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< Back Belgrade Calling 2 15 July 2020 Katarina Kostandinović Birdhead, April protests in Belgrade, 2017 When thinking about the title of this text, I thought of “Is Belgrade Burning?”, referring to “Is Paris Burning?” – the question Hitler is said to have asked on receiving the news of its fall. But I changed my mind; I did not want to dramatize the situation in Belgrade, which has, in the last week, escalated into several days of protests, police brutality and general dissatisfaction that threatens to be annulled by the authorities and the regime media. In a previous article that I wrote for this journal, through the form of diary entries, I dealt with the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This text is a reaction to the current situation caused by unprofessional management of the coronavirus crisis, by the state representatives and the Crisis Staff. I’d like to clarify the position I am taking in writing the following text. I am an academic citizen and cultural worker employed in one of the public institutions of the city of Belgrade. In addition to supporting my generation in protests and expressing our dissatisfaction and recoil in fear, I want to condemn the rhetoric of violence, to rebel against corrupt officials, to condemn sexual predators and take the side of their victims. I want to allow myself to tell for the first time what kind of future I want and where I (don’t) want to live. To get out of the media darkness that has been overshadowing us all for some time, to support my colleagues and professors in the fight against plagiarized diplomas, I want nepotism to stop and positions in institutions to be filled on the basis of competency and knowledge. I want to support the fight for human rights, the rule of law and justice! DOUBLE STANDARDS and SOCIAL MEDIA AS AN EMERGING PUBLIC COUNTER SPHERE On June 21, the citizens of Serbia voted in the first parliamentary elections in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, and part of the opposition decided to boycott the elections. A little more than a month before the elections, the state of emergency was lifted and people were encouraged to return to “normal”. That meant the possibility of holding sports matches and celebrations again, re-opening clubs and conducting an election campaign, as well as the elections. The new COVID-regime was meant to set the conditions for the upcoming parliamentary elections and voting procedures. While president Vučić was preparing, the cracks in the healthcare system and state’s neglect of health infrastructure became even more obvious than before [1] . Although the fact that the ruling Serbian Progressive Party won convincingly was not a surprise, there were discrepancies in real and reported numbers. Shortly after, the number of infected people started to rise and this time the numbers of infected and deceased people from some cities did not match the official data coming from the Crisis Staff and the state representatives. New precautions had to be introduced; among other things, the president decides to evict students from dorms in the middle of the exam period, identifying them as a dangerous factor in spreading the infection. After the report on the president’s decision on the same day, July 3, students from Belgrade gathered in front of the National Assembly to protest – the reaction was spontaneous and urgent. On Tuesday, July 7, after President Vučić announced that a curfew should be introduced in Belgrade, due to the rapid spread of the virus, thousands of citizens took to the streets of the capital to express their dissatisfaction. It was the first of seven protests held so far, which turned into a brutal showdown between police and protesters for almost three nights in a row. The protest turned into riots and people were throwing rocks and garbage cans, containers were set on fire, as well as police vehicles. On the first day of the protest, according to the information by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, four vehicles were set on fire, while one was damaged. Shortly after the arson, a story erupted on social networks that members of the police a.k.a. trained hooligans controlled by the state were behind such deeds. Most social network users are convinced that the Ministry of the Interior burned their vehicles on their own, old and unusable ones, which they are trying to prove with photos. On the other hand, the representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs deny it. Social media, these days, is a serious channel through which information travels, people who protest from the streets report, and people who are not able to get to the streets share the content with incredible speed. Messages are of various content – from warnings about the movement of the police, mapping of suspicious persons at protests to articles of the law on protection of citizens and rights during arrests or police duties when using weapons, etc. Such mobilization through social networks was encouraged partly by footages of independent journalists who were the few to report on the protest, and largely by footages of protesters noticing police brutality and false statements by government officials denying the brutality in the media. Mass civil protests are a burning topic on social media and the public sphere. Numerous people have been discussing violence they have been witnessing. Thus, there is also fake news (both on social and TV networks) and corrupted media are now attracting even more attention – it is a matter of different content, and I will mention one. Reporting by a pre-written text, while people were sitting at the protest third day in a row, B92 TV news anchor states in the news at 11 pm that “the protest turned into violent demonstrations and clashes with the police”, although that was not true. The same reporter later joined the program live, saying that “there were no major incidents”. The fact that the “script” which anchor read in the studio was written in advance is evidenced by photos and recordings from the protest on Thursday, which, apart from a few minor clashes between the protesters, took place in peace and without clashes with the police. The mobilization on social networks gives the impression that the news from Belgrade is being transmitted outside the borders of Serbia. However, again, there are notable examples of biasing and altering news. Photo by Katarina Kostandinović WHO IS WHO and WHOM ARE YOU PROTECTING? For several days now, I have been witnessing a similar choreography of police and “hooligans” who are believed to be there to provoke incidents so that the government, supposedly, can blame the “organizers” of the protest for the violence and take violent steps to suppress the protest. People gather in front of the Assembly, the loudest and right-wing ones are in front of the entrance to the building, most of the other protesters surround them. Derogatory words are being shouted, the government is called out, Kosovo is mentioned, and specific demands are heard in some places. Some of the demands that can be heard are the following: the resignation of President Vučić; resignation of members of the Crisis Staff; overthrowing parliamentary elections; that the formation of Assembly and the Government should not be allowed on the basis of illegal and fraudulent elections, a law prohibiting party affiliation to employees in the judiciary, inspection, education, health, police and military; return open calls for employment in the public sector, without party employment; etc. Tension and dissatisfaction grow and after a while rocks are fired. The police came out of the Assembly and moved to the crowd in front of the building. Torches were lit, they flew towards the police, and at that moment, tear gas was flying from the other side towards the protesters who were fleeing from the police cordon that separated the group and continued to suppress it in the side streets and parks. It was the first time that my friends and I felt tear gas and its consequences. Later that night I saw the footage of the N1 television (one of the few that was on the scene that night).It showed the brutal beating of young men who were sitting in the park next to the Assembly. In the following evenings, from the terraces of apartments in the city centre, people recorded various cases of police brutality, and the number of arrested and beaten people on the streets grew from night to the night. It is undeniable that some police officers were hurt too, but the number of hurt unarmed civilians was much larger than reported. Revolted by the reaction of state representatives, whose speeches and announcements often confuse the Serbian public, regarding the protests and their violent suppression and final disintegration, people continue to gather next day at the same time in front of the Assembly. The next day, reactions to the police violence that happened the previous evening could be heard from the crowd. Then, after a couple of hours of protest, the situation escalated again into chaos and fleeing from tear gas and, now, better-equipped police forces, cordons, cavalry, and special anti-terrorist units in armoured vehicles. The violence on the streets of Belgrade which we witnessed opened the question of who are these people attacking police and whether there are those who are there to quell the protests from within “inserted” among us. This time, the aggression increased on both sides and the collision with the police continued. A huge amount of tear gas was fired, which was now coming to the apartments in the streets where people were fleeing and hiding. The denial of the fact that the police fired tear gas at all, by the prime minister herself, led the protesters to take the streets peacefully the next day, to show disgust with the police brutality while sitting in front of the Assembly. After two days of brutal clashes with the police, the protesters gathered under the slogan “Sit down – Don’t be manipulated”. Authorities withdrew the police and seemingly acknowledged the peaceful protests, which escalated with the president’s next public announcements. As usual, his aggressive rhetoric when addressing citizens and journalists, which oscillates between the role of a worried father and a frightening tyrant, encouraged protesters to take to the streets for the fourth night in a row. And the now well-known choreography is repeated with even stronger police forces, which this time arrest everyone who is on their way and take them to, as it is stated, the Assembly, where they interrogate the detainees, beat them, take away their phones and write reports. The media have been reporting that after the conflict in front of the Assembly, the police fired a large amount of tear gas into the mass of peaceful demonstrators, some of whom are 30 years old. The cartridges that were scattered on the streets near the Assembly of Serbia clearly show that the year of production is 1990. The current debate in media discusses the effects of old tear gas, which, apparently, after five years changes its chemical composition and the substance becomes stronger. This can imply that the convention on the use of chemical weapons was violated and human health was directly endangered. State officials and Ministry of the Interior denied these reports, stating that the inevitable was done in order to quell the violent protest and prevent greater damage. People are more and more scared and, consequently, there are obviously fewer people gathering, unlike the first two days of the protest. During the weekend the number of protesters almost halved, and this Monday (July 13) was immeasurably lower than the first few days. This is partly a consequence of the increase in police patrols, which have been on the streets of Belgrade, searching for people who get in their way, especially those with protest banners.Several arrests have been reported. On the other hand, reported cases of cell phone hackings and deleting of the protest recordings brought unrest and additional fear due to privacy violation. The police have arrested non-violent protesters, among them leftist activists. This prompted the protest movement from the Assembly to the Central Prison in Belgrade, where protesters are demanding the release of “political prisoners” [2] . Yesterday and today, July 14, people are protesting because of numerous arrested activists and students who were not violent during the protest –some were just passers-by interrogated by police whose statements were falsified. They were then sentenced to 30 days in prison, without the possibility to contact a lawyer and defend themselves in court. We are scared and disoriented, it seems that the expressed rebellion and anger did not get any political articulation and does not turn into a strategy in the fight against the current government or a strategy of clearly defined demands that would pressure the government to meet those demands. The role of the opposition, which has been left without the organizational capacity and credibility to address the citizens at this political moment, seems