< Back The Election Conundrum: Ethiopia’s Determination to hold the 6th National Election and its Ramifications 20 June 2021 Naol Befkadu The official NEBE logo of the 6th National Election with the hashtag “Via Election Only” It was Abraham Lincoln, the US president during the civil war, who famously said, “Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision.” However, Abraham Lincoln did not consider at least two things. One is that the case for Africa is different, and the other is that when a pandemic hits the world, it changes a lot of things. Ethiopia was not the only nation to postpone its election in 2020. In fact it is among 78 countries around the world that should have undertaken elections in 2020 but were forced to postpone due to the pandemic. The 6th Ethiopian national election was expected to be held on August 29, 2020, but due to the pandemic it was indefinitely postponed until further notice from the Ministry of Health regarding the course of the pandemic. In December 2020, the Ministry of Health announced that the election could take place with necessary COVID-19 related precautions. Hence, the National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) planned for the polls to open on June 5th 2021. In early May the NEBE claimed that facilities were not ready for the election to take place on time, and rescheduled for June 21, 2021. There are many sides to the story of the election. Some believe that the election is a sham and should not take place while others adamantly support it. By now the situation in Ethiopia has been internationalized with so many spectators now accustomed to inserting their feet into it. The true picture of the country is yet to be unveiled to the international community who seem to be concerned with the recent situation in Ethiopia. Before I go deep into the opinions surrounding the 6th national election and the situation in the country in the general, it is necessary to have a sense of the background; hence, I will try to briefly paint the main events in the life of the country in the 20th and 21st centuries. Brief Background to the Story: From the Student Movement to the Qerroo Revolution Most scholars agree that the 20th century was the bloodiest and the most revolutionary century in Ethiopia’s history, politically speaking. The country endured an invasion by Italy (1930-35); a student movement that in 1974, brought down the monarchical government of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie Ⅰ, the longest reigning emperor of Ethiopia; the ‘Red Terror’ massacre that took the lives of hundreds of thousands; the civil war that resulted in the downfall of the Derg regime (1974-1991); and the devastating Ethiopian-Eritrean war of 1998-2000. While all those events are thought to have left a significant blueprint on the course of the country, there are three events that take the lion’s share in shaping political ideology, government structure and the economic model of the country. They are the 1970s student movement that took the voice of the peasants to the streets and to academia; the establishment of a communist government by a leading military junta (post-1974); and the downfall of the Derg regime by the joint force of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary and Democratic Front (EPRDF). Photo taken during a rally of Addis Ababa University students in the 1970s holding a banner that reads “Popular Government Must Be Established.” The 1970s student movement brought down the centuries-old Abyssinian monarchical system. The goal of the movement was twofold. Firstly, to bring an end to the feudalistic system that abused peasants all over the country. This feudalistic system had been in operation in the country for many centuries. With the dominant ruling Amhars tribe operating all over the country collecting unfair taxes from the peasants, the country was led by monarchs and autocrats who claim to have descended from the line of Judah. The student movement stood against such irrational notions. Secondly, beside the class struggle, the student movement also had another goal which was a national struggle. Although the country was made up of 87 nations, only the Abyssinians—comprising the Amharas and Tigres, who are historically the northern highland settlers—were dominant politically, culturally and economically. Hence, the student movement also brought to the fore the question of nations and nationalities and different ethnic and religious groups. A great example of these questions was the paper titled, “On the Questions of Nations and Nationalities of Ethiopia” by Wallelign Mekonnen, at the time a student at Haile Selassie I University. This paper is thought to be groundbreaking with its pioneering introduction of equality and recognition of nations and nationalities for different groups in the country. In light of this student-led movement in the 1970s, we assumed what the course of the country in the following decades would look like. Contrary to our expectation, the road to the fulfillment of the voices and cries of the 1970s generation (it is usually regarded as ‘The Then Generation’) was not smooth and easy. Many lives were taken and many are still sacrificing for their rights at the time of writing this article. Following the 1970s revolution, the military acted out and the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, was overthrown in 1974. A transient military junta was created with Mengistu Hailemariam as president of the transitional government also known as “Derg”. Though the Derg was a military junta, it had a political manifesto and acted as a political entity. Most of the early 1970s elites also directly supported the regime. With a growing communist trend in the world, the military government of Ethiopia had been associated with communism and became one of the foremost advocates of communist ideology. Church and state were separated and the government officially declared itself atheist. This was in direct contradiction to the history of the country, mostly that of the Abyssinians who, for centuries had anointed Kings and Queens with an ordination of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The Derg, although initially supported by the 1970s elites, gradually lost credibility from the enlightened groups in the country when the military government became totalitarian and started attacking those who opposed its ideology. Mengistu Hailemariam, the president of the communist regime, became another dictator that Africa had to witness. However, Mengistu also faced many challenges. From the East, the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF) under Siad Barre tried to invade Ethiopia’s Ogaden region. In the North, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had been waging war to declare their freedom. And in the West, the Oromo Liberation Front had already started conquering land. While the Ogaden war of 1978-79 ended with Ethiopia claiming victory, the Northern war continued for more than a decade. The war in the North between the communist regime and the liberation forces took on the nature of a civil war. Many ethnic forces also joined the liberationist camps and jointly fought the communist regime. Eventually, the communist military junta also known as Derg, gave up and the EPRDF took power in 1991. The Derg military junta that ruled the country from 1974 to 1991 was overthrown by the joint forces of EPRDF, EPLF and OLF. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary and Democratic Front (EPRDF), which took power on the famous day of May 28, 1991. EPRDF expelled OLF of Oromia and eventually separated with the EPLF of Eritrea. EPRDF was then a party comprised of four big chapters, namely: the aforementioned Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), and the Southern People’s Democratic Movement (SPDM). The coming to power of EPRDF was another dramatic change that took place in 20th century Ethiopia, because EPRDF made several changes to the nature of the country. Regarding the economy, the country started following a free-market system in principle and a mixed system in practice. Following the revolution the country also changed its structure from unitary to a federal state that was divided into nine (now ten) self-administering regional states. This was in line with the demands of the student movement in the 1970s. Hence, many ethinc groups were recognized and their languages and cultures were appreciated under the EPRDF system. This was mainly made possible through the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia’s 1995 constitution. The revolution handed the people a constitution that guaranteed human rights and religious freedom and promised free and fair elections. It was ratified in December 1995. It was the first of its kind in Ethiopia, which has had three constitutions. Of the three, the 1995 constitution was different with its liberal, democratic and inclusive nature. However, some still critiqued it saying the constitution gives undue attention to collective rights such as the rights of nations, nationalities and people, while focusing less on the individual rights of