2 September 2009 | The performance “Macedonia!” by Italian artist Silvio Palladino will be held at Skopje’s Stone Bridge on Wednesday evening, starting at 7:16 pm.

The participatory event, aimed at bringing together Macedonia’s diverse ethnic communities, plays with the different meanings and perceptions of the word Macedonia.

In Italian, ‘Macedonia’ is used to refer to a typical summer desert, made from mixed pieces of different fruits. The artist’s idea is to invite Macedonian citizens of different ethnic groups (Macedonians, Albanians, Roma, Serbians and Bosniaks) to brings fruits and participate in the process of making the Macedonia fruit salad.

The resulting product will be offered to participants and passers-by, and in a way present the different cultures that co-exist in Skopje.

Palladino, who often uses public space installations and participative events to reflect on social and economic matters, has chosen the Stone Bridge as a setting for the event, as it both separates and brings together the two parts of the city.

According to etymologist Juan Antonio Cincunegui, the word 'Macedonia' was popularised at the end of the eighteenth century to refer to mixed fruit salad. Although some claim that it referred to the ethnically mixted Macedonia when it was under Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century, chronology and contemporary sources do not support this interpretation.

The Oxford Companion to Food lists 1740 as the earliest French usage of the word ‘macedoine’ and claims that it can be used of any medley of unrelated things, not necessarily edible.

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