Your questions answered about us and the State in Time
The NSK State is a virtual global state. It is conceived as a utopian formation without physical territory and is not identified with any existing national State. It is inherently transnational and describes itself as "THE FIRST GLOBAL STATE OF THE UNIVERSE". It issues passports to anyone prepared to identify with its founding principles, and citizenship is open to all, regardless of national, sexual, religious or other status.
Neue Slowenische Kunst was founded as a multi-disciplinary artistic collective in Ljubljana in 1984 as socialist Yugoslavia began to fracture. By the end of that decade, the NSK groups had gained a reputation across Western Europe, America and Japan. NSK's works and actions have commented on many of the political events of the last two decades. NSK is now widely acknowledged to have played a vital role in the political and cultural history of Slovenia and former Yugoslavia, even being credited with playing a role in the pluralisation of society and culture in 1980s Slovenia.
NSKSTATE.COM is maintained by NSK citizens and friends. We do not issue NSK Passports and cannot answer questions on this subject. For more information, please visit The Official Pages of the NSK State Passport Office
The NSK State was created in 1992 by the groups comprising the Slovene arts collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). These included Laibach, IRWIN, Noordung, New Collectivism and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy.
The NSK State has several thousand citizens across numerous countries and all continents, including many in Nigeria. The NSK State is a collective cultural work formed by the iconography and statements of its founders and its citizens’ responses to these and the state's existence.
NSKSTATE.COM was created by Haris Hararis in Athens, Greece, with the invaluable help of the digital agency RADIAL and the contribution of many exceptional members, citizens and friends of NSK.
Some of the early collaborators of NSKSTATE.COM are Valnoir (France), with his superb graphics, Christian Matzke (America) with “NSK Reading Room”, Peter Blase (Germany) with his unique artworks, as well as a series of others who followed and slowly shaped the movement that we now call “NSK Folk Art”. Donald Campbell, the owner of the very first unofficial Laibach sites, contributed with news and articles about Laibach; Zlato Krec sent numerous concert reviews and photos; Nikica Korubin, Hanno Reichel and Avi Pitchon contributed with critical reviews and essays; Jernej Spende with the web scanner "NSK State Radar" and Alexei Monroe, the most crucial researcher and cultural theorist of Laibach and NSK who later became the author of Pluralni Monolit and Interrogation Machine, wrote some exclusive early articles about Laibach and NSK for us and he remains one of the closest collaborators of nskstate.com
This site's first version was launched in the late ’90s under the name “The Slovenia of Athens”. It started as a personal project with texts in Greek and English and was designed to introduce the work of Laibach and NSK to the Greek audience.
In 2001 it took the form of a digital news portal that presented and examined the work and ideas of the NSK artists. It also documented activities around the utopian NSK State from the perspective of its citizens.
In 2002 the domain name nskstate.com was registered, and the website became the central meeting point of NSK citizens.
NSKSTATE.COM was built to promote communication and interaction among people interested in Laibach and NSK.
Artists and art enthusiasts, Laibach fans, NSK State citizens who wanted to add a new dimension to their citizenship and several colleagues or even members of the historic Neue Slowenische Kunst collective all started to treat the website as the “official” website of the NSK State. And just like that, the NSKSTATE.COM became the Virtual Embassy of a state that keeps growing, independently and without the supervision of its original creators.