unwelcomed. How to articulate a rebellion against impotent representatives of the people, who confuse, deceive and criminalize their citizens? How to express dissatisfaction with public information and corrupt media? How to invite colleagues, professors, friends to join and not be afraid to withdraw from obedience to the perennial fear government? In the previous few days, perhaps the most serious protests were held during the rule of Aleksandar Vučić, who already after the first evening fulfilled the first and so far the only request of the demonstrators – a change in the decision to reintroduce the curfew. Some would say that no matter how these protests end, it is a big and serious thing, especially since the public, after the “One in Five Million” protest ended, speculated whether and when energy would be accumulated for new protests. It turned out, on Tuesday night, July 7, that only one spontaneous gathering of angry citizens, due to the announcement of a new curfew, was more fruitful than about a year of protests led by the opposition. The protest became a place where politically, ideologically diverse people gather, and how the day will look like depends on the current dominance in the number of some of them. The only thing that is constant and common to everyone in front of the Assembly of Serbia is dissatisfaction with the regime and the current situation in the country. For the first time since the April protests in 2017, when Vučić was elected for president, we see young people on the streets, mostly those aged 18 to 30-40. There were also sympathizers and activists from the oppositional Alliance for Serbia, Don’t Let Belgrade Drown, activists from the Roof (anti eviction organization), the New Social Democratic Union, artists and cultural workers, but also alt-right groups such as People’s patrols, Levijatan, as well as workers from the Private Security Agency Protector. Public institutions are still in the dark, no one has stepped forward, unions are silent too, and people are scared to join because they see no defined prospect. It is showed that those who stood against the current rule were criminalized and overshadowed, even silenced. I am afraid that any civil protest that will take place in the future in this way will be compromised. It seems to me that the public is confused by the number of young people on the streets. They are not seen at rallies of the opposition or the ruling party, the public is confused by the so-called orientation of people, which again, cannot be reduced to those political and ideological phrases that existed at the time of October 5th 2000, when the people rebelled against Milošević’s rule and finally overthrew him. This is a generational thing, there are young people left and right oriented, civic oriented and patriotic oriented, but the regime media impose their ideological phrases and criminalize what they do not understand. The notion of left and right is not valid at this political moment, we also have to rethink the terminology and its historical and/or current state. We wonder whether the right-wingers are the people who are advocating for Kosovo at the protest and its preservation in the constitutional and legal order of the Republic of Serbia, advocating for physical security and the right to property and the rule of law, both for Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Is it a right-wing or liberal vocabulary? Is a leftist someone who stands for ethnically clean territories – for the policy of demarcation and, thus, follows the policy of the West? How broad is the political spectrum that we know, and how much do we know? Now, only a thin layer of educated young people from larger cities are on the streets (Niš, Novi Sad, Zrenjanin, Kragujevac, Novi Pazar, etc.). Those who still have a lot of strength and a lot of life ahead of them. But we fail to turn indignation into political demands, because the opposition is incapable of helping us, among other things. Our parents have been exhausted for a long time and are not ready to stand up, those who fought for the democratization of society in 2000, gave up. We live in Belgrade, in a bubble, without contact with people who vote for the ruling party and whose world and worries we do not understand. They are trapped in an authoritarian system that their children, WE, want to blow up. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but even this time it doesn’t seem that the uprising will be successful, the spontaneous civic protest is facing the question of “and then what”. It seems that our opposition, as it is today, is not ready and is lacking strong support of the people. We need an organic opposition that will be formed at the protests. We have to think long-term and offer ideas and policies, talk about solutions because it will be difficult to defeat the tyrant in his field of violence. Photo by Katarina Kostandinović ENDING NOTE It seems that the fight against the coronavirus will not end so quickly. It seems that the members of the Crisis Staff found themselves unprepared again in the fight against the epidemic. While the authorities have the responsibility to ensure public order and to respond to individual violent incidents, the disproportionate use of force against entire demonstrations is not justified. Heavy-handed measures of the kind we have seen over the past few days infringe the rights of those protesting peacefully and will only increase tension and provoke hostility, leading to an escalation of the situation. It is a matter of time before a state of emergency is introduced again, which in a way blurs some priorities and raises alarms about how human rights are being balanced against the risks posed by COVID-19. The last time Serbia was in the State of Emergency was in 2003 following the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić; on which occasion the government derogated numerous human rights, including the right to privacy, the right to freedom of movement, the right to freedom of expression and the freedom of media. P.S. THE LEGACY OF THE OCTOBER 5 This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the great demonstrations in Belgrade that ended Slobodan Milošević’s rule on October 5, 2000 [3] . The Democratic Opposition of Serbia called on the citizens to gather in front of the National Assembly on October 5 in order to oppose the great election theft that the Federal Election Commission carried out on the order of Milošević. The opposition ultimately demanded that Slobodan Milošević recognizes the electoral will of the citizens expressed in the federal, presidential and local elections held on September 24, by 3 pm on Thursday, October 5, 2000. It was also demanded that all those arrested be released, as well as that the arrest warrants and criminal charges filed against those who protested for respecting the electoral will of the citizens of Serbia be withdrawn. Currently, the then participants in Slobodan Milošević’s government are once again occupying the most important positions in the country. Katarina Kostandinović is an art historian and curator based in Belgrade, Serbia. [1] https://dversia.net/6026/serbia-mass-protest-vucic/?fbclid=IwAR2LDkBeUtiKHIfbMQxTnSo807MkULpu5VF3qKwjj7EUOURSJgHMd08mKQc [2] https://www.masina.rs/eng/beating-and-jailing-of-non-violent-activists-followed-by-protest-in-front-of-belgrade-central-prison/?fbclid=IwAR20g4iHhvUn5jA3mvNUfu91-5scgs_KODi3-rIZaOeMDZhgrOH5TZKIqds [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87 ; (See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/05/continuous/yugoslav-protesters-set-parliament-on-fire.html , https://balkaninsight.com/2010/10/05/timeline-the-bulldozer-revolution/ ) Previous Next

< Back Mask making and coffee drinking in Addis Addis Ababa 18 May 2020 Sarah Bushra Making masks in Temesgen studio “The idea of abundance and scarcity takes a constant shift. What seemed to be scarce has forced itself to become an abundance”, writes Robel Temesgen on his Instagram post announcing his communal mask making adventures. In a conversation over the phone, Robel relates he finds the confinement to his home studio stifling with consequent strains on his creative practice. In addition to escapades to favourite coffee spots around the city, a regular habit prior to the pandemic, in the past 7 weeks since the Corona lock-down he has taken up several new pastimes, one of which is making beautiful face masks. The collective mask making began organically. Tsedenya Abayneh, Robel’s close friend attempted to make a mask for herself and shared her process with Robel, who’s then reminded to call on Leayne Telahun, a friend with a sewing machine, to give their endeavour a fighting chance to succeed. Between the malfunctioning of said machine and the hunt for a new one, the task force grew to seven people in total. Kasahun Hailu, a regular at Robel’s studio, who also happens to be an industrial design graduate, took over the streamlining of the production and earned himself the name ‘Supé’ short for a supervisor. Shimeles Tadesse and Tesfaye Bekele, along with Robel, fill in the necessary gaps in the production line, while Naod Lemma, documents the process through pictures. Now, the collective makes an average of 60 masks in one afternoon and staggers their distribution rippling from their closest relations to members of their communities in need of a shield. Many pharmacies around town hiked the price for a single-use face mask by upwards of 200% on the day the first case of Corona was confirmed in Addis. What used to be available at 25 ETB (75 cents) suddenly started to be sold for 150 ETB (4,50 USD), way beyond what a majority of Addis Ababans can afford. When the fear of contracting the virus increased with the rising number of cases, unable to afford to buy masks, many invented make-shift solutions, covering their faces with the shawls they’re wearing or repurposing discarded Ethiopian airlines sleeping eye shields to cover their mouths. On the 16th of March, quickly after the breakout of Corona in Africa, Jack Ma, Chinese Billionaire, and founder of e-commerce multinational Alibaba announced his donation of 100,000 face masks and other PPE to each one of the 54 countries in the continent. [1] This donation was followed by a second batch containing 200,000 face masks and other PPE to be distributed among 54 countries [2] , and the third batch including 4.6 million masks and other PPE donated immediately to African Union, and Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) [3] . The Ethiopian government has also received facemasks form UAE, Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture, Korean Business Association and other local and international organizations [4] . Although it is generally assumed these donated masks go to, or are reserved for health workers in the country, there’s no system in place to track whether the distribution is indeed being made towards the right recipients. According to a doctor working at St. Paul Hospital in Addis Ababa, a hospital anticipated to become a treatment centre for confirmed cases when the current centre, Eko Kotebe Hospital, reaches its capacity, thus far she has to buy her own PPE from private pharmacies. Although, at the beginning of the pandemic many were lax about wearing a mask, in recent times members of the community have started to hold each other accountable. Now a person not wearing a mask is not allowed entry to the blue and white minibus taxis, the most common mode of private transportation in Addis. When entering public service areas like banks, security guards ask people without a mask to put one on. Ride, one of the most popular taxi-hailing platforms has distributed face masks and hand sanitizers to the majority of their drivers. Other mask making endeavours in Addis that stem from organizing like-minded individuals include a collaboration between Doctors in Action (DIA), an enterprise empowering doctors for social change, and Sabegn, a concept store for lifestyle products. They started Debo project that works to spread awareness about Corona, recognize and support the work of front-line health workers and spread videos on how to make DIY masks and distribute the masks they’ve produced. Many good-hearted business-inspired communities have also mobilized to make face masks available for sale on the streets of Addis, standing close by taxi lines and other relatively crowded spaces for a price of 10 ETB (30 cents). The price for surgical masks sold at pharmacies has also plummeted to 30 ETB (90 cents) from its sudden climb 7 weeks ago. With continued improvement in access to masks, many still walk the streets of Addis without a shield on their faces. Robel admits buying a 10 ETB mask from the streets is an easier way of providing protection for himself and many around him. It is not just the lack of masks on the streets that motivated the collective to gather at his studio. He speaks about the boredom that brought this group of people together, an interest in shared conversations that made them stay, the satisfaction in simple acts of generosity that entices them to come