citizens. For an outsider it seems EPRDF had already answered the two big questions of the 1970s generation. Not so fast. In practice, there were many shortcomings of EPRDF’s system. The TPLF, the dominant party in the EPRDF, although representing the Tigray region that comprised only 6% of the total population, ruled the country with an iron fist for two decades, through its longtime leader and the Prime Minister of Ethiopia the late Meles Zenawi. The Oromia and Amhara regions, which comprise the two largest ethnic communities in the country, who go by the same name respectively, were sidelined by the TPLF. Their organizations OPDO and ANDM were also nothing more than puppets that followed their master TPLF even though they represented a huge constituency compared to TPLF. It is worth remembering here that the TPLF dominated the EPRDF and had expelled the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) who moved military operations outside Ethiopia, mainly from Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya’s jungles into central Ethiopia. The TPLF-led regime faced many challenges after taking power in 1991. Among them was the 2005 election where post-election riots resulted in many deaths in the capital Addis Ababa. Moreover, with its longstanding leader and longtime Prime Minister of Ethiopia, Melese Zenawi dying in 2012, the EPRDF faced huge challenges especially with regards to replacing the longtime leader. Eventually, Hailemariam Dessalegn of SPDM succeeded the late prime minister. It has been said that Hailemariam Desselegn did not really act as a prime minster, but rather was a marionette, a puppet, to say the least. It was the TPLFites who, behind the curtain, held the leading role. Hailemariam Dessalegn faced a huge popular protest especially after the announcement of the Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan (AAIMP) in 2014. The AAIMP was a project intended to expand Addis Ababa’s border into the surrounding Oromia cities. This created a huge backlash from the young Oromos also called Qerroo (‘young man’ in Oromo language). Oromo youths also known as Qerroos crossing their hands in public to display their discontent The Qerroos became the anthem of another popular revolution in the country. They became the motor of the 21st century revolution, perhaps the largest by constituency and scale,that the country has ever seen. The protests engulfed the universities of the country and the Hailemariam government tried to silence the protests using force, which resulted in the death of more than 5,000 Qerroos in four years. Here it is also worth mentioning the role of diaspora media and influential people like Jawar Mohammed, the notable activist and director of the frontline media of the protest, the Oromia Media Network (OMN). The protests that erupted in Oromia later spread to the whole country, with other protests and long silenced voices being heard across many regions and towns. The protests cost too much, however, after four years they bore fruit with the resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn as Prime Minister of Ethiopia. The protests were also supported by the OPDO and ANDM authorities because of the visible problems that were occurring in the country. The OPDO and ANDM officials secretly formed a resistance team named after Lemma Megersa, the then president of the Oromia region. ‘Team Lemma’ as it was later called, operated in communication with the protestors to bring an end to TPLF’s hegemony. It should also be noted that cooperation between Amhara and Oromo was not expected by the TPLF because of the nature of the dominant political ideologies of the two camps. The Amharas favored a Unitarian set-up in the country, while the Oromos were adamant with regards to an ethno-linguistic federal structure. While the Amharas were regarded as assimilationists, the Oromos were often called “separationists”. It is through this historical discourse that the TPLF managed to lead the country as a diluting and a neutralizing agent in relation to the tensions between the Amhara and Oromo factions. However, Team Lemma proved the TPLFites wrong. The experiment to unite the Amhara and the Oromo forces was successful under Team Lemma, or at least it seemed to be. After the resignation of Hailemariam Dessalegn, there was a huge contest between TPLF and Team Lemma over who would take over the premiership. Team Lemma, being from the Oromo chapter had the dominant hand and was favored to take the position of the prime minister. However, Lemma Megersa, the leader of Team Lemma was not a member of the House of People’s Representatives (HPR) and so couldn’t become prime minister. His deputy, Abiy Ahmed (PhD) was elected in place of Lemma to represent the Oromo faction of EPRDF (the OPDO) in the urgent meeting to replace the departing prime minister. Abiy Ahmed won the majority of votes in the EPRDF executive meeting to become the president of the party and two days later, in April 2018 Abiy Ahmed (PhD) became the first Oromo Prime Minister of Ethiopia. Abiy Ahmed: the Voice of Synergy (Medemer) Abiy Ahmed sounded a voice of freedom, unity and love from the first day he became prime minister. From his first day in office, he made many big moves. He released more than 40,000 prisoners and prisoners of conscience. He traveled across every region in the country and preached love and unity and promised peace, stability and freedom. His philosophy is “medemer” roughly translated as synergy. According to Abiy Ahmed himself, medemer is nothing but a collective effort to fulfill a shared vision. He shook the country with this idea. But by far, the most extraordinary measure the prime minister took, was his reconciliation with Eritrea. Hailemariam Dessalegn handing the Constitution to Abiy Ahmed, the incoming Prime Minister of FDRE, on the day Abiy was inaugurated. As stated earlier, Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war over border disputes from 1998-2000, a conflict which was resolved by an intervention from the UN. In this conflict, which is regarded as one of Africa’s deadliest wars, no less than 100,000 people were killed from both sides. Since June 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea had been in a no-war no-peace state. Abiy Ahmed was able to break this silence and extended a welcoming hand to the Eritrea’s longtime president Isaias Afewerki, after 18 years! Long story short, Ethiopia and Eritrea resolved their issues under the leadership of Abiy Ahmed which was the reason he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Abiy also invited many of the exiled political figures and forces back into the country. Many of them returned to huge celebrations. Some of the most well-known returned political personalities included, Berhanu Nega (who had been expelled after the 2005 riot), Dawud Ibsa (exiled OLF leader), Jawar Mohammed and many others. While their admission to the country was a sign of democracy that was cheered and celebrated, it wasn’t without its consequences. They represented not only different popular segments of society, but also polarized political ideologies. Abiy Ahmed inherited a severely divided country with unresolved issues. His job was to heal the division and bring the various polarized ideologies in the country to the table. However, this wasn’t without its own challenges. Primarily, the polarized politics could not help his vision of a unified country. The term ‘unity’ has been associated with a specific political side in the country, just as ‘secessionist’ has also been tied to a specific political ideology. Every speech and action of the prime minister was critically observed and interpreted by different bodies in the country. Secondary to this was the issue with the TPLFites, which was not resolved. Since the ascension of the new prime minister, the TPLFites felt betrayed by the OPDO and ANDM who were already seen as siding with the people during the protest years. Hence, most of the TPLF members left their positions at federal level to focus on, and were limited to, their region, Tigray. Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region became the center of opposition to Abiy Ahmed’s government. Furthermore, Abiy Ahmed’s government had also received challenges related to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that was being built in the Bennishangul region of Ethiopia on the Abbay River (Blue Nile). When finished, GERD is going to be Africa’s largest hydroelectric power station. However, Ethiopia had to convince the lower Nile basin countries, particularly Egypt and Sudan, regarding the impact of the dam with regards to the content of the Nile water. Ethiopia had faced a huge challenge from the two countries prior to Abiy’s ascension to power, but was able to manage the challenges, as far as convincing Sudan to stand beside Ethiopia. However, following Abiy’s coming to power, the dynamics of the geo-politics of the horn of Africa, and East Africa in general, were yet to be unveiled. It is with those fierce challenges in play, that Abiy Ahmed’s government decided to undergo the 6th national election in 2020. The 6th National Election: the Postponement and its Consequences If the reader were to travel to the countryside in Ethiopia and ask how the 6th national election is being perceived, they might get very different perspectives. Some think that the election would have significant impact in the country, while others say that the election is nothing but the usual drama of the EPRDF (now the Prosperity Party). However, no matter how many different perspectives there are surrounding the election, there is a universal desire in the Ethiopian people that this election takes place peacefully. This is because the country has been on the verge of failure ever since the postponement of the election in 2020 was announced. While the postponement was due to the pandemic, what were the results of the election’s postponement? There are, I believe, five consequences of the postponement of the election that was supposed to take place in 2020. These consequences are the reason why the country is currently in an internationalized mess and why Abiy Ahmed went from a Nobel Laureate in 2019 to a suspected war monger and genocidal leader by the end of 2020. The first consequence of the postponement of the election, is the sentiment it created among different political parties in the country. The Oromo opposition parties saw the decision as the government’s way of illegitimately prolonging its term. Added to this was the already growing tension between TPLF and the government. They saw the decision by the government as a pretext to lead the country for a longer period. Secondly, the postponement also resulted in the TPLF defying the federal order and organizing its own regional election in Tigray. The TPLF badly wanted the election because they knew if the election were to take place in August 2020, Abiy Ahmed’s party would not win because of the huge contest it would face in the Oromia region. Hence, they saw the election as the easiest way of getting rid of Abiy Ahmed’s federal government. Seeing this from afar, the federal government seemed to use the pandemic to postpone the election. In June 2020, the TPLF executive committee decided to hold the election in Tigray region, defying the federal order. The constitution was silent about the issue of organizing a regional election and the TPLFites used this loophole to establish their own election committee. The tensions between the federal government and the Tigray region grew by the day. The Late Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundessa Thirdly, the postponed election already created discontent among Oromo parties, popular figures and supporters. This eventually grew into another round of protests by the Qerroos, the Oromo youths, who had been silent for a while since the ascension of the prime minister. The Qerroos demanded change in the Oromia and the opposition parties promised huge measures if they won the election. To the contrary, the Oromia chapter of the ruling party, PP, was dormant regarding popular questions. Gradually, pressure grew on the government, resulting in popular Oromo figures finally coming out in public denouncing the government’s actions. One of the popular Oromos was Hachalu Hundessa, a musician and an activist for Oromo rights who fought with music during the Oromo Protest of 2014-2016. Hachalu Hundessa was interviewed on OMN, a media outlet dominated by opposition narratives, and he made firm claims against the prime minister and his ideologies. Two weeks after his interview was aired on OMN, Hachalu Hundessa was assassinated. The government immediately blamed TPLF and Shene (the governments’ term for the Oromo Liberation Army that is the military wing of the now returned Oromo Liberation Front). Opposition parties and political figures accused the government of assassinating Hachalu and on the same day as his death, the government initiated a crackdown on major political figures in the country. Jawar Mohammed, Bekele Gerba, Hamza Borana and Dejene Tafa of the Oromo Federalist Congress party were arrested. Eskinder Nega from the Balderas party was also arrested. OLF’s party offices were also raided and major members of the party’s executive committee were thrown in jail. But it is also wise to ask how the Oromo youths grew discontented with Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo. There are several reasons, minor and major. However, the main reason relates to Abiy’s vision of a more unitary state, which would mean dismantling the current federal system. For many, this was demonstrated by Abiy’s dissolution of the EPRDF into a new merged party named Prosperity Party (PP) in October 2019. This was a huge decision for many because Abiy dissolved the EPRDF, which had ruled the country for nearly three decades. Prosperity Party, the newly merged party, had a Unitarian outlook rather than a federalist one. This was not welcomed by the Oromo youths and the Oromo parties. In fact even Lemma Megersa, the former Oromia president, did not welcome the merger. However, Abiy pressed on with his idea of a merged party. It is onto this dissatisfaction of the Oromo youths that the government added the indefinite postponement of the election. The fourth consequence of the postponement of the election was the growing armed resistance in Western Ethiopia. One of the Abiy Ahmed administration’s initial decisions was to welcome exiled political figures and fronts. OLF resisted returning home even after Abiy Ahmed went to invite them back. For this reason, the then Oromia president Lemma Megersa and the then Foreign Minister of Ethiopia Workneh Gebeyehu, went to Eritrea to discuss with Dawud Ibsa, OLF’s president. They reached a verbal agreement for OLF to return to the country. Dawud Ibsa was welcomed by millions of his supporters at Addis Ababa on that historic day in September 2018, six months after PM Abiy took office. However, OLF had an army—the Oromia Liberation Army (OLA), the majority of which was stationed in Eritrea, with some in Kenya and others in Western Oromia. While those OLA soldiers returning from Eritrea were disarmed and were assimilated into the government’s training program, the Western and Southern OLA commanders did not give up their armies and the trials to disarm those fronts failed a number of times following OLF’s admission into the country. This created an increased rivalry between Abiy Ahmed’s government and OLF’s Dawud Ibsa which finally forced OLF to separate itself from OLA in April 2019. The government undertook heavy military operations to eradicate OLA from Western and Southern Oromia in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and yet they did not manage to defeat them. OLA soldiers controlled a good part of the Western and Southern Oromia in 2019 alone. However, they returned to their guerrilla warfare against the government, which continues to this day. Following the postponement of the election, OLA released a press statement saying that the government would be illegitimate after September 2020. In the meantime, the other dangerous zone beside Western Oromia had been the Bennishangul region where Bennishangual Liberation Armies had been fighting with the federal government and the Amhara militias, resulting in the death of several civilians in the region. The Bennishangul fighters’ demands were very difficult to diagnose. However, the government linked them with the TPLF. The killings in Western Oromia and Bennishangul resulted in the last, but not the least consequence of the election’s postponement. The last but not least consequence of the postponement of the election has been the now internationalized war in Northern Ethiopia. It was expected by many that the TPLF and federal government would go to war. TPLF became a great threat to Abiy’s administration after they held their own election in September 2020. TPLF won the election by far, after competing with some parties based in the Tigray. The federal government did not recognize the election. The TPLF then started their propaganda saying that the federal government is illegitimate. As the tension between the federal government and the Tigray region grew, both parties began holding military parades in public, week after week. Abiy made several visits to Eritrea as a warning to the TPLF, since the TPLF-led EPRDF had gone to war with Eritrea in 1998-2000 and Isaias Afewerki, president of Eritrea, wanted revenge for the losses his government suffered during the war. On November 4, 2020, Abiy Ahmed appeared on national television to declare a state of emergency in the Tigray region, saying that the TPLF militias had attacked the Northern Command base of the Ethiopian Defense Force (EDF). Abiy labeled this war ‘law enforcement’ and invited Amhara militia, Eritrea and Somalian forces to side with him. Even though many local and international organizations warned both parties before the onset of this war, nothing seemed to have been able to stop the war from happening. Day after day, both sides declared victories in their media. Three weeks into the war, Abiy Ahmed declared the ‘final’ victory on national television, after conquering Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, saying that no civilian had been injured and Eritrean forces were not involved. However, the TPLF had chosen to scatter to the remote regions of Tigray to take up guerilla warfare. In the meantime President Isaias got his longtime desire of winning over the TPLF. Today, the simple ‘law enforcement’ that was started in November has reached its seven month, resulting in an incalculable number of deaths and a humanitarian crisis. The atrocities committed by the EDF, Amhara and Eritrean forces have been documented by major world news outlets. The issue has become a topic for the G7 and UN. Now, it is wise to pause and remember how the postponement of the election played a huge role in this devastating, and to this day, ongoing war. Despite what is happening in the country however, by the time of the writing of this article, the government is weeks away from undergoing the 6th national election. The 6th National Election: The Expectations By now the first question that would come to the reader’s mind might be, ‘What are Ethiopians expecting from this election?’ Well, to answer this question in short, there is not much expectation among the majority of Ethiopians in this election. Contests are expected in the Amhara region and Addis Ababa particularly. The election is not even going to take place in Somali. NEBE’s data shows that the election is not going to take place in many places including Western Oromia, parts of Bennishangul Gumuz region, the entire Somali and Tigray regions and so on. The European Union decided not to send a committee to watch the election process after the standard EU requirements were not met by the Ethiopian government. The Biden government of the United States of America urged for a national dialogue. This came after the US decision to restrict visas for Ethiopian and Eritrean officials following the atrocities committed in the Tigray war. The case for the Oromia region is a very different one. The Oromo people are not going to be represented in this election by any of the dominant parties since the leaders of the parties are imprisoned. Hence, only the ruling party is running for the election in Oromia, the largest region of the country. In the Amhara region, the second largest region, there are several parties besides the Prosperity Party (PP), such as the National Movement of the Amhara (NAMA), the Enat party, EZEMA and others. The results are yet to be predicted, let alone known in the Amhara region. A huge contest is expected. However, what would this bring to Ethiopians in general? It is yet to be known. Amhara politics is at its most complex, climactic stage. There are ethno-nationalists such as NAMA and partly the Amhara chapter of PP (APP) who advocate for a stronger Amhara region and the respect of Amhara rights, and there are Ethio-nationalists such as EZEMA and Enat. The Ethio-nationalists seem to be losing to the ethno-nationalists based on the campaigns we see. However, the result is yet to be known. One thing both the Ethio-nationalists and the Amhara ethno-nationalists have in common is that they both plan to change the 1995 FDRE constitution. The same is true in Addis Ababa. There are several parties running for office. EZEMA, Balderas and Prosperity Party are the three parties to have a huge contest in the city. EZEMA led by Birhanu Nega, PhD, is favored, if we can predict based on the 2005 election results where the majority of seats in Addis Ababa were won by CUD, Birhanu Nega’s party at the time. However, things have changed. Abiy Ahmed also has a huge constituency in Addis Ababa. Adanech Abebe, Addis Ababa’s mayor and a PP candidate, had a very successful campaign where many turned out en masse to support her. The Balderas Party, although younger than the above two, also has good support from the younger generation. Balderas’ campaign motto is to save Addis Ababa and to make Addis Ababa a self-governing region. Even if the election goes well, total results cannot be known and a new government cannot be formed since there are places and regions that will not go to the polls for security and other reasons. NEBE issued a press release saying that the second part of this election will be carried out on September 6, 2021. Until then, no one can know the exact result of the election. Hence, a new government will not be formed in June. The 6th national election of Ethiopia is then, an experiment that is going to take place with mixed feelings among Ethiopians. It will take place when Tigray is in the midst of a huge humanitarian crisis; Western Oromia is under command post; the world is watching the developments in Ethiopia closely; and a possible disintegration of the state is in the air. Naol Befkadu , MD, is a physician based in Addis Ababa. Previous Next

< Back The Sustainable Museum Ljubljana 12 Apr 2020 Zdenka Badovinac Drawing by Nika Ham In September 2018, I wrote “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary” ( [ My Post-catastrophic Glossary , 305–326]), which was in essence a kind of glossary of memory relating to my professional work. At the time, I never dreamed that, a year or so later, a pandemic would force museums into a situation not unlike what I was describing in my glossary. The key questions that stand behind the entries in the glossary, which were illustrated by the artist (and Moderna galerija museum guard) Nika Ham, are: How should museums function in times of extreme limitations? and, How can we create fairer and more equal cultural exchanges on the global scale? The impact of the pandemic is already apparent: museums all over the world are reporting enormous losses. The world’s major museums are facing huge drops in revenues, in some cases as much as several hundred thousand euros a week. Big international exhibitions are being cancelled, because, given insurance issues, the redistribution of public funds, and scheduling conflicts, preparations are too risky for these times. A museum’s revenue losses are nominally proportional to its financial strength: institutions with an annual budget of €10 million or more are seeing losses of several millions, while the Moderna galerija, which receives €2 million annually, foresees in one month “only” some €18,000 less than in “normal” times. Despite these numbers, institutions with smaller budgets will draw the short straw. Not only are museum activities affected, but, everywhere, so are the people who work at museums, both salaried employees and, most severely, their external co-workers, who almost overnight are finding themselves out of work. Small-budget institutions, which themselves are barely able to breathe, cannot do very much to help such workers. But at the Moderna galerija, we are at least drawing attention to the ever more precarious position of our external co-workers through the project Several Flies at One Blow , in which we have continued to employ a number of our museum guards/students for a while longer by having them deliver food and other necessities to artists infected with the coronavirus and our pensioners. Also, like many other museums, we quickly developed several online projects, most of which link to our collections and archives but there are some that also respond to the current situation. Of course, everyone is wondering how long the pandemic will last and what its long-term consequences will be. Museums will undoubtedly have to operate under greatly altered conditions. It will be probably be some time before we are again able to go to openings, greet each other with friendly hugs, and exchange our impressions face to face. And almost certainly, we will be working under worse conditions than we did before; even now our funders are advising us to focus primarily on our collections and archives, in other words, what we have under our own roof. And what about artists? How in the future will we be able to support them and other threatened groups – not only professionals such as writers, translators, and designers, but also refugees, the homeless, and other marginalized communities? For a long time now, museums have been more than just places for housing and presenting art; they have become important sites for critical discourse, social sensitivity and solidarity, and the imagining of a better future. Certainly, the catastrophe in which we now find ourselves is also an opportunity to think about an even stronger social role for the museum. At a time when public space is reduced to balconies and windows and we are increasingly becoming captives of the virtual world, museums should be contemplating an even more active social role for themselves. The fact that the economic aspect of our work will only become more difficult obliges us to think about and propose an alternative economy, an economy of solidarity, one that is based not primarily on a market economy but on the direct exchange of services and the results of work, as well as donations. Museum associations throughout the world are warning governments that funds must be made available for the revitalization of museums after the present crisis. Italy’s museums, for example, have recently asked the Italian government to establish a National Fund