where to start with this one-million-euro project that took place during September and October 2000 in eight of the nine European Culture Capitals of that year -- Helsinki, Kracow, Avignon, Brussels, Reykjavík, Bergen, Bologna, Prague and Santiago del Compostela. (the latter being the sole non-participant) Here I will construct a personal view of this large and complex project -- as I was one of two people who were involved in the project from its initial floating by a couple Italian IT engineers in Bologna in 1998 through many transformations to its inglorious final meeting in a Chinese restaurant in Brussels in November 2000. the EU logo looks unified, but don't let the surface fool you -- there are enough tensions, jealousies, cultural stereotypes, and disagreements to satisfy any battalion of relationship psychotherapists and homophobics. and, despite all that, there is much to be enjoyed, especially á table: bon appetit!

the history will be charted in images, IRC logfiles, snippets from official EU applications, emails, mailing lists, videos, and my own reflections on the process of helping facilitate a project that married eight languages, eight cultures, eight local cultural politics and eight cuisines. it is a comparitive history that looks at two genotypes: networkers versus cultural producers. networkers being those who have at least a small altruistic interest in connecting to others in other places; cultural producers being workers in what I term the "cultural-industrial sector" -- a class of folks who are supported by infusions of national cultural patrimony. folks who are not the artists, but who act as middle-men between the partimonial flows and the 'content-producers' or artists...