back. This impromptu artist’ collective is beyond a manufacturing line, they’re a conduit transforming what is scarce towards a perception of abundance. For many Ethiopians, the stay at home period for this pandemic is frequented with power cuts and water shortages. The severity of this problem varies in different parts of town. While the cuts are intermittent in some areas varying between one to two days per week, other areas have no power for days on end. The longer power cuts are caused by the malfunctioning problem rather than rationing tact. Although this may appear unbearable for an outsider, for a majority of Addis dwellers it is, unfortunately, business as usual. The understanding of abundance and scarcity is versatile in Addis society, its flow is seamless and uninterrupted. When there’s no electricity at Robel’s studio, for example, to power the sewing machine used to make masks, the group simply shifts towards activities done only by hand or simply playing cards, relishing in the sudden abundance of time to be filled with enjoying each other’s company. In these times, the productivity aspect of time is scarce, says Robel, while the idle and reflective space remain abundant. “Is it worth it to be an artist?” – he asks. “I am in my studio – suddenly forced to gauge my capacity: what is my actual reach, how vastly does my network extend, and how wide are the margins circumscribing the works I produce?” Although an avid consumer of art through virtual media, Robel expresses his hesitancy towards creating work for an online audience, he says he’s not interested in that capital right now. This sentiment refreshingly centres Ethiopian audiences as spectators of contemporary art that are coming from the country. Considering the very limited access to the internet, a work of art with output on a digital platform has little to no local reach. The resistance from Addis Ababans towards staying at home is not primarily a question of the economy, Robel says. Although the economy is a crucial factor, people defy stay at home sanctions from the government, unable to placate their needs to socialize. Long before the pandemic, Robel has been investigating the nature of communities around coffee drinking culture in Ethiopia, describing the resulting spaces as heavens for uncensored dialogue and fertile soil for growing deep-rooted connections. In a conversation with the Corpus Podcast about his exhibition RE:PUBLIC held at Circle Art Gallery [5] , Robel describes ‘jebena’ as a symbol of society. For his series, Floating Jebenas he has been looking at the disruption of social structures formed around coffee drinking culture due to rapid urbanization of the city. He notes the shift from neighbourly socials that were dismantled by aggressive construction to the emergence of informal small businesses that serve coffee at the many curves and crevices of the city. He iterates the way Ethiopians function as social fabric, and points at the various means we evade threats to our coffee gatherings. Robel’s creative practice continually probes at the nature of communities, the strands that form them, the bedrocks they stand on. His meditation with ‘jebena’ as a holding space for Ethiopian culture and identity has resonance in the space his studio has recently become, a host for labour of passion in the form of mask making. Within the folding, stitching, and pressing of fabric, there’s a strain of alchemy at play, morphing superfluous substances into one of the most valuable items of the times. Sarah Bushra is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, working primarily with a hybrid of text and images. [1] https://twitter.com/jackma/status/1239581509125726210?s=21 [2] https://twitter.com/jackma/status/1247014237303537664?s=21 [3] https://twitter.com/jackma/status/1252136657672790016?s=21 [4] https://www.trackethiogov.com/in-kind-donations-tracker [5] https://circleartagency.com/online-gallery/exhibitions/recent-exhibition/re-public/ Previous Next

< Back “Bor is burning” [1]: the political economy of IT in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia 20 Dec 2020 Robert Bobnič and Kaja Kraner Back to the future! At the entrance to the Bor copper mining complex (RTB Bor) where one of the pits is situated, a large board reads, “Politics of security and protection of the environment: life first, we have to care for our environment.” The signage is in Chinese and Serbian (though not its Cyrillic script). Nearby lies a monument to the victims of a labor camp in the Bor mine during World War II. The Third Reich was one of many who had dug a mine at this location within the past 7, 000 years, and when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia capitulated in 1941, they took over the mine shortly after, establishing around twenty labor camps known for a special kind of torture. People had to work barefoot and naked – some were executed: hung with their heads towards the ground as if to be some kind of monument. It is very quiet – almost too quiet – for a mine. As we look at the empty halls (which in the socialist heyday would have been filled with workers dining and changing clothes), two young engineers – one of them emphasizing that nowadays more female engineers work at the mine – ironically say, “we are going back to the eighties. ” After the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia, during the isolation of Serbia (owing to the international sanctions during the 1990s) and their period of privatization, RTB Bor was sold to the Chinese state-owned Zinjin corporation in 2017. Bor mining facilities is now under the process of reconstruction and automation as a part of Chinese investment in the Balkan region. Is this the coming of another wave of modernization, another acceleration – another colonization – as suggested by the vague perception of a Chinese techno-capitalist entry (through the Balkans) into Europe? Discussing the question of Sinofuturism, Chinese philosopher of technology, Yuk Hui, claims it “runs in the opposite direction to moral cosmotechnical thinking – ultimately, it is only an acceleration of the European modern project.” [2] It is therefore a project, which according to the moral attitude in the current age of ecological thinking, cares neither for life nor for the environment. Monument of the victims of labor camp at the entrance in Bor mine (left). Zinjin headquarter in Bor (right). One mine, 7, 000 years of cosmos A penetrated surface – the hole in the earth. Mankind not only got to his feet and looked up to the sky where he was blinded by the sun, but also began to dig into the earth’s past to exploit it for his own (re)production and preservation . We could say that to enter the mine is to enter geological and cosmological deep time – [the] accumulated dead labor of the cosmic economy, accessible only by the technics of mining conducted by the living labor of humans, tools, science, and machines. The latter is quite clear in the case of RTB Bor, where copper and gold mining dates back to at least 5000 BC. Nowadays, we can only imagine the importance of mining in the formation of different cosmologies from surrounding cultures during the prehistoric and historic, or premodern and modern, periods. During the modern era, the technics of mining not only became industrialized, but functioned as the basis for industrial technological development – mining, and nature in general, is a standing reserve for energetic and infrastructural potential. The latter holds true both for the heavily industrialized 19th century and heavily informationalized 21stcentury, where mining and data mining came to form a particular synthesis. Strictly speaking, mining could be understood as one of the most fundamental practices underpinning cosmotechnics. The concept of cosmotechnics was coined by Yuk Hui as a departure from the epistemological, social, and material framework of the European project of modernization. The latter was based on the ontological difference between nature and culture by means of modern technological development and its corresponding way of technological thinking, in which technics is understood as a mediation tool between the order of nature and order of culture. In this regard, it is important to note that cosmotechnics (as a concept and methodology) emphasizes a cosmological understanding of technology, not an anthropological one. This fundamental change in conceptualization – the elimination of the basic human-centricity, characteristic of Western modernity – became possible when the whole world (nature and cosmos included) began to function as a giant computational machine. For this reason, Hui is not conducting a backdoor exit through some nontechnological return, but rather, suggests an exit through technics itself. In the middle of technological geneses – as is modern technology – lies an entire cosmos of the totality of nature and technics: a particular technological genesis as well as a particular cosmology, i.e., the way different cultures understand the universe and comprehend the order of things, be it in the form of myth, magic, or science. In the specific case of Europe, the entire cosmic totality of nature and technics includes understanding the technology which endowed particular nation states with their competitive advantage in the colonial and economic subjection of the rest of the world. These are indistinguishable from capitalist modes of production. While developing the concept of cosmotechnics, Hui’s initial question asks why there was no technological development in China as it happened in the West, given that China had material conditions for such a development. In embarking on an answer, he suggests that the reason lies in the different cosmology of Chinese culture. It is devoid of the concept of technology as operated and understood in the West (beginning with the famous Greek techne , until its synthetic finalization at the start of the 20th Century with the end of metaphysics by cybernetics, as understood by philosopher Martin Heidegger). In this sense, China’s current technocapital power, and corresponding Sinofuturism, is therefore based on the appropriation and acceleration of the Western concept of technology after the Opium wars and late socialist modernization. Cosmotechnics encapsulates diversity, however not in the form of cultural diversity (the idea of multiculturalism itself being the product of modernization and colonialism), but in the form of technological diversity. Thus, the question of locality is wedged open (again, not locality as a result of cultural identity, but locality as the product of technical means). However, Hui states: “Cosmotechnics is not simply about different ways of making things, for example, different techniques of knitting or dying,” it is above all, “the unification of the moral and the cosmic through technical activities. […] This cosmological specificity must be rethought beyond astral physics, beyond the conceptualization of the universe as a thermodynamic system; it also reopens the question of morality beyond ethical rules, which are added posteriorly as constraints to new technologies. Technical activities unify the moral order and the cosmic order; and by unification, I mean reciprocal processes which constantly enforce each other to acquire new meanings.” [3] This is one way to say that technology is not neutral – not only in the sense of its use but also its existence. Perhaps this also means that cosmotechnics functions more as a perspective and less as a concept, and for that reason cannot be transmitted from one place or history to another without alteration. Prehistoric mining tools in Museum of mining and metallurgy Bor (left). Zinjin flag at the entrance to the mining hole (right). Balkan, time and (deep) time again This is where our initial question comes in: can we reconstruct a specific Balkan cosmotechnics? The formulation of this question emerged precisely from the specific case of RTB Bor and is of particular importance when considering at least two distinct elements: (1) the extreme duration of mining activities and natural resource exploitation ranging through many different cosmologies, cultures, politics, and economies; (2) the period of modernization, which unfolded during the existence of socialist Yugoslavia. The latter is the focus of the current stage of our research. The modern history of mining in Bor started in the late 19th century, when a rich Serbian industrialist, Djordje Vajfert, was looking for gold. He [mostly] found copper, though some gold as well. French capital soon entered and the French Company of the Bor Mines, the Concession St. George, began mining in 1904. In Bor you can still see the old flamboyant French houses where French management lived. In comparison, workers were all living in wooden housing. But technological development and modernization in Bor came with the birth of socialist Yugoslavia. The mine was nationalized in 1945, and the industrial town was gradually built around it. Due to the importance of mining in modern industry and the resulting “cult of work”, Bor attained a special status within