The following blog is taken from a speech given by Wendy Hassler-Forest, Music Connects Program Manager, presented to Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission.
What you see in this video might look like nothing out of the ordinary. Normal young people doing normal young people things.
But the young people in this video are not growing up in what people in countries like the Netherlands or the US would call ordinary. They are from Mitrovica, Europe’s most divided city, and they’re coming from both sides of the divide.
In Mitrovica, everything is dominated by ethnic division, ethnic identity, and the unresolved conflict that caused, and was deepened by, the Kosovo war in 1999.
The division between the Serb community in the North and the Albanian community in the South is almost complete. Different languages, different educational systems, different healthcare systems. To some extent, controversially, different governing bodies. And underlying it all, the history and trauma of a recent civil war.
But Mitrovica had another history: before the war, it had been a city where rock, pop and jazz bands had thrived. Where there were jam sessions and festivals. And where musicians from the two communities didn’t think twice about coming together to make music. This history, and the infrastructure that supported it, had been wiped out by the war. Mitrovica musicians asked for our help to rebuild it, and the idea for a rock school was born.
Since 2008, Mitrovica Rock School has been working to bring together the city’s young people, who have grown up without any contact whatsoever with the other community.
We took small, incremental steps. First bringing participants across the border to Skopje to form mixed bands there, as it simply wasn’t safe enough in Mitrovica. Later, when we had too many mixed bands to keep bringing everyone to Skopje, we made it possible for mixed bands to meet and rehearse in Mitrovica, albeit in secret.
Still later, we organized our first mixed concerts in Mitrovica, for a mixed audience. And every time we took another step and repeated it a couple of times, those rehearsals or those concerts started to feel normal. We were not pushing people out of their comfort zones, we were growing those comfort zones, and growing community support as we went.
During my time in former Yugoslavia, this word “normal” kept coming back. “We just want a place where we can be normal.” Or, in judgment: “That guy isn’t normal.” Normal doesn’t actually describe the prevailing situation, but rather some moral judgment on what it should be. And it occurred to me that, with every step we took to bring people together in Mitrovica, we were expanding the city’s definition of normal.
The past two years, since the start of our Creative Europe project, old divisions have flared up, raising concerns about a return to violence. And with every setback in the security situation, we have spoken about a new normal that’s emerging – this time not in a positive sense.
But inside the school, surprisingly little has changed. Despite the rhetoric, the riot police and the protests outside, ethnically mixed bands have continued to come together. Students and teachers have continued to cross the other side to see each other. Why? When every other interethnic project in Mitrovica had to stop, or was unable to find participants, why could we continue?
A big part of the reason is our Creative Europe project, Music Connects. Music Connects doesn’t only connect youth from North and South Mitrovica. It connects them with students from Roma Rock School in North Macedonia, where Roma and Macedonian youth play together in bands. It connects them to artists and cultural organizers in Berlin, and here in Brussels, through residencies at Balkan Trafik festival. And it connects them to students of the Dutch Rockacademie: young people who, like them, dream of a career in music.
These connections shift something. They bring the Mitrovica youth closer together, as they share these new experiences, and meet these new people. It gives them something to continually look forward to: positive, exciting experiences where the focus is not on ethnic identity or political affiliation, but on talent and potential. And they create networks of young artists who are, despite their geographical distance, similar in their aspirations.
This project is just a little David against the Goliath of the frozen conflict over Northern Kosovo. But it’s an incubator: a place where a generation can grow up with a different experience of normal. An experience which in many cases informs who they become and how they look at the world as adults. And one that they can project outwards as they grow into the leaders of tomorrow.
