Photo: Luka Knežević StrikaCertain members of the Commission have resigned, this is the explanation why the City Assembly made a decision to cancel all this year's competitions for co-financing cultural projects
The Secretariat for Culture canceled everything competitions tendered for co-financing and financing of projects in culture for this year.
This decision was published on the Secretariat's website in the Useful Links section, which is not the usual place for this type of information. Maybe that's why it was only discovered a few days after it was made public.
The decision was made on April 23, after the expiration of the legal 60 days for the publication of the competition results.
Explanation
Here is how it is explained:
"The Secretariat for Culture, for objective reasons, was not able to publish the results of the public competition on the official website of the City of Belgrade no later than 60 days after the end of the submission of applications, because some members of the expert commissions trained to select projects in 2025 that will be financed or co-financed from the budget of the city of Belgrade in 2025 have resigned."
Otherwise, the resignation or replacement of commission members is a technical problem. A few years ago, this happened, for example, to the Commission of the Ministry of Culture, which decided on the purchase of books for libraries, so not all tenders announced for that year were cancelled.
Third time
In the last five years, this is the third time that the City of Belgrade is saving on culture.
The first time in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when artists and cultural workers needed help the most because they were prevented from working due to the ban on public gatherings. The reasoning was that due to the state of emergency, "there are no conditions for the competition to be implemented", and the funds were diverted for salaries for 309 part-time associates of cultural institutions in Belgrade.
The second time, last year. The reasoning was that the City of Belgrade was temporarily financed for nine months due to the elections, and that after the adoption
of the city budget on July 1, 2024, there is not enough time left
to conduct the competition regularly.
This is the third time.
In the aforementioned Decision, nothing is written about the money that should have been allocated for this purpose, what will happen to it, and where it will be redirected.
The Ministry of Culture is waiting. The deadline for the results of the competition announced by the Ministry was at the beginning of April.
More than 20 festivals were not held last year and this year, the FCS has not announced competitions for two years, the Ministry of Culture rejects projects of art associations, the removal of successful directors and the appointment of people who do not promise... all this is evidence that we are living a culture of destruction, according to the research of the Center for Cultural Studies
In the Viennese auction house Doroteum, a painting by the Croatian author Vlaho Bukovac was sold for half a million euros, it will soon be exhibited in Zagreb, and the public there does not know the name of the buyer
The play "Professional" is performed for the 50th time. "It is incredible that in forty years - since writing about the then government and communism, little has changed," says its author, Dušan Kovačević.
The world-famous "Aesthetics of Film", memoirs by Srećko Džamonja, books by Aleksandar Dimitrijević, award-winning novels and other new Clio publications that will not be at the Book Fair
The performance of "Balkan Spy" was canceled last night just before the meeting of the Student List at Slavija - due to the indisposition of the actors. "I am not indisposed," says the director of the play, Tatjana Mandić Rigonat
There is, literally, no difference between the one who claims it is day in the middle of the night, or the one who claims to be a giraffe, from the claims we read on billboards: that Vučić is working to unify Serbs and that Serbia is doing better and better day by day.
The pre-election arrests due to the alleged "overthrow of the state" testify to the regime's panic. The bad news for them is - they can't arrest the whole people who decided to defend themselves from progressive beatings and election theft
The ring that tightens around Ćaciland Student list is getting narrower. Because there are more and more spoiled people who see the false prophet for what he is: a street obscener who is fighting Serbia
The archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