Yugoslav culture and its collective imagination. It is this status, and subsequent turbulence of the postsocialist period, that now leads it to face Chinese technological investment as the inscription of Bor in global technocapitalistic unification (which rejects cosmotechnical difference). This is the starting point for opening an inquiry of whether we can speak of a specific Balkan socialist cosmotechnics, i.e., a specific local understanding of technology. The question is important because it transcends the entrapment of Balkan and socialist Yugoslavia tradition in the form of cultural curiosity (from being part of the globalized multicultural world in which socialism ceased to represent a threat to the Western capitalist – and from the start, a technocapitalist – project). Still, Balkans is the name of a specific cultural and political locality where mainly South Slavs have resided for centuries under distinct mythological traditions and religious cultures. Due to its geographical position (and resulting unique political and economic position), the Balkans has been of special importance for many imperialist powers. The region as a whole also holds the position of the Other to either/both the West or the East, and besides that, has always been “out[side] of the world”: free-floating in space, endowed with a nonhuman and noncivilized imaginary. After the period of political unification in the 19th century and the consequently established Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the early 20th century, the region fully integrated under the banner of [a] socialist project, which in case of Yugoslavia acquired a specific positionality between the Western and Eastern bloc – clear in the fact that they implemented a Western technoscientific (cosmotechnical) projection in a supposedly socialist way. If we propose the idea in this way, we must differentiate the alleged unity of the European modern objective based on a specific unifying concept of technology. In other words: we must consider – and question – the difference between the capitalist and socialist objective of modernization. The key question is therefore: are there any differences in how socialist projects enacted an understanding of cosmos and nature through technical means? Since there exists an overlapping sphere of technological thinking between capitalist and socialist alternatives – materialized especially in the totalizing science of cybernetics, which functions as an epistemic unified cosmotechnics without a specific locality – we can also pose an additional question: did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? Since [the] Bor mine was one of the first industries in Yugoslavia where cybernetic thinking and computer technology had been installed (the earliest example of Yugoslav computational modernization), we can lay the basic methodological groundwork: contrasting Heidegger’s understanding of technology (which already totalizes the concept of technology on a philosophical level) with Marx’s understanding of technology. From this, and by referring to the implementation of computer technology and management automatization in the industry when examining the Bor mine, we can pose the following question: why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? Components from Univac computer, installed in Bor mine in late 1950s. Source: Visa Tasič, Principal Research Fellow of Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor. Why did technological progress in the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia slow down at some point? By posing this question, we are directly referring to the development of computer technology at RTB Bor as explained by one of our colleagues, a researcher and a former employee at the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, dr. Dragan R. Milivojević: When I wrote the article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” [4] for a very reputable American journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computering… and – when you write such an article, you send it and it is reviewed by the peer reviewers [who] demand you correct something, etc. – the thing they asked me the most was to explain where this interruption of our development occurred. They remembered us in the rank of Finland and Czechoslovakia, because from 1946 to 1950 those three countries – Yugoslavia, Finland and Czechoslovakia – were technologically at the same level. This is what they were most interested in, and of course I had to explain it a little bit, I had to find the literature on what was in those other countries, and I found out we really haven’t lagged behind at all. We are suggesting that the answer to this question can present a good starting point to emphasize specific understandings of science and technology within the framework of Marxism – the official ideologic, economic and political basis of “real existing socialism”. In the first phase, Marx’s, or more broadly, Marxist understanding of technology (from which the socialist policies regarding technological development in Yugoslavia stemmed) must be differentiated from Heidegger’s (who is predominantly considered the key philosophical representative of the modern Western understanding of technology). The main difference emerges from the fact that Marxism perceives science and technology in its indistinguishable relation to the capitalist mode of production, marked with the broader move from the perception of natural resources as the main source of value towards human resources as the main source of value . Science and technology in Marxism are therefore not so much understood in its relation to nature, but in relation to human nature, whereby presupposing the context of (in Foucauldian terms) governmentality and biopolitics – characteristic of the (Western) modern period. The latter can be understood as a condition of the possibility for Marx’s labor theory of value; Marxist perception of science-technology relation; the linkage of scientific-technological development with the problem of alienation; and especially the ‘institutionalization’ of the split between the manual and intellectual labor – broadly speaking: class perspective on technological development. The establishment of “human capital” (if we would use the classic neoliberal term) as a fundamental of Marxist understanding of technology and technology-nature relations, inevitably led to the (self)limitation of potentially exponential, technological socialist progress. Socialist technological “catching up” since the mid-20th century, driven by the logic of economic rationality, at some point clashed with the logic of the development of social relations. In the specific case of self-governing, socialist Yugoslavia, the latter can be especially seen in the formal equalization of IT experts with all other employees, which led to difficulties implementing critical technological innovation on a micro social level. Dragan R. Milivojević explains this as: […] It was a time of socialist self-management. That period was very interesting. I am not qualified to talk about it, but I can talk about my experience of that period because I’ve lived and worked in [it]: we had terrible difficulty putting an expert idea into practice because at [the] time it was ideologically necessary for all the working people to agree with that idea – all those employed in [the] particular organization. […] The complex organization of the joint work RTB Bor had 23,000 employees, in each relatively autonomous unit of RTB Bor, an assembly of working people had to happen – an assembly of all of the employees – and more than 50% of them [must] vote for this idea. The voice of the lady who [made] coffee and my voice were considered equal. It’s funny but it was a reality. [5] The Socialist “monopole” of state politics/party over the economy, or more specifically, workers’ involvement in the management of factories and their development, in its first phase (at least in theory) tried to reduce established differentiation between intellectual and manual labor by including workers in the decision-making processes. In the case of RTB Bor, the latter can be explicitly perceived by (in all the big factories in Yugoslavia) the mandatory worker’s magazine which shared all crucial information regarding the company’s leadership; investments; its annual loses and profits, etc. The transparency of the factory’s management established this as a common matter, which effectively activated [the] worker’s sense of responsibility (worker’s self-management goes hand in hand with the production of their responsibility [i.e., moral training], which is specific to the socialization rather than individualization of responsibility), and presented that company or factory as a collective. Worker’s magazine “Rudar” (“The Miner”). Source: Bor Library (Bor, Serbia). Did socialism enact specific cosmotechnics when it implemented technological and cybernetic thinking? And could a Marxist understanding of scientific and technological development be the starting point to answer this question? At current stage of our research, we cannot fully answer to the complexities these questions unravel, and in general we see our outlined inquiry as relatively modest: primarily questioning the unification of modern Western cosmotechnics. However, we can further emphasize the Marxist determination of scientific and technological progress in four main goals and its consequences (consequences that can be also seen in specific case of RTB Bor’s socialist period). Those goals are: (1) joint control, (2) rational regulation, (3) minimum power consumption, (4) conditions that are most worthy of human nature and are best suited to it (i.e. demand creative work). [6] Technology itself is largely understood as a synonym for material production (and the opposite of a spiritual one), whereby the main idea is that a society’s material foundations (technical included) are closely related to social change. Technological and scientific development and progress are therefore potential tools for social development and progress; they are seen as a moving force of history, rather than mere liberation of humankind from nature. The industrial revolution of the 19th century, which established the idea of nature as a form of energy in service to the needs of humankind, is defined as a condition for the possibility of a higher form of society, i.e. communist society based on the ideal of creative work (for instance, as manifested in arts). Technology in Marxism is therefore not so much understood within the framework of the Greek techne (an activity that does not satisfy in itself and is, above all, the means of developing other activities. [7] For instance, ars as an activity where human freedom is manifested and this freedom is understood as freedom from the natural laws of necessity , or human’s general susceptibility to nature – including his own). Marxist understanding of technics and technology is not strictly instrumental, objectivist (nature as a means of supply for humans), or idealist. Namely, at least in principle and programmatic terms, Marxism eliminated the differentiation between techne and physis . Technology is therefore a means of human expression, a channel where human activity comes within proximity to the autopoietic creativity of nature, characterized by the merging of techne, poiesis and physis . Since the concept of cosmotechnics encapsulates the nature-technics relation, in this regard we could add that in a socialist society, the ideal of nature’s productivity is established as the very basis for [a] communist society ideal. Naturally, this is all theory, though it does prompt us to think on (socialist) practice or – better yet – real, existing socialist technics? Robert Bobnič is a Ph.D. Kaja Kraner is an independent researcher, lecturer, and curator. [1] The phrase is a reference to the Serbian alternative rock band, Goribor (literally translates to: Burning Bor ) originating from the town of Bor. The band got its name based on the impression of a large fire over the town due to the process of copper smelting slag being separated from copper. [2] Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics , Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018, p. 297. [3] Yuk Hui, Machine and Ecology, Angelaki 25:4, 2020, p. 54-66. [4] The article “Half a Century of Computing in the Serbian Copper Mining and Metallurgy Industry” was published in co-authorship with Dragan R. Milivojević, Marijana Pavlov (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia), Vladimir Despotović (University of Belgrade, Serbia) and Visa Tasić (Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia) in IEEE Annals of the History of Computering in 2012. [5] From the interview with Dragan R. Milivojević, retired researcher of Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Bor, Serbia conducted in Belgrade (Serbia) on 22th of October 2020. [6] Andrej Kirn, Marxovo razumevanje znanosti in tehnike (Marx’s understanding of science and technology) , Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1978, p. 226. [7] It is quite evident, Greek understanding of technics follows an already established class division of labor as the basis of antient Greek society: among others, the division between the free citizens and the enslaved ones executing manual labor. Previous Next