for Culture. It is also incumbent on us to refocus the priorities within our existing programmes. Living artists must come first; we must develop acquisition funds intended primarily for working artists and in this way help them to survive. It is necessary to respect our resources, not just in terms of our collections and archives but also in terms of people – everyone with whom we collaborate and together produce meaning for our work. For the most part, these are people from our own environment, from the environment in which our museum is situated, but also from the environments of our “trans-situatedness”, by which I mean all the spaces where people work with whom we join in the effort to respond to the dilemmas of the global world. Through our “trans-situatedness” we can develop more equitable exchanges of ideas on the global level. All these things are conditions of the “sustainable museum”, which, indeed, is one of the entries in “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary”. But I first wrote about the sustainable museum in connection with the exhibition Low-Budget Utopias , which was drawn from the Moderna galerija’s own collections. Among other things, I presented a diagram showing four museum models (besides the sustainable museum, there was also the universal museum, the global museum, and the meta-museum). The essence of the sustainable museum is that it actively operates within the framework of a certain community and does this by working with others – with artists, various kinds of stakeholders, and socially engaged groups, individuals, and organizations – people who, in the L’Internationale confederation of museums, we refer to as “constituencies”. The constituencies of a museum are those resources without whom the museum, as a museum of its time, could no longer survive today. It goes without saying that the sustainable museum is also a “green” museum, but more than this, it is first and foremost a museum of its constituencies, for whom and with whom it is continually transforming. The sustainable museum, therefore, lives the same life as its community, who are shaped by a multitude of constantly changing relationships and interests. The sustainable museum is grounded in the resources of its environment, in people and their work, and in nature, and as such it connects with other environments. It does not address its public from any exalted position of expertise with only the “weapons” of its collections and archives; on the contrary, it is open to interaction. In “My Post-Catastrophic Glossary” I describe a situation in which all museums have been destroyed, along with their collections and archives. Only people and their memories remain. And these are not just the memories of the experts, but also those of museum guards, visitors, and everyone else. Maybe one of the priorities of the post-pandemic museum should be work on developing a future collective memory that will include all of the museum’s constituencies. Translated by Rawley Grau Click to read Slovenian version Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer, who has served since 1993 as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Previous Next

< Back Untitled 10 July 2021 Naol Befkadu Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, Burtukan’s Coffee, 4-Kilo, July 2021 Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, July 2021 Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba, Lime Tree Cafe, Kazanchis, July 2021 Stories form the Room, Addis Abeba, Enetewawek Cafe, Olympia, July 2021 In 2020 at the brunt of the lockdown Jasphy Zheng, an interdisciplinary artist living between Brooklyn and China, initiated a public art project, “Stories from the Room” exploring new modes of connecting people amidst pandemic induced isolations. Stories from the Room, writes Jasphy, is a participatory long-term project that collects personal writings about the shared experience of living through this “new normal” and builds a living archive that could be reproduced in different localities. An ongoing open call accepts submissions from all over the globe, unrestrained by language, form, or geographic location. In an experiment that pushes the boundaries of traditional archive, Stories from the Room adopts to the contexts of its host city as a living, malleable “Structural Monument”. Thus far, iterations of this project are held in Japan, Australia, China, Serbia, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia. The latest iteration in Addis Abeba, which began at the end of June 2021 takes an analog form, with writing stations installed in 3 selected cafes across the city. Story submissions were made with handwritten notes and voice recordings. Naol Befkadu who visited the project in Addis writes his reflection in free form, sharing his inner dialogue that unfurls in unexpected directions, from the significance of coffee culture in the city to the current temperament of people living in Addis – suspended between a raging war in the North of the country and a pretense of normalcy by the government. His musings offer an analytical reading of the project, and slowly combs through the ease and discomforts of public interactions in the current climate. Stories from the Room, Addis Abeba is presented by As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future together with Curtain project by Rockbund Art Museum and Contemporary nights. This edition took place between June 29 – July 5 in 3 Cafes, Burtukan’s Coffee in 4 kilo, Lime Tree in Kazanchis, and Enetewawek Cafe in Bole Olympia. Naol Befkadu , MD, is a physician based in Addis Ababa. Previous Next

Throughout the first year of inquiry, As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future , most of the research has dealt with human-made changes and how this has interfered with the local life of other people. However, there is very little mention of the non-human world, or an acknowledgement of its existence and transformation. For the april edition of our online journal , I asked each researcher and partner cells (if there are many of you in one cell, you must still each individually participate) to contribute two keywords. The first describing one non-human existence which has disappeared from the earth in relation to the changes within their research. The second a non-human existence that has emerged from the new living conditions that have transformed within your respective research. The keyword and its accompanying description could range from one sentence to an entire page, could be sounds of short video, and image. This special feature of journal in march will acknowledge our interdependence in the world that virus reminded us of but also proposition to act and view the world as truly interconnected web knowing that we are just one part of it. It is invitation to become conscious of the world under our feet, making each step lighter, acknowledging the world below. Biljana Ciric 29 Apr 2021 Manila shawl and “gold mountain uncles” and Protein demand and chicken farm blockchain Nikita Yingqian Cai Read More 27 Apr 2021 “Topola” (Cottonwood trees) and “Breza” (birch trees) and Chinese wok Hu Yun Read More 25 Apr 2021 kaijū and The real Ocean & Wavz Read More 22 Apr 2021 The roar, which never vanished Sultan Mussakhan Read More 20 Apr 2021 Gigantic dwarfs of Lake Balkhash: Journey into a microscopic world of phytoplankton. Veronika Dashkova Read More 19 Apr 2021 cosmotechnics, modernity, RTB Bor, (data) mining, computer history, self-managing socialism Robert Bobnic and Kaja Kraner Read More 18 Apr 2021 national identities, common ground Marija Glavas Read More 16 Apr 2021 Disappeared – appeared: selo – BOR – grad village – BOR – city Jelica Jovanovic Read More 12 Apr 2021 Appearing: the statue of Confucius in front of the Samarkand State University Disappearing: historical city centres across Uzbekistan due to gentrification Alex Ulko Read More 10 Apr 2021 Pigeon post Kyōzō Jasphy Zheng Read More

< 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

