvejević introduced the dimension of writing and memory into the project. Born in Mostar, Matvejević devoted a significant part of his work to the Mediterranean, identities, borders and the dissolution of the Yugoslav space. The title of the performance refers to Mondo «ex», the book published by Garzanti in 1996, in which the condition of being “ex” becomes a lens through which to examine the political and cultural transformation of contemporary Europe.
In Rimini, Matvejević’s reflections entered directly into the structure of the network. His voice was placed in relation to the streams arriving from the other cities. The literary and technological dimensions were not separate: the reading took place within a network that was simultaneously re-establishing connections between places that had belonged to the same political world.
Paci Dalò’s work thus acquired a territorial dimension. Radio, telematic connections and live streaming became tools for intervening in the distance produced by the war. The performance did not physically reconstruct the places and did not erase the new borders. It created a communication system in which those places could once again appear together.
The Yugoslav Electronics Federation can be understood as a temporary form of spatial organisation. The federation existed through its nodes and lasted for as long as the connections holding them together remained active. Its provisional nature was an integral part of the project: it was a structure created for a performance, in a specific historical situation, through technologies that made it possible to reconnect people and places.
Paci Dalò’s documentation describes Mondo Ex as one of the central events of the 1998 edition of L’Arte dell’Ascolto and explicitly records the preparation of the network and the formation of the Yugoslav Electronics Federation.
On the basis of this documentation, the project can be regarded as a pioneering experiment in the radio and telematic reconnection of the former Yugoslav space in the post-war period. To define it with certainty as the first project of its kind would require comparative research into radio, telecommunications and networking experiments carried out in the region during the 1990s.
The documented fact remains central: in 1998, in Rimini, a group of people worked for months to reactivate contacts between places and people dispersed by the war and, through communication technologies, created a Yugoslav Electronics Federation that was intended to exist for a single night.