< Back A disturbing Chinese dream: scattered thoughts on the cultures of involution and art institution in China 18 Feb 2022 Zian Chen 1. Just as Chinese social media widely popularized the notion of involution, or neijuan, literally “curling inward,” as a term critically reflecting the collective feeling of burnout, quite ironically, its Politburo policy makers has been promoting the concept of domestic circulation, nei xunhuan, as a response to their ongoing economic warfare with the United States and their sustained zero-tolerance policy towards Covid-19. There has been criticism of China’s apparent political seclusionism, although quite a few developmental economists supported its anti-liberalist spirit by connecting it to the dependency theory of the third world. 2. Lately, I’ve found that Chinese contemporary art practitioners actually relate to the feeling of involution in ways that exceed the presupposed instant lifespan of the term. For one, quite a few artists still remember the heyday of the worldwide “fever” for Chinese contemporary art when their studios were visited by international visitors on a weekly basis. They brought funding to China, be it private or public. Back then, Beijing was known as a mutational cosmopolitan city where everything can happen. The fever reached its height before the opening of Beijing Olympics in the summer of 2008, until an (un)timely financial crisis hit and suddenly burst the neoliberal bubble of immaterial wealth. By the time I relocated to Beijing in 2017, the city felt like an entirely different one from what I have heard. On top of the air pollusion and rising living expenses, the city government even attempted to wipe out the artists’ studios on the urban fringe, studio visits by occasional international visitors were often done with the intention to woo funding from Chinese collectors. For another, since Chinese authority rarely exercises its soft power by allocating government funding to its own contemporary art, the marketing strategies of the domestic private art institutions can only be involutional. https://www.bilibili.com/s/video/BV19a4y1577F A video documenting a cycling laptop user in Beijing’s top university. The original post was called “Tsinghua’s Involuted King” and was about those who code on bicycles. 3. It’s worth to note that it is the advent of memes in an internet environment that actively reshaped the term into a netizen’s glossary in September 2021––the highly restricted nature of Chinese internet against access to overseas networks might be seen as an infrastructural attribute of involution. If we look way back into the prehistory of the word, involution––following the sinologist Prasenjit Duara’s adaptation of Clifford Geertz’s term in the 1980s––was merely an academic definition denoting ever-intensifying labor practices in rice farming resulting from a rise in population. Involution is a process that can only result in fierce social competition without relevant technological breakthroughs that increase productive outcomes. The haunted metaphor of agriculture behind today’s all-too-informationalized signification of involution symptomatically suggests its ontological hindsight: it’s been definitive of the nation who once proclaimed its existence being “rooted in the countryside and agriculture” (yinong liguo), and young Chinese programmers have coined a new, self-deprecating term: “code farmer” (manong). Indonesian version of Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia by Clifford Geertz. 4. Prima facie, people seem to be celebrating the astonishing rate of growth in terms of contemporary art infrastructure outside of the nation’s traditional cultural center over the past decade. One can perhaps attribute this Chinese museum dream entirely to the worldwide notoriety of Chinese collectors active today, some of whom perform the dual role of both museum director and curator. A prototypical private museum in Shanghai in the recent years has employed a laissez-faire directorship and a part-time-based staff structure. Nosy media reports portray the museum boom as some kind of gold rush, with blue-chip artists (mostly white) as the gold diggers seeking to get their pricey works into the Chinese market. Their enormous bodies of work make it very easy to churn out proposals for retrospectives in those program-free private museums, tailor-made by the Chinese representative of their international gallery. With its blatant pragmatism emphasizing its efficacy in the dissemination of its cultural capital over critical insight, we can fairly proclaim a new genre of mediocre curating: the instant retrospective. Fortunately, many local veterans are aware that these are just what Eileen Chang called a “gorgeous robe, only infested with fleas on closer inspection.” Privately they all gasp at the unexpected change of the art scene in Shanghai, infested with such tasteless exhibitions in the course of a mere decade. Local veterans never die. They fight back with the eternal picture of the past by mounting exhibitions such as “The History of Chinese Contemporary Art: 40 Years”; some other newly founded museums have revisited the exhibition history of a city as its strategic “salute to the key stakeholders” (bai matou). As for me, I don’t believe these historicisms are really looking for any sort of answer in history; in fact, if there were any artistic movements today capable of propelling a historical moment like the Chinese avant-garde artists once did in the 1980s, perhaps we wouldn’t be dwelling so relentlessly on the past to begin with. 5. Some museums with real-estate backgrounds allocated their museum’s operation costs in their annual promotion budget. Surely, the city government would be delighted to brand your museum a local cultural cluster. That will be very creditable for the municipal cultural officers to boast as their outstanding achivements. In turn, the “philanthropic” investiment can be rewarded with a favor deal in acquiring lands. Another newly opened museum in a second-tier city enjoyed the support from their parent company, a developer whose investment primarily focused on lower-tier Chinese cities. Their staff once characterized such a marketing strategy as “xiachen shichang, or sinking market”: they hosted municipal officials to their art museum which was constructed at the top of a high-rise shopping mall, whose panoramic window provided a bird’s-eye view of the cityscape. How can an elevated view possibly lead to a sinking market strategy? The municipal officials would be very flattered to see the developer’s capacity to bring a Mori Art Museum to their city’s skyline. Now, a popular marketing strategy applied by the nation’s e-commerce business which successfully used low-end products to explore a potential market in lower-tier cities is translated into contemporary art circulation. 6. For some pessimists of Chinese museum futures, this model is doomed, considering the recent U-turn of the nation’s ever-tightening real estate policy, in response to its rising infertility rate. However, another case would point out quite an opposite tendency, considering that the venerable UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, after changing hands to a domestic private-equity firm, has now brought this sinking market strategy back on track. In less than five years, they have opened two other franchises with more to come in quite a few other lower-tier Chinese cities. Arguably, a leading museum has now transformed into one that is also conglomerated with professional museum management business. 7. In the latest managerial involution of the Chinese art philanthropy, what used to be a tight salary expense in securing an exhibition team has now been dissolved into temporary scholarships for recruiting a handful of talented Chinese curators-to-be. It might not be a coincidence that, in this scene, the word “neoliberalism” can rarely be seen in the exhibition press releases and critical essays. To put it in Brian Holmes’s terms for further analysis, the key to the culture of involution (as an extended manifestation of evolution) is its rendering of a “flexible personality” back to an “authoritarian” framework. And neoliberalism, the idea that has historically mediated the transition from authoritarianism to flexibility, has gone undetected by Chinese critics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLBkXYAB-lg Ryuichi Sakamoto at the UCCA Sonic Cure Concert 8. In a time of rising infertility rate of cultural reflexivity and criticality, what kind of culture does such involution grow? Perhaps we should consider a peculiar case from UCCA in a time of emergency and crisis. The pandemic had rendered online public events as a norm. But what marks the genesis of those online events? Back in the days when the pandemic was just beginning, UCCA actually organized the first online event of its kind, entitled “Sonic Cure,” at the end of February, 2020, on a live stream APP Kuaishou, a software with a particularly strong user base outside of China’s first-tier cities (thus bespoke the Chinese culture of involution par excellence). The livestream features, amongst others, the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto experimenting with an almost soundless vibration of a cymbal at his home in New York, and later, we got a glimpse of the instrument’s label in Chinese, “Made in Wuhan.” This sentiment mobilized netizens to project Sakamoto’s gesture as one of solidarity with the virus-affected city. He drew their attention to Wuhan as a major center of manufacturing for musical instruments, a fact which might have remained unknown to wider Chinese audiences. Now labeling as a “cymbal of unity,” the music clip facilitated re-imagining a place away from perceptions of hell. To us this viral image serves as an example of good contamination; it also demonstrates that, under Covid-19, there has been a considerable change in approaches to art making, from an emphasis on production to one on sustained practice. Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities WCSCD 2025/2026 educational program lecture series Lecture by Nina Möntmann Decentring the Museum. Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies Time September 10th , 2025, 19:00 Venue: SKUP Novi Sad Nina Montmann lecture is taking point of departure of her recently published book Decentering the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial legacy. Montmann in the book acknowledges transition processes towards decolonization, de-elitiziation, giving emphasis on importance of moving away from collection, exhibition policies that are based on European colonial legacy of institutional rituals that will be also addressed at the lecture. To counter their dwindling relevance in a post-migrant society more and more modern and contemporary art museums are seeking approaches to decenter their collections, policies and infrastructures. In doing so, they can benefit from engaging with the discourses triggered by the restitution processes of the anthropological museum as well as the working methods of small art spaces. In this talk I will introduce the concept and practice of decentring as it can be applied to the museum. I will have a look at the example of the MASP/Museu de Arte São Paulo and the HKW in Berlin and focus on a series of exhibitions and projects that performed the interweaving of diverse colonial histories with imperial modernity that the art historian Ruth Iskin calls for. Nina Montmann is mentor of WCSCD educational program 2025/2026 and she the lecture is organized as part of educational program public encounters in collaboration with SKUP and Sok Cooperative Lecture will be in English Nina Möntmann is Professor of Art Theory at the University of Cologne, curator and writer as well as Principal Investigator at the Global South Study Center (GSSC) at the University of Cologne. Before she has been Professor of Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and curator at NIFCA, the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Curated projects include Naeem Mohaiemen: Langer Tag , Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2023; Måns Wrange: Magic Bureaucracy , Tensta konsthall in Stockholm 2017; Fluidity , Kunstverein in Hamburg 2016; Harun Farocki A New Product (Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2012); If we can't get it together. Artists rethinking the (mal)functions of community (The Power Plant, Toronto, 2008); The Jerusalem Show: Jerusalem Syndrome (together with Jack Persekian), 2009, Parallel Economies in India , (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2006) and the Armenian Pavillion for the 52nd Venice Biennial. She participated in the long-term Israeli/Palestinian art and research project Liminal Spaces , and in 2010 was a research fellow at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. She organized a number of symposia, such as Beyond Cynicism: Political Forms of Opposition, Protest and Provocation in Art , 2012, and New Communities , 2008 (both at Moderna Museet in Stockholm), We, Ourselves, and Us at the Power Plant in Toronto, 2009, and ReForming India - Artistic Collectives Bend International Art Practices at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in New York, 2007. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