< Back Astrobus Ethiopia 2021 | Omo Valley Southwest Ethiopia 11 May 2021 Forward Astrobus Ethiopia 2021 Omo Valley Southwest Ethiopia We invite you to join us on our journey of learning and unlearning that has already been underway for the past year with Astrobus-Ethiopia through the curatorial inquiry of As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future. Astrobus was initially established in 2017 to reach students across Ethiopia with the aim to inspire, connect, and empower. In previous editions, scientists, astronomers, artists, writers, and filmmakers alike have hopped on the bus in Addis Ababa to embark on this journey of knowledge sharing. The previous year moving into 2021 has been unlike the years we have all personally experienced before. As Ethiopia continues to undergo an unceasing rise in covid cases (with a 1 in 4 infection rate), challenges have arisen regarding how to maintain distance with ones communities while still making a difference in localities who remain somewhat digitally estranged. How do we keep communities safe? How may we keep caring? How do those of us who are far from Ethiopia, with no connection to the knowledge of Astrobus, actively support, learn, and empower this kind of work, grounded in our interdependence in Ethiopia. How may we overcome physical separation but also transport this knowledge and care into our own immediate communities? In February earlier this year, the co-founders of Astrobus-Ethiopia, Yabebal Fantaye and Sinkneh Eshetu (who also make up one of the many partner cells of our project), conducted their first research trip to Omo Valley in Southwest Ethiopia to better understand the conditions under which this year’s Astrobus may happen. They visited several places with the aim to locally situate their intention – to not only understand local needs but to also explore the multitude of possibilities of what an encounter may be. More on the research trip can be read about here. In an interview with Yabebal Fantaye, she describes this year’s research trip: [The] ambition of Astrobus-Ethiopia is to reach students from all corners of Ethiopia through its series of events. In the past, the team has travelled to the north and the south of Ethiopia. This year, the team plans to travel to the Lower Omo valley, the south west of Ethiopia, which is known for its extraordinary cultural diversity; approximately 8 ethnic groups; and ecosystems including grasslands and pristine forests, and other natural wonders. Omotic-speakers are endemic to the south Omo and include the Ari, Maale, Daasanach, and the Hamar-Banna. The region is home to the vast omo park, and the massive Gibe III dam built on the Omo river. The full interview can be read here . From May 10th, the activation of Astrobus 2021 will begin and will continue for six days. We will find ways to follow their activities on daily basis and to share their experiences with you. After the project ends, we will continue to share the accumulated knowledge of Astrobus to our local communities, to actively learn from their mode of working. Saving you a seat on the bus, Biljana Ciric The team for Astrobus-Ethiopia 2021 includes: Science & Technology Team: Yabebal Fantaye, Sinkneh Eshetu, Redeat Asefa, Bezawit Tesfaye, Alemiye Mamo, Shambel Sahlu, and Eyerusalem Tamirat. Art & Innovation Team: Yeabtsega Getachew, Michael Abebaw Felleke, Efrata Birhanu, Kalkidan Taddesse, Betelhem Abebe, Lidiya Zelke, Robel Kiros, Tinsae Tsegahun, Yidnekachew Weldesilase (ይድነቃቸው ወልደስላሴ), and Abiy Hailu Astrobus 2021 has been supported through As you go..roads under your feet, towards the new future inquiry and CURTAIN with Rockbund Art Museum. The inquiry is composed of research cells including What Could Should Curating Do (Belgrade), Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Guangdong Times Museum (Guangzhou), ArtCom (Astana), Robel Temesgen and Sinkneh Eshetu (Addis Ababa), and The Public Library (Bor). The first stage of the project has been supported by the Foundation for Arts Initiatives, CURTAIN (Rockbund Art Museum), Austrian Cultural Forum, Curatorial Practice (Monash University Art, Design and Architecture), and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Local partners of Astrobus 2021 include: Ethiopian Space Science & Technology Institute (ESSTI), Ethiopian Space Science Society (ESSS), the University of Arbaminch, and the University of Jinka. Previous Next

Educational Program  Educational Program Lecture Series Participant Activities Educational Program WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO?—WCSCD was initiated in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform focused around notions of the curatorial and is a registered civic association. WCSCD’s education program has been run on an annual basis every year since 2018. Till 2022 it was organized as a three-month program for practitioners situated in Belgrade. From 2023 program is organized as biennial working with program participants over longer period of time. Our participants were young practitioners from different parts of the world including the Balkans, EU, Asia, Central Asia, Russia and Latin America making it a unique program in Europe. WCSCD educational program has been learning through recent years to think what kind of citation could actively produce.Through carefully created mentorship program we are committed to think and practice what kind of knowledge we consider worth and how it gets prioritized creating new citations from the margins. [1] [1] Sara Ahmed, “White Men,” Feminist Killjoys Blog, November 4 2014, www.feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men < Mentors Educational Program Menu >

< Back History and stories from Lake Balkhash 15 Jan 2021 Aigerim Kapar Roads From the capital, the way to the city of Balkhash and its lake lies 600 km through the steppes of Central Kazakhstan and the uplands of Sary Arka ([the] Steppe and lakes of Northern Kazakhstan). Whenever I find myself in the Steppe, my imagination always starts to play. Like the hostage of an “epistemological gap”, I try to recall the cultural landscape of a rural space filled with herds of horses and sheep, yurt auls, and Arka songs – which though the home and birthplace of my grandmother, remains unfamiliar to me. Today Central Kazakhstan is an industrial belt, modernized by the colonial administration of the USSR. The pipes and mines of Temirtau, Karaganda, Dzhezkazgan, and Balkhash rise oddly above the steppes to smoke the “sky pastureland” of Tengri (the god of the sky in Turkic mythology). Central Kazakhstan, Temirtau city, photo by Aigerim Kapar An artist, Syrlybek Bekbotayev, and I visited Balkhash via a road known mainly to local residents. Running through the settlement of Aktogay, it lies in connection with the reconstruction of the main highway – intended to connect the new capital with Almaty by a high-speed autobahn, within the framework of the “Nurly Zhol” kazakh state Infrastructure Development Program, associated with the “New Silk Road” initiative of the Chinese government. We crossed the steppe following the course of the Tokyrau River, previously abundant and a significant contributor to the formation of Balkhash Lake in the 8th and 9th centuries. The deltas of the Tokyrau river from the northern coast, and the Ili river which originates in China from the south, meet to form an isthmus along which lie the routes of the ancient Silk Road (which integrated Eastern and Central Kazakhstan in trading systems, and nomadic cultures with the sedentary and agricultural South Kazakhstan). During the 11th-13th centuries, the water in the lake increased as a result of climatic and geological processes. The isthmus flooded and was divided into two parts by the Saryesik peninsula, forming the Uzyn Aral canal where the western half is fresh and shallow and the eastern half is deep and salty. This cut off the South Balkhash region from the North, and consequently disrupted trade routes. [1] Today, socio-economic and infrastructural relations in the region are limited to [the] military training grounds leased by the Russian Federation (8.6 million hectares, for $20 million USD) [2] , including the Sary-Shagan testing ground centered in Priozersk, which until 2010 was a closed military city. In 1928, a route beginning from Karkarly before moving along the Tokyrau stream, was followed by geological prospectors, led by soviet geologist Mikhail Rusakov (who discovered the Konyrat deposit), who later became the first builders of the copper smelter and the city of Balkhash in the 1930s. Taken over two weeks, this journey involving the transportation of construction materials and equipment on camels and horses, led to a strengthening of the Russian Empire. Memories of one of the explorers who made their way to Konyrat, saw a tablet with a message left by their colleagues near the sacred mountain Bektau Ata: “Compatriots! No more water, no grass! Go back! Otherwise, you will disappear with the cattle you have!” [3] This is often cited as evidence of the lifelessness of the territory and the severity of the conditions in which the builders of communism performed their feat. It is not surprising that it is difficult for an uninformed person in the Steppe to find water, especially in a dry, hot summer, since the Northern Balkhash region was a wintering place for the tribes of the Middle Zhuz (the Kazakh tribal system), and in the summer season, they would migrate north to summer pastures. History Lake Balkhash is 35,000 years old. Shaped like a crescent, it is surrounded by the Saryarka, Dzhungarian Alatau, and Tarbagatai ridges. The inner western region stretches to the Betpak-dala desert (named the “hungry steppe” by Russian royal colonial researchers at the end of the 19th century). Balkhash is an endless reservoir, with 80 percent of the water coming from the Ili River, which begins in China (Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Region of Xinjiang). There is a rich history around the lake, always being a place of attraction, as evidenced by archaeological sites, rock paintings, ancient settlements and medieval cities. “Entire medieval urban complex of Northern Tienshan (1-20th AD): settlement location, size and type”, image Renato Sala [4] The first mentions of Balkash Lake were found in Chinese written sources dating back to 126 BC, where it is called “Si Hai” – the Western Sea. It [also] had [a] fixed Dzungarian name: “Balkhash-Nor”, of the nomadic Oirat tribes (who were of Mongolian origin) who lived south of the lake. In the fertile delta of the Ili River, the Dzungars (among other [living] things) were engaged in flood agriculture, mainly growing wheat and building irrigation systems. It wasn’t until the Dzungar Khanate was finally defeated by the Qing Empire in the 18th century, that the Oirats were exterminated and dissolved as a state union. The territory of the Khanate was subsequently divided between the Qing and Russian Empires, and the Kazakh tribes returned to the remainder of the deserted territories. 