3.17 Marginal Years: Methods, Frictions, and Other Survival Strategies from the Balkans gathers the first three-and-a-bit years of Marginal projects, curatorial texts, reflexive papers and interdisciplinary thoughts from artists, theorists, curators and contributors from across the Balkans.

Edited and curated by Sabina Suru, with a methodological framework and afterword by Andrei Tudose, the book functions as an honest try at a transparent critical inquiry into how independent cultural infrastructures are built from the margins of Western institutional paradigms. Positioned from Balkans—from a cultural-political situationship perspective, where local initiatives are frequently expected to import external frameworks rather than develop situated methodologies—the book presents publishing as an act of tactical disobedience and epistemological resistance, built around an apparently simple question:
How can an independent cultural infrastructure sustain our collective capacity to sense, challenge, develop, and preserve the volatile friction between human, technological, and natural systems?

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Book Contents & Chapter Breakdown:

Chapter 01: Practicing Obsolescence
Looks into the variable paradigms and perceptions of the instruments and approaches employed for understanding & caring for the bigger eco-techno-system we are part of. This first chapter lay down the ideological and technological context, orbiting a sub-question of its own: How do human communities, sensory bodies, and frameworks of care navigate, embody, and adapt to digital transformation and accelerated technological use and obsolescence?
Contributions:
Technological (in)determinism – Sorin Badea in conversation with Tom Chatfield, transcript
In loving memory of my sparkling Walkman – Alexandra Sofonea, reflective paper
Slowing down, weirding, caring – Sabina Suru, thoughts
Places of Care – Andrei Tudose, curatorial text
When science fails – Vlad Toma, reflective paper
The post-digital never arrived – Alexandra Costea, reflective paper
On real bodies making sense of invisible things – Daniela Brill Estrada, reflective paper
Chronicles from In-Between 495 to 570 nm – Claudia Schnugg, Andrei Tudose, curatorial text

Chapter 02: Trash Scientific Certainty!
How can artistic, technology, and scientific research, all three done together, expose and reconfigure the friction between human structures, and non-human ecosystems? The second chapter looks into transduction over translation in transdisciplinary collaborations which ask questions that no discipline could formulate in isolation.
Contributions:
Ecosensibility, transmaking, technologies of care – Sorin Badea in conversation with Yvonne Volkart, transcript
A journey through the strata of Space Shelter Earth - B-02 – Annick Bureaud, reflective paper
Otherwise Residency – Claudia Schnugg, Andrei Tudose, foreword and curatorial text
Otherwise, from within – Andrei Tudose, reflective paper
Wormholes in the concrete – Andrei Tudose, reflective paper
Research ecologies: Rethinking how to notice / Andrei Tudose, reflective paper

Chapter 03: Disobedience as Infrastructure
The third chapter addresses professional and infrastructural precarity in cultural work within and beyond the Balkans, looking into this persistently not-obvious-enough systemic entanglement. It tackles the paradox of artists growing into institutions, while staying countercultural, embracing methodological friction, and reclaiming administrative labor as part of the creative practice.
Contributions:
Like a Cucumber – Sorin Badea in conversation with Špela Petrič, transcript
Glossary of frictions – Andrei Tudose, reflective paper
Growing from the cacophony – Uroš Veber, reflective paper
Insert Curiosity: Automatic Gallery – Venelin Shurelov, reflective paper
Beyond the new: Infrastructures for artistic continuity – Kasia Molga, reflective paper
The artist is present and I have a spreadsheet to prove it – Sabina Suru
STAY UNFINISHED – Tanja Brandmayr, reflective paper
Open Practice Society – Andrei Tudose, Sabina Suru, reflective paper


Publication Details
Publisher: Editura Nouă
Typefaces: Space Grotesk (Florian Karsten, ver. 2.0, 2022), Be Vietnam Pro (Lam Bao, Tony Le, Vietanh Nguyen, ver. 1.002, 2022)
Paper: Serixo off set 120 g/m2
Cover: Keaykolour Chilli Pepper 300 g/m2
Printer: Azero
ISBN: 9786065962316
First printing edition: 2026
Print run 500 copies

Partners: Editura Nouă, Librairie Kyralina, Projekt Atol, Stadtwerkstatt, DA Lab Foundation, CNDB, UNArte, French Institute in Romania, Austrian Cultural Forum, Revista Arta, V2_ Lab for Unstable Media

Editorial project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN).
The project does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the project's content or any use to which the project outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.