Nikita Yingqian Cai < Back Manila shawl and “gold mountain uncles” and Protein demand and chicken farm blockchain Nikita Yingqian Cai Manila shawl and “gold mountain uncles” The Manila shawl was originally from Canton. The silk produced in Shunde – an affluent region since the Ming Dynasty due to its adjacency to water, abundance of agricultural land, and its robust mulberry and sericulture industry – was woven into the shawls hand-made by local embroidery artisans. They adapted designs principally of lotus flowers and dragons to depict flora that resonated better with an international audience, such as roses and carnations. Spanish and Latin American women became enamored with the intricate floral designs, while the shawl’s signature tassels, originating from Native American garments, contributed to the vibrancy of the flamenco dancer’s mellifluous performances. This was the time when Spain dominated the maritime trade route. A range of colonial luxuries including silk products, ceramics, and tea leaves would be loaded in Canton and transported via Manila and Acapulco before arriving in the southern port of Seville in Spain—the same route taken by the explorer Magellan. It would, however, go on to lose its imperial advantages within Asia to the monopoly of [the] East Indian Companies in the 19th century. Travelling in the opposite direction, destined for the Philippines, were Spanish galleons transporting heavy loads of Mexican bullion from South America and devoted Catholic missionaries from Europe. The missionaries arriving early in Luzon had known for a long time that “Catholicizing” the traders ( sangley ) from the southern regions of Imperial China — particularly those from Guangdong, Fujian, and Taiwan — and fostering them as local intermediaries, would aid the Spanish colonial expansion in the area. To this day, there are still some Catholic relics in the region of Sze Yap . The region would later provide a large number of young and cheap laborers for the coolie trade that followed the opium wars. Coolies were deceived into signing up for jobs that had them setting sail from Macau, and drifting for months, before arriving in Peru, Cuba, or the British-controlled Caribbean to earn a pittance shoveling bird droppings, farming sugarcane, or digging the Panama Canal. Some would later travel to the west coast of North America where they provided labor for mines, the construction of transcontinental railways, and the California gold rush. Those who struck rich by panning for gold were referred to as “gold mountain uncles” upon their return home. Right after the peak of the coolie trade, the US signed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, and the racist rhetoric it legitimized would later be a contributing factor in the opening of the notorious immigration station on Angel Island (1910 – 1940). Protein demand and chicken farm blockchain A YouTube video “How to quickly destroy the world’s forests?” produced by PaperClip and WWF sparked accusations from Chinese internet commentators in early 2020 for its direct linking of China’s middle class growing protein demand with deforestation in Brazil. Some of the commentators claimed the “right to development” both for the Brazilians who wanted to do business with China and for the Chinese who could finally afford to consume more meat. It is a third-world developmentalist ghost in the shell of nationalism, and the current trade route of meat and soy between China and Brazil resonates with the long history of mercantile modernity. China’s food security based on pork supply and the Belt and Road Initiative are also connected to Brazil’s soybean chain and the ongoing construction of highway BR-163 in the state of Mato Grosso, which has a fundamental role in commerce, tourism, and the transport logistics of the agribusiness. However, the growing Chinese demand for protein does not have much to do with the CCP and state-owned enterprises as most western media would have depicted. On the contrary, it masks a socio-economic divide which is very much like what is happening around the world. Some people like beef, some people like pork, while some can afford neither but will surely want more. Some might prefer organic food or no meat because they live a cosmopolitan life and are more alert to the surrounding ecological crisis. In some poor villages of hinterland China, one would still have hard time finding beef dishes in home-run restaurants because farmers won’t kill cows for food – they raise the animal for agricultural labor. There are still plenty of small farm holders in rural areas of China, and when compared to industrial farming, have different ways of bonding with their lands and animals. Cows for them are like horses to cowboys (though less romantic). In recent years, some farmers have started raising high-tech chicken in their farms, in which chicken wear leg bands to track their movements as Fitbits for tech start-ups to record the data on a blockchain. That is how technology is transforming the lives of the human and nonhuman – neither the farmers nor the animals have any free choice when confronted by global capitalism. What we should continue to bear in mind is who sustains the flourishing of the world. Nikita Yingqian Cai lives and works in Guangzhou, where she is currently Associate Director and Chief Curator at Guangdong Times Museum. Previous Next

Hu Yun < Back “Topola” (Cottonwood trees) and “Breza” (birch trees) and Chinese wok Hu Yun Key words from Bor:Provided by The Hunter and Miss K (two friends from Bor who guided me during my first visit to Bor) http://old.wcscd.com/index.php/wcscd-curatorial-inquiries/as-you-go-journal/bor/ Collected by Hu Yun Disappearing: “Topola” (Cottonwood trees) A towering native, a cottonwood tree soars and spreads, growing more than 30m tall and almost as wide. It’s a cherished shade tree, often planted in parks. In the wild, cottonwood grows along rivers, ponds and other bodies of water. It also thrives in floodplains and dry riverbeds, where infrequent rains transform dry land into waterways. Historically, cottonwood earned its place as a landscape tree because it grows rapidly, cumulatively up to 1.5m a year. It’s also a favorite for shade, with the large spread helping to cast cooling shade over homes and streets. There’s a cottonwood for nearly any region, with different hardy types in Zones 2 through 9. (Brandt, Wilhelm; Gürke, M.; Köhler, F. E.; Pabst, G.; Schellenberg, G.; Vogtherr, Max., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem Texte : Gera-Untermhaus :Fr. Eugen Köhler,[1883-1914]. www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/303674 ) “Breza” (birch trees) Birch trees belong to the genus Betula and are classified as part of the Betulaceae family of plants. They are typically small to medium-sized trees and shrubs found in temperate zones in the Northern Hemisphere. Some varieties grow in shrubby clusters. Others are trees that clump with multiple trunks. And others grow as classic single-trunk trees. Most birches are characterized by distinctive bark with papery plates; the appearance of the bark often is the feature that gives the species its common names. Birches often form even-aged stands on light, well-drained, particularly acidic soils. They are regarded as pioneer species, rapidly colonizing open ground especially in secondary successional sequences following a disturbance or fire. Mycorrhizal fungi, including sheathing (ecto) mycorrhizas, are found in some cases to be beneficial to tree growth. A large number of lepidopteran insects feed on birch foliage. (Betula pendula Roth, syn. Betula verrucosa Ehrh. Original book source: Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. Source: www.biolib.de ) Appearing: Chinese wok Being the first Chinese person to open a Chinese restaurant in Bor, Chef Qiu’s wok is one of his everyday’s essentials. Image courtesy Chef Qiu, Bor, Serbia Hu Yun is an artist currently based in Melbourne. Previous Next

Anne Bourrassé < Back Art as barrier gestures Anne Bourrassé Early mornings collide with long evenings. Tuesday is like Friday, and Saturday runs without sleep. News are so often repeated that it falls into the norm. The days pass by. Without natural light in the apartment my shadow disappear. It appears behind my back, twice a week, on my way to buy basic necessities. All that remains to be done then is to reconquer the “infra-ordinary”, as Georges Perec calls it, to enchant the usual. There is nothing usual about the crisis. It does, however, impose new attitudes on us, by freezing the binary rhythm. It defines a space for our movements and its choreography of useful gestures. Locked up, the right foot more rarely exceeds the left foot, and vice versa. Big is the magnitude of the situation, small is the space of our condition. How can we extract ourselves from it and apprehend it in new forms? See this crisis as an object in its own right, understanding its language and the tone of its appearances, deducing from it the means of artistic action, even ephemeral and solid. How can we propose an image for the invisible ? How can we lend a material to the impalpable? Artists, curators, critics, operate at a distance to make the sensation of reality take off and allow creation to emit new frequencies. Geographically isolated, but united in the experience of the environment. The studio moved to the home, in a context that constrains us in our possibilities and tools. At the same time, the situation delivers its own atmosphere, it defines its point of view, its materials, its sonorities, and its colours. Resource of inspiration, it sets the tone of time. Art thus becomes a rampart to agitation with its own barrier gestures. Respect the distance with your subject. Listen to your environment. Favour the tools at your disposal. Use your hands regularly. Anne Bourrassé is an independent curator, fostering the interactions between visual arts and humanities. Previous Next

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities On WCSCD educational programme Collective reflections This conversation with What Could Should Curating Do (WCSCD) education programme participants happened in June 2024, during the final part of the 2023/24 education programme. The conversation took place in the rural (the village of Gornja Gorevnica, in central Serbia), as we spent one of the last weeks of the programme together in the WCSCD pedagogical centre.The heat challenged our abilities to focus and to be present during this discussion — the conversation was recorded as temperatures reached 35 degrees celsius in the shade. Writer Toby Üpson, who has been following the programme during its transition over the year, initiated the conversation with questions. Program participants Anna Ilchenko, Asida Butba, Andrey Parshikov, mentor Luigi Coppola and intern Min Chengxiang were present and took part in this conversation. Program participant Laura Rositani wasn't with us during the last visit to the rural. Her responses were introduced to this text later, as the conversation was being transcribed. Overall the conversation tries to reflect on the programme's focus and the embodiment of knowledge. WCSCD’s educational programme was established in 2018, mostly situated in Belgrade. It is an international programme for artists and curators. Having these two positions, curatorial and artistic, in close proximity is very important for WCSCD; in many places that lack an art infrastructure, these positions constantly merge, complement and support one another. The WCSCD educational programme has been a testing ground for creating a collective learning site, a space to think about how to institute differently. The central place of the educational programme in WCSCD’s activities has been vital to the institution; the programme has helped guide us, creating a space to collectively consider many practical questions as well as to think about our future. Biljana Ciric (BC): It’s the 21st of June 2024. Toby, Asida, Andrey, Anna, Luigi, Min, and myself are present. I think it's a good moment to reflect. Toby has some questions which I found interesting and I felt we could think about these together. Toby Üpson (TU): To start off, my first question is really broad and very subjective. The premise of the education programme this year, and its leading question was, what does it mean for an arts institution to become the custodian of land? So, that guiding question automatically implies that the programme is focused around the arts institution and its organisation beyond the programme. In that sense, as participants, I was wondering what and how have you ‘gained’ from the programme — to use a word I don't like —, or at least how have you experienced this process? Asida Butba (AB): You mean in relation to how through knowing our background, what sort of meaning we put into custodianship as a practice, as a way of thinking? TÜ: I think more generally. You signed up and applied to an education programme which is very, very specific. How do you think this process has formed you, if it has formed you, and what have you learned, if anything at all? Anna Ilchenko (AI): Or unlearned. TÜ: Indeed. AI: I was curious about the idea of custodianship, carrying in a larger sense, because of how this word operates in different contexts, in relation to Australian Indigenous communities for example. And how to practise different cultural strategies in order to have a more inclusive society, that sort of thing. I was curious to see whether this situation could somehow be applicable to other contexts. I mean as an experiment, an experimental educational, not practise per se but a condition. It was interesting not just to see but also to practise it [— custodianship]. Of course, I'm oversimplifying because it was purely a kind of artificial, I would say, laboratory situation. But I was curious to see how it could work. Do I know whether it works or if it can be universal, that sort of a strategy? I wouldn't say that I have a clear understanding of how this could be, these ideas come from engaging with knowledges from indigenous communities from other parts of the world. So this is still an open question for me. AB: My motivation to apply was more related to a question of alternative ways of instituting, since I’m organising a space myself that's something that I've been curious about. What are these methods, you know, especially when starting something from scratch with no infrastructural backing, where there’s not a lot of resources to build either or you have to inherit the resources. To me, that was what I found interesting. I'm not sure that the things I learned have anything to do with custodianship of the land. TÜ: How do you think you could apply what you have experienced with the programme to your daily practice? AI: I think that my experience of the programme has been very different. I would say that it fluctuated between inspiration and thoughts you apply to your work directly, but which also have a kind of vagueness or intuitiveness where it's not clear what's going on, where it's not clear how or what the result is going to be. It is an open process. And that's a huge thing. I can go on forever about this and what I can take from this. Andrey Parshikov (AP): After documenta14 I was interested in how and what the connection is between cultural production and the production of goods or food or something like that. I had never thought about that. Second, I never thought about these groups, those who are going into the woods and making something there, who are connected to the land and so on. ‘Land’ was not in my vocabulary as a contemporary practitioner. So it was out of this curiosity that I applied. I learned a lot from the tutors about how artistic value could add something to the production of food and now I understand better all these artists from documenta14, like what their artistic practice is, where their art is and how it works. Laura Rositani (LR): I can certainly relate to Asida's response. My initial motivation for applying was driven by a desire to reconsider my approach to curating, especially in light of my recent learnings. I was and still am particularly interested in exploring more ecological and caring methods of curating. This experience has prompted me to ask many questions: how can I curate a show without artworks? One of the most valuable lessons I've learned is the importance of the process over the material object. The programme made me rethink the methodologies and phenomenologies of new spaces, developing a critical eye and embracing failure sometimes. This was a new experience for me: I've come to realise that the current ‘likes culture’ may not be conducive to learning. This experience has pushed me to think outside of the box and challenge my assumptions. The opportunity to interact with such a diverse and talented group of people from around the world has made me realise how often I limit my view to my own bubble; being with the WCSCD group was enriching. TÜ: It sounds like you all approached the programme with a level of curiosity, an interest you wanted to learn more about. Is it right to say that you've become more knowledgeable about these things? AI: I have implemented the things I learned through the programme in a recent show. Not everything worked but at least this is just something that I felt I could naturally implement both as a curatorial strategy and also as a way to challenge the idea of how to engage with Indigenous context in Russia because these have their own layers of complexity, much more twisted than could be imagined. The exhibition talks about the earth as a political, economic and spiritual agent; we worked with a group of researchers from Yakutia, because of their relationship with the land and their understanding of its purpose as a support system. TÜ: Sounds like there was a knowledge transfer at a simple level taking place. AI: Yeah, I've never done anything before like that. AB: I’ll say there has been an expansion of how I understand what I want to do and what I want to do in the near future. Some of the issues we've discussed here, regarding the land, and some of the readings, give me a sense of the possibilities of what I could do in the environment I work in. Thinking about where I work, I was asking myself what is this? I don't quite understand because I was born in Russia; there are some things I really don't grasp enough and that I have no clue why they work like this. For example, there are activist groups uniting around land-based issues and they are really strong. Young people in their early 20ies have this gut feeling that this is our land, we're not giving it to anybody and so on. I can relate to that. I also work with an indigenous population, in a place where half of the population lives in the rural, it's basically a Caucasus tribe, one living in an unrecognised state [— Abhazia], and I’m actually working with some of these people now, on future programmes for the space I organise. TÜ: How useful was it to have the programme so focused on the rural, and not just in terms of curiosity, in terms of the reality of the situation? In other words, why choose an education programme with no aircon! when you could have been in a library? AP: I didn't want to read books. I wanted to be in dialogue with others and this was a good opportunity for that, an opportunity to learn from other professionals and not from the books, it's always better that way. BC: An embodied experience? AP: Yes, yes, an embodied experience, exactly! AB: It is also all those conversations had beyond the workshops, beyond the presentations and the lectures. For me, these were the spaces for the most fruitful discussions. They were also part of that educational process, for me anyway, and that's why it's important for everybody to be together in a situation like this. Luigi Coppola (LC): After this year, do you think there is a specific category that you can confine to the rural? Is it a specific category for curators or art context to engage with? Do you think there is a specific way of working in this context? AP: Of course, you need to be brave enough to do that. I mean doing an exhibition is one thing and creating the space for rural within contemporary production is another, that’s very different from a traditional art institution. LC: I don't think there is this categorisation. I think it's more a methodology or way to engage with an issue. I don't see the distinction because I don't find a big difference in terms of how the society is built. If we say we have the institution in the city or that an urban area is more educated to the art context what does it mean? Because there are so many rurals; I ema we talk about marginal places, peripheric places, indigenous places, and we categorise everything as a rural place. What we think of as rural is the space for the production of food but it's much more than this. Urban contexts are now also producing food maybe, more than you know. I live in a place where nobody is cultivating anymore there is no attachment to the land, and the people are living exactly with the same trauma, the same mechanism in the city, maybe missing some things in the city, but there is no difference in the way they are educated, they create society, they create a relation. In every context that I've been in, I'm not able to create a category and I don't feel I fit in this idea of rural art, rural artist. I feel all this construction around contemporary art is completely fake, and I don't find this categorisation worth the discussion to be honest, so I try when it's possible to destroy this because I don't feel it's for me. There are so many things that it's more interesting for me to talk about: methodology, engagement, connecting, the way to connect, the way to create, the way to act, the way to practise. We need to talk about situated practice and every time we are in a place we need to discover a methodology for this. AP: It's not about the context. It's very raw. I mean here there is no audience. There is no nothing. There is no… LC: And it is rural? AP: Of course. LC: But it's not part of urban-rural. We can go to many places in the city that are rawer than this. We can go into favelas and we can find people who are very raw. I can show you some raw context in the city. AP: Of course. I'm sorry, but I'm working in a museum. In a museum there is an audience, there is an infrastructure, there is everything. LC: Yeah, but this is an art institution. It's not rural. It's not a question of rural and not rural. AP: But we're building institutions, right? Or alternative institutions. So that's why I'm comparing it to. TÜ: I think it might be useful to reframe a way of thinking. You're in the programme, you're researching, how useful is it to have a specific, project-based, situation like this? To have this institutional project alongside the education programme’s research and the conversations? AI: I think it's very useful. Actually, I really loved this experience here in the village. Also all the rawness that Andrey mentions. Because you're trying to do something and you see the reality of what is really happening. You ask yourself and everyone else more questions, and I think that this is an extremely useful process. The first aspect of the programme was more of a scenery, like all the workshops and so on framed our thinking. I felt that the second part, engaging with this rural context, really required closer engagement with the people who have an understanding of how this place functions, maybe knowing the language. BC: I think that it's interesting that you mentioned this because it's something that I’m thinking deeply about. The majority of the physical programme happened in Belgrade, in a very urban setting. But it's fascinating that when we talk about the programme, we talk about the rural experience. It's very sensorial being together here, living together, eating together, cooking together… AP: Taking showers together… BC: Taking showers together… This experience creates a different bond within the group. This compliments the notion of learning as everyday practice. Figuring out these dynamics interests me; so too, hearing about how our experiences together, in the rural, has left an impression on you. Before moving to the rural we did a methodological preparation. For that we thought about positioning: how do you position yourself as a practitioner, etc., etc. We focused our research with case studies on rural practices from across the Balkans, undertaking a number of field trips to understand these histories and contexts. It was very important that you understood that there were practitioners before us and, like us, that they tried to decenter artistic work. Through this historical research, we learnt where the problems with these practices were, what the struggles were. Indeed, Whilst on our research trips we could actually taste the bitterness of these practices as we encountered their ruins, deepening our thinking about what and how we could learn from these practitioners. So yes, for me it's really interesting to hear how powerful our stay in this rural context was for you, I mean for me as well. AP: We keep forgetting about the part of the programme dedicated to the margins, to the people who went out of the system. This was very important for me as well. When I was living in Moscow I was researching different types of secs, all the case studies and communes we visited resonated with this research, especially in relation to spirituality. LR: To me the situation we experienced in the rural was not that new but still it was challenging. I am not used to sharing the same space with several people for ten days but I believe this brought me to new awareness of myself