100 years ago, nomadic and semi-nomadic cattle breeding were the primary and traditional types of farming. The tribes who inhabited these vast territories – of harsh climates and drought-ridden landscapes – moved with herds of animals, developing the only possible type of activity and lifestyle which would continue to take shape over the coming centuries. Alongside adapting to the ecosystem, they also developed their own economy, traditions, culture, and collective memory, shaped by a co-dependency with nature. The history of metallurgical activity in this region also goes back thousands of years. Since the early Bronze Age, Nomadic tribes possessed “primitive” technologies for smelting ore in such a way where the ore – rich in non-ferrous precious metals – would often be laid out on the surface. For several centuries, neighboring nomadic tribes of Kazakhs and Dzungars had disputes over pastures, territories, and resources but they did not carry a purposeful destructive character – contrary to how it may have otherwise been presented in the history of Kazakhstan, which was written during the Soviet period. [5] The demonization of the Kazakh-Dzhungar relations was beneficial to the historians of the Russian Empire and the USSR, justifying the colonization of the Kazakh steppes as protection from the Dzungar raids, calling it a “voluntary annexation” of Kazakhstan to Russia. In our meeting, historian and researcher at the Balkhash Museum of Local History, Daulet Kozhakhmetov, said: “we are indebted to the Dzungarian people, that at the cost of their lives, a buffer was created against Chinese aggression.” Modernization The Soviet policies for the development and modernization of the steppe and desert expanses of Central Asia were based on an intensive exploitation of natural and human resources; and a disregard for Indigenous traditions and ways of life, the environment, and ecology, all the while armed with the slogan: “man will conquer nature!”. The dark side of this modernity was quick to appear to the Kazakh people. The 1920-30s, characterised as a period of forced sedentarization, dispossession and resettlement of nomads, resulted in the creation of an artificial famine: “Asharshylyk”. It was also a period of time marked by a genocide in which almost 40% of the population died, and more than 1 million people migrated through China to Iran and Afghanistan. More than 12, 000 people left their native lands in the Balkhash region. As a result, the livestock population in the Ili-Balkhash basin reduced by 75%-100% – a dire situation for nomadic life where animal breeding was a critical source of support. Unused pastures degraded, which contributed to the desertification of a third of the territory in the Ili-Balkhash basin, and the continued disruption of its ecosystem. [6] Workers from all over the USSR were resettled in Kazakhstan to places of Indigenous people for the implementation of great economic plans (of five-year projects) – but as well as this, some of them were also deported and exiled to the camps of the Gulag system (Karlag, Balkhashlag, Steplag, etc.). Repressive colonial policies, irrational management, and misuse of natural resources led to both human and environmental tragedies. The Aral sea was drained over several decades, the river system was disrupted by anthropogenic interference, and the water was depleted for the irrigation of moisture-loving crops (namely cotton and rice, which are not suitable for cultivation in the arid climate of the steppe landscape of Central Asia). After 30 years of independence, governmental powers and economic systems have not yet been rebuilt. Kazakhstan continues to bear the burden of its raw material base, having its success measured against the formerly implemented five-year plans [of] exploiting the subsoil and insisting on forgetting pre-industrial period and culture. Syrlybek Bekbotayev, “Five-Year Plan”, 2019“Re-membering. Dialogues of Memories” Exhibition in memory of victims of political repression, curated by Aigerim Kapar. TSE art Destination, Astana, 2019. Photo by Zhanarbek Amankulov Balkhash Lake Along the shores of a picturesque lake, lit with glittering emerald water, the smoking chimneys of the Balkhash Mining and Metallurgy Plant create a surreal scene and evoke a sense of unease that such a unique corner of paradise continues to be extensively exploited and polluted. During the Soviet period, economic and industrial development, and the use of natural resources in the region, were carried out without considering the ecological capacity of the basin’s ecosystem. This was aggravated by the construction of artificial reservoirs and the Kapchagai hydroelectric power station built on the Ili River in 1967, which has been filling the basin for over 20 years. According to the resolution of the International Forum Balkhash held in Almaty in 2000, the situation of the Ili-Balkhash basin was recognized as critical due to the unstable water levels – a key indicator of the basin’s ecosystem. [7] As a result of the II International Forum “Balkhash-2005”, [an] Alakol Basin Inspection was established to regulate the use and protection of water resources. Lake Balkhash, photo by Aigerim Kapar Today, Lake Balkhash remains devoid of state care or any global environmental programs to save its ecosystem, and the lake and basin are left in a state of ecological and socio-economic disaster. A quiet tragedy, unfortunately, does not arouse attentive interest nor the adoption of effective measures that may prevent a repetition of the tragedy of the Aral Sea. Modern industrial, infrastructural, and economic programs – in particular, the program of OBOR and Nurly Zhol – (just like during the socialist regime of the USSR) don’t take into account the ecological burden on the environment in the region. These programs don’t consider resolving issues of transboundary rivers, water security, or access to water for local communities as a guarantee of sustainable development for the region or the success of the implementation of long-term plans and cooperation. According to the McKinsey expert group, by 2045 Lake Balkhash may lose up to 86% of its water. [8] The threat of an environmental catastrophe is mainly attributed to the growth of economic affairs, climate change (resulting in the melting of glaciers), and industrial pollution. In the columbine area of the Ili River basin, China is cultivated by [the] irrigation of 1 million hectares of cotton. Water reservoirs have been built and hydroelectric power plants are operating, and an increase in water intake by 10-15% threatens to lower the water level in the lake to a critical condition. Within the region that lies in Kazakhstan, more than 90% of water resources are used for irrigated agriculture, mainly for growing rice and cotton, continuing the USSR’s methods of extensive production and capitalisation without any considerations to the land and the environment. Of these exploited water resources, 60-70% of which is inefficiently used and seeps into the sands through outdated irrigation systems. The main industrial environmental pollutant in the region is the Balkhash copper smelter, built on the lake shore in 1938, 10 kilometers from the Konyrat mine, which became the backbone enterprise of the Balkhash city. Checkpoint of the Balkhash copper smelter. Banner caption: “Let’s build the future together!” Photo by Syrlybek Bekbotayev Today it belongs to the Kazakhmys Smelting Corporation. According to official data for 2018, the harmful emissions into the atmosphere amounted to 72,899 tons – for which the company pays to the state budget of 3,083,699 KZT per year. [9] In settling on the surface of the lake, toxic substances penetrate the water. The indicators of heavy metals in the water grow each year and exceed permissible standards, negatively affecting the biodiversity of flora and fauna. Anthropogenic interference has also affected the species composition of the lake’s fish, where endemic species lie on the verge of extinction, and fisheries are in crisis. We met with researchers from the Committee of the Research and Production Center for Fisheries in Balkhash, who monitor the rational use and reproduction of fish stocks, and issue annual forecasts of fish catch volumes. The committee is also looking for new opportunities for the preservation and development of fisheries, but their activities are limited by financial and other resources. Gas emissions of the city-forming enterprise are a great sore spot and the most difficult problem for the townspeople, city administration and the plant – a situation which has not been resolved for several decades. [However], Rymkul Belyalovna, a local ecologist who has worked for many years in the department for the protection of natural resources, spoke of a (far from perfect) system for assessing material damage and paying compensation for atmospheric emissions to the residents, in the case of complaints. Pipes of a copper smelter and thermal power plant, Balkhash city. Photo by Syrlybek Bekbotayev. In September, plant workers posted a video on social media showing faulty pipe filters which elicited a great public resonance. The plant was only fined 1,000,000 tenge – by comparison, a beauty salon that violated quarantine work restrictions was fined 600,000 tenge. [10] In news from Balkhash – which also currently holds the status of being the most polluted city in Kazakhstan – plans of the local authorities to develop the tourist potential of the lake, without eliminating the source of pollution, are seen as difficult to implement. Alongside this, the Ministry of Ecology launched a project for a roadmap of environmental problems in the Karaganda region this year, which plans to reduce emissions of harmful substances and modernize mining enterprises in the region. “This is my city, my combine, my factory” We received a dedication to the gas of a copper smelter upon [our] arrival late in the evening. On that day, the wind blowing from the direction of the plant was especially felt in the air. Aizat, our hospitable guide through the city and its senses, and a student of the Kazakh language and literature, says that her mother is kidding: “nevertheless this gas kills all harmful germs in the body”. Bertys bay, view of the city of Balkhash. Photo by Syrlybek Bekbotayev. Geologist Mikhail Rusakov received an award for the discovery of “blue hill” [11] a trip to the USA to study new technologies in the mining industry. Upon arrival, he was sentenced to 25 years in a prison camp under espionage charges. After 5 years he was rehabilitated and returned to Balkhash, where he discovered several more deposits. The town of Balkhash grew out of the workers’ village in Bertys Bay (as One tooth), fuelling the industrial development of the Konyrat mine since 1930. The mine was developed by the labor of workers from all over the USSR. The city was built by the forces of prisoners of camps and Japanese prisoners of war. The policy of the Soviets forced the nomads, who were left without resources to sustain their own livelihoods, to be hired in industrial enterprises. My grandfather’s family from the Madeniet (Culture) auyl of Northern Kazakhstan were forced to work through severe hunger while working at the factories of Magnitogorsk. Palace of Culture of Metallurgists named after Magaui Khamzin on Lenin Street. Photo by Syrlybek Bekbotayev. After 90 years, mining at Konyrat has finally stopped. The “blue hill” disappeared and became a gaping crater – a model of which can be viewed in the local history museum of Balkhash, where in its halls of exposition, the entire history of Kazakhstan is presented in an attempt to revise itself from a decolonial position – though this position barely touches the history of the factory or the construction of the city. Model of the Konyrat mine, Balkhash Local History Museum. Photo by Aigerim Kapar Soviet propaganda and its methods have been minimally criticized or rethought, and so continue to manifest themselves on the city streets and public spaces. It is not enough to replace monuments on pedestals and rename streets to create a “new” history and future. Monument to Agybai batyr (1802-1885), Independence Square. Photo by Syrlybek Bekbotayev In his book “The Pride of Balkhash” (2010), historian and factory veteran, Sovet Kaukerbekuly, denotes his belonging to the place with the words: “This is my city, my factory, my combine”, effectively omitting the lake and its importance in the context of the city. Rather, the stories, hopes, and destinies of the people who built the “bright future” are what is woven around the plant. Today Lake Balkhash remains “invisible”. Its physical scale is not proportionate with the space occupied in the minds of people, the cultural landscape, public agenda, or the policy of the authorities, despite its value for the entire ecosystem of the region, the country, not to mention, the planet. Sadly nothing alarmingly new, this sentiment is a general reflection of the alienation of man from nature in the Anthropocene epoch, and his attitude and interaction with the environment. Aigerim Kapar, Almaty 2020 Aigerim Kapar is an independent curator, cultural activist, founder of the creative communication platform «Artcom» . [1] Stasiv Igor, “On the origin of Lake Balkhash and the Balkhash-Alakol depression”, 2018 http://sci-article.ru/stat.php?i=1523036452 [2] Dinara Kuatova, “8.6 million hectares of land leases for military training grounds Kazakhstan”, 2019 https://inbusiness.kz/ru/news/8-6-mln-ga-zemli-sdaet-v-arendu-pod-voennye-poligony-kazahstan [3] Sovet Kaukerbekuly, “The Pride of the Balkhash”, Karaganda, 2010, p. 38 [4] Renato Sala “The medieval urbanization of Semirechye”, 2010 https://www.chikyu.ac.jp/ilipro/page/18-publication/workshop-book/workshop-book_individual%20files/2-1_Aubekerov.pdf [5] Radik Temirgaliev “Dzungars in the history of Kazakhstan”, 2007 https://zonakz.net/2007/03/26/джунгары-в-истории-казахстана/ [6] Zhuldyzbek Abylkhozhin, “Study of the ecology of the Ili-Balkhash Region in the Soviet Period”, 2010 [7] The International Ecological Forum “Balkhash-2000”, http://kazneb.kz/bookView/view/?brId=1169574 [8] Dr. Bulat K. Yessekin,“Ecosystem management in Balkhash Lake basin as a model of SDG localization in Kazakhstan and Central Asia region, 2020 https://www.es-partnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Ecosystem-approach-in-Balkhash-Lake-basin-Kazakhstan-China-002.pdf [9] Unified ecological resource of the Ministry of Ecology, Geology and Natural Resources, Kazakhmys Smelting LLP Balkhash Copper Smelter, 2018 http://prtr.ecogosfond.kz/2019/12/04/too-kazakhmys-smelting-balhashskij-medeplavilnyj-zavod/ [10] Balkhash Copper Smelter was fined one million tenge https://24.kz/ru/news/social/item/426189-balkhashskij-medeplavilnyj-zavod-oshtrafovali-na-million-tenge [11] Sovet Kaukerbekuly, “The Pride of the Balkhash”, Karaganda, 2010, p. 40 Previous Next

About educational program Introduction of program 2018-2022 About Lecture Series Participant Activities About educational program Introduction of program 2018-2022 Due to the lack of formal education related to curatorial and artistic work in the Balkan region (while in the former West there has been a proliferation of MA and PhD programmes in curating and artistic research), WCSCD was initiated with the goal of fostering the new generation of curators and artists as well as to raise awareness of the importance of curatorial and artistic knowledge and positions when thinking of art institutions and their role within the larger social context. The intention is to bring together key international and local figures engaged in decolonizing curatorial and artistic discourse, who are specifically able to offer diverse knowledges to the program participants. Through the program, we invite mentors from non-western contexts, local practitioners and also colleagues from the former West. In the last three years our participants were young practitioners from different parts of the world including the Balkans, EU, Asia, Central Asia, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America making it a unique program in Europe. Due to very limited funding structures for the arts within Serbia, funding of the program was dependent on the support of cultural institutions. The program has also charged a participation fee in line with the monthly salary of the country from which the participants is a passport holder. This was an attempt to generate more equal access to participation for everyone who applied. We also offer special grants for colleagues in need and in 2022 we have granted program access to the colleagues from Russia. Furthermore, in collaboration with Kadist Foundation in 2022 we have enable grant for practitioners from the region in order to participate in the program. The program is intensive, with daily programs of workshops, writing sessions, studio visits, and research trips in the region. Some of the research trips we have done so far include: Kosovo, Bosnia, Romania, Slovenia and Austria. Every year the program would accept up to 15 participants. Besides closed-door workshops for participants, all invited mentors would present public lectures to the larger cultural sector, sharing their ways of working and instituting. From 2023 educational program will be biennial and spread across two years in order to facilitate deeper and longer research of program participants. < Mentors Educational Program Menu >

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