as a person and as curator. It made me think about the importance of time and slowness: it takes time to get in touch with a community, to take care of it and to come up with something valuable created together. TÜ: Do you think you've gone through a process of unlearning? AI: I wouldn't say ‘what have you unlearned’ is the best question. On a very practical level, I had this knowledge in me already. It's been there since I was a child, I would wash the dishes the same way as you, but I have forgotten all this knowledge after living most of my life in cities. So here the unlearning was more of a case of going backwards, mentally, and unpacking some of the things already embedded within me but which lie latent and unused, like riding a bicycle essentially. TÜ: When I say unlearning I don't just mean bookish knowledge, I mean body-knowledge too. AB: Yes and learning how your body's being socialised. AI: I felt this when we were working with Petra [Pavleka], physically thinking about biodiversity and how to implement this; you took a shovel and your body already knew what to do because you've done it so many times, so this is what I’m saying, it's like riding a bicycle. Growing up I was much more experienced living in the countryside — even though it's a very complex relationship for me because I grew up in the 90s — we had to know how to grow vegetables so we could have food on the table. Being a child you don’t want to go through with this labour, you want to be a kid not planting potatoes. So the rural can be a dark place in some way and that is why I hesitate to go back to something. There were moments of joy, of course, and moments of learning; my grandmother was so knowledgeable about countryside life and I would learn a lot from her. So, for me, an inter-generational relationship and knowledge also resurfaced here. And this is another thing that I asked Luigi when we were having discussion in the autumn; coming from a post-socialist context, for me, it's going back to the countryside and means going back to its models of producing food. I can remember after school or during the summer we would cultivate potatoes for free. Obviously, it was not ‘common wealth for god's sake’ , this was essentially exploitation. For me, this experience surfaces all those complexities. It makes me question the means of labour, its distribution across a labour force as well as all the power dynamics in place or that were in place. TU: I'm very interested in bodily knowledge. You've all grown up, gone down a specific route, normally followed an institutional pathway or a particular curatorial mode of thinking, becoming socialised to that way of working. I am interested to know if you have started thinking about and unthinking how you've been socialised. AB: I mean I can totally relate to Anna regarding the activation of forgotten parts of myself, like washing the dishes or taking a shower or enjoying the view from the window of the toilet. I know these things instinctively, some are active in my present life and others need to be reactivated. I was never really socialised in a... I mean, I do not come from an institution. BC: It's more grass roots. AB: Yeah, I'm not cultivated. I'm just grass root. Just grass. TÜ: Sorry to jump in and to directly ask about your artist space, is the logic you follow to organise this the same logic as the ‘big boy’ institutions? ie, applying for the same pots of funding. I would like to think about this experience in relation to alternative institutional models. AB: Despite my curiosity in alternative methodologies, to organise my space I currently apply to ‘normal’ funding streams. For me, this is the only thing that works honestly. I haven't figured out any other strategy and I don't think that looking at this programme I can see any other strategies that are immediately available to provide me with sustainability. To pursue an alternative system, in my context, I feel I would need to quit whatever I’m doing with my art space and spend two years or more researching alternative strategies. And this is not what I want to do. Our resources in Abhazia are scarce and I’m trying to learn how to do what I do better with these limitations. BC: Can I ask where you think the curatorial is here? AP: While you are creating you are cultivating something or are taking care of something probably. Trying to introduce alternative means of production into cultural institutions that have very traditional and conservative ways of working it's already something curatorial, even thinking about this and thinking about how to do this is curatorial. AB: I think there should be a certain sensitivity to the people we meet in rural areas. For me the curatorial would be to engage more, to try to enter from different angles, to experiment with different means of engagement and to see how people respond. AI: For me it's also about people first, finding people to have conversations with. But also, there is a necessity to care about this place. BC: I have a last question. If the field of curatorial is constituted by the questions we can ask, What is the one question that you would ask after experiencing all the hardship? LC: I'm not sure that the curatorial is constituted by the questions you ask. It's about the care that you put into things, be this an economic thought or the ecology of people. A question isn’t the starting point but a practice. AI: For me, the question, as a cultural practitioner, is about the idea of holistic unity. AB: Maybe my question would be how to create a space that could be productive for listening or how to create a space where everyone present could have a sense of the other or the unknown. LR: More than a question, mine is a thought and again it’s about time and what Luigi called the ecology of people. Working on margins and working on communities requires a lot of time spent on site and with people. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

Yana Gaponenko < Back Activities to stop or to reappear and to be born after (or as a result of) the health crisis Yana Gaponenko Bruno Latour proposes to reflect on the current pandemic situation as the possibility to refuse poisoning and damaging activities we had before it as well as emancipating and liberating ones to appear after we learn to live with the consequences of the pandemic. I may for now conclude that we’ll be totally missing our pre-pandemic brains as we used to miss our pre-internet ones. Nostalgia as a safe space element now defines our daily life practices in quarantine: artists, curators, researchers of all kinds return to their unfinished projects, rethink on their previous background and dive into an inner archeology and inner watching. Diaries will return as a tool of everyday notes and individual archiving and dreams will replace physical travelling in space so people will write down and draw their dreams’ narratives as one of the only unpredictable and not controlled by the state adventures spaces in quarantine times. Past time begins to matter and the concept of the future feels to be reduced. The planning horizon is as narrow as one week maximum. Offline meetings with group activities became extremely precious practices of the past and the concept of collectivity moved from the concept itself to the real people groups quarantine put us in – whether it’s our family we locked in with or our neighbors we rent the space with. At the same time family as a social institution will be reconsidered and people will practice single status much more often after all. All human life spheres will be emphasized with the nationality aspect. The concept of a national state already comes back as geographical borders are now more obvious than ever in past decades. The tools of pandemia fight varies from one country to another. Bio, body management and health maintenance is especially politicized now and have all means of control described once by Foucault. Perhaps control over death will return and replace neoliberal control over life as the medical system isn’t able to sustain so many people suffering from diseases. People will be allowed to die as it was in the Middle Ages. One gets medical help depending on the health system status their country has reached due to inner political decisions of the past. The perverse imbalance of medical help reveals total social injustice in all countries. Vulnerable people became even more vulnerable, precarious cultural workers – even more precarious than earlier. Incest, home violence, suicides will grow. There will become more homeless people as a consequence of the economic crisis and physical distance. Capital, be it financial or symbolic, is the key currency nowadays. Institutionally protected artists and curators will for some time rest in their safe spaces whereas total freelancers and the rest of emerging art makers will show more agility and maybe even invent new means of art production. More and more artists will practice work offline and make crafts and art with palpable materials which will remain after the crisis. Barter as an alternative to money exchange for the service will reappear as a practice of surviving and mutually beneficial cooperation. Home agricultural rituals will reappear and people will live with the vegetables and fruits they planted in their houses which will cause the appearance of the new organic forms of life in a human habitat (worms, insects, etc). Searching for vitamin D people will start moving to the south, and so will the building industry. People will reduce consuming food from the supermarkets, clothes (they may use each other’s protecting costumes when going outside now) and the entertaining experience will remain individual as in quarantine times. Invisible labour done by women in families such as housekeeping and childcare will be equated to the paid work and become more regulated and protected. Office work and going to school will cause a lot of debates after the pandemic and will split society into those who put real interactions at the forefront and others who don’t trust people after all biological battles. Vernissages, public art discussions and symposiums will be held less often than before being replaced by individual tours and consultations for those who can afford it. Art infrastructure will be represented by two polar agents: very strong state art institutions with national old art collections and low horizontal self-organised initiatives. No ‘middle class’ private cultural institutions will survive the crisis. Artwork logistics will become chaotic, works will be bought directly from artists studios, there will become more private collections as collectors will support living artists on a barter basis, making collections of the future look subjective. More and more international council boards will appear to decide on the future of art producing today. Big art institutions will combine their collections for mutual survival and reduce exhibition spaces which no one may maintain anymore. National cultural memory of third world countries will since upcoming times be owned by big players among capitalist countries, bringing us to the new era of informational colonisation. Some practices which will most likely be back but not wished: Elite individual original artworks experience (will make capitalistic gaps even bigger) Rewriting history and informational colonisation (oblivion and propaganda will lead to irrevocable consequences) Alt-right and nationalistic tendencies will grow Control over death replacing control over life (ethical crisis) Some practices which will most likely be back and are wished to: Barter and exchange economy (will strengthen horizontal connections) Self-sufficiency with nature materials, sewing clothes, planting food, crafts (will reduce consumerism) Diary notes, archiving, inner archeology, mail art (will reduce visual overproduction) Vladivostok as a relatively young Russian city (est. in 1860) has always been aside from major empire or state disasters and used to be “a state in the state”. As a voluntary and adventurous place it was discovered by those who were ready to start their life from scratch and had nothing to lose or were forced to settle these lands from the west. This entrepreneurial vein comes to the fore every time the region is in crisis. So nowadays, pandemic unfortunately doesn’t deter people from going to work because otherwise they won’t survive the economic crisis. Extremely remote position from the place of state decision making will leave my region to survive on its own as it has already been doing during the 1990s. Poaching seafood and wild animals will intensify, that’s the way people will become closer to nature here. Vladivostok used to be a closed city until the 1990s, therefore solely as a speculation we may assume that the pandemic of 2020 will just make this isolated city as remote and independent as it already used to be thirty years ago and before it as well (exactly one hundred years ago when the Far Eastern Republic was proclaimed here for a couple of years). Yana Gaponenko (born 1988) – curator, lives and works in Vladivostok, Russia. Previous Next