Search Results

< 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 Alumni 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 Future Light: or is A New Enlightenment Worth Considering? | Maria Lind Comradeship: Curating Art, and Politics in Post-Socialist Europe | Zdenka Badovinac What Could/Should the Institution Do? | Ares Shporta < Participants Educational Program Programs >

About educational program Introduction of program 2018-2022 About educational program Introduction of program 2018-2022 Lecture Series Participant Activities < Mentors Educational Program Menu >

Program Participant Activities Program Participant Activities Tonight we invite you to encounter a collective archive of the 2022 What could/should curating do educational programme, which took place in Belgrade and other locations around the Post-Yugoslav region, between September and December this year. The departure point for this archive is a proposal by Biljana Ćirić, program curator and facilitator, to consider the means by which the discussions, events, inquiries and relationships developed during this time might be recorded or documented. Archiving is never neutral. Determinations are always made—by individuals, by collectives, by collecting institutions—about what knowledge is worth saving, the means by which knowledge is indexed, housed and cared for, who has access and on what terms. Within the framework of an alternative educational platform—with a loose and evolving curriculum, and no formalised method of assessment or grading—this exercise presents an opportunity to consider what alternative measures we might allow ourselves for the production of knowledge when freed from institutional modes of transmission and circulation. As such, these archives—both individually and collectively—do not simply record a series of shared (and at times differing) experiences. They include questions around how the embodied, linguistic, political, intimate, relational nature of experience and remembering, ranging in scope from the personal, to the national. Each contribution is informed by the “baggage” we carried with us, as a group of individuals from many different geographic and cultural contexts, many of whom had little relationship with Belgrade, Serbia or the Balkan region prior to this course. This “baggage” includes our different relationships to contemporary art’s infrastructures; our different fields of knowledge and networks of relationships; cultural and linguistic differences; differing relations to histories of colonialism, resource extraction and capitalist exploitation; and varying habits of thought, modes of making, inhabiting and formulating questions about the world. Through differing strategies of presentation and circulation, we hope to open up questions about what we have in common, as well as what separates us; what of ourselves is dispersed, and what is withheld. But the physical “archive” we share with you tonight is only a part of a wider set of relationships, experiences, idea exchanges, occasional encounters, gossip and experimenting. Tonight we celebrate the beauty and fragility of these moments. Be our guests at the two tables. Read silently. Read aloud. Whisper. Describe what you see. Share what you feel. Eat. Drink. Embrace. This archive is staged as something living, developing and transformational, ever evolving as our moments with you. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. We hope it’s not the end, but only a stop on the way. WC/SCD 2022 Adelina, Anastasia, Ginevra, Giuglia, Jelena, Karly, Lera, Sabine, Simon < Educational Program Participants >

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Lumbung | WCSCD 2020/21 Annual Lecture Series The curatorial program What Could/Should Curating Do is proud to be continued in 2021 with public program through lecture series The seventh talk in the 2020/21 series is titled: Lumbung by farid rakun Date: March 16, 2021 Time: 12:00 pm Belgrade / 10:00 pm Melbourne / 07:00 pm Shanghai / 6:00 am New York Venue: zoom link Meeting ID: 985 237 3109 Live stream/Facebook link ruangrupa, photo Gudskul/Jin Panji ruangrupa , a Jakarta-based artists’ collective, is in the middle of launching lumbung—a planetary network initiated to put particular values into practice, such as sharing, humour, generosity, independence and locally-anchored, to name a few. This process is also largely made possible by the collective’s mandate as the artistic directors of documenta fifteen (Kassel, DE, 2022), for which ruangrupa’s approach can be considered as finding ways to exercise our way of institutional practice—as opposed to mere critique. This session is a relaxed one (as much as a platform like Zoom would allow) where (at least) a member of ruangrupa, farid rakun , will be present and explain more about the processes described above. Hopefully, you will not only be able and interested to attend, but also take something out of the session and realised the possibility of practicing those very values in your own ways under your particular conditions afterwards. farid rakun, photo Gudskul/Jin Panji About Speaker Trained as an architect (B.Arch from Universitas Indonesia and M.Arch from Cranbrook Academy of Art), farid rakun wears different hats, dependent on who is asking. A visiting lecturer in the Architecture Department of Universitas Indonesia, he is also a part of the artists’ collective ruangrupa, with whom he co-curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL. As an instigator, he has permeated various global institutions such as Centre Pompidou, La Biennale di Venezia, MMCA Seoul, Sharjah Biennial, Bienal de Sao Paulo, Harun Farocki Institut, Dutch Art Institute (DAI), Creative Time, Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD) Genève, and basis voor actuele kunst (BAK). He has worked for Jakarta Biennale in different capacities since 2013 and currently serves as its advisor. ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication. As an artists’ collective, ruangrupa has been involved in many collaborative and exchange projects, including participating in big exhibitions such as Gwangju Biennale (2002 & 2018), Istanbul Biennial (2005), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), Singapore Biennale (2011), São Paulo Biennial (2014), Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016) and Cosmopolis at Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated TRANSaction: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, NL. From 2015-18, ruangrupa co-developed a cultural platform Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem together with several artists’ collectives in Jakarta, located at Gudang Sarinah warehouse, Pancoran, South Jakarta. It is a cross-disciplinary space that aims to maintain, cultivate and establish an integrated support system for creative talents, diverse communities, and various institutions. It also aspires to be able to make connections and collaborate, to share knowledge and ideas, as well as to encourage critical thinking, creativity, and innovations. The results of these joint collaborations are open for public access—and presented with various exhibitions, festivals, workshops, discussions, film screenings, music concerts, and publications of journals. In 2018, learning from their experience establishing Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem and together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa co-initiated GUDSKUL: contemporary art collective and ecosystem studies (or Gudskul, in short, pronounced similarly like “good school” in English). It is a public learning space established to practice an expanded understanding of collective values, such as equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship and togetherness. WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? (WCSCD) was initiated and funded in 2018 in Belgrade as an educational platform around notions of curatorial. From 2020 WCSCD started to initiate its own curatorial inquiries and projects that should unpack above -mentioned complexities keeping educational component as a core to the WCSCD. The WCSCD curatorial program and series of public lectures have been initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric. WCSCD 2020/2021 public program series has been done in collaboration with Division of Arts and Humanities, Duke Kunshan University and they co-stream all public lectures. Strategic media collaboration is done with Seecult and they will co-host all public lecture series. Project Partners Media Partner For more information about the program, please refer to www.wcscd.com Project contacts: what.could.curating.do@gmail.com Follow us: FB: @whatcscdo Instagram: @whatcouldshouldcuratingdo < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

Bor Encounters As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future September 15th –September 19th 2022 Press statement from Dragan Stojmenovic, librarian, Bor Public Library, partner cell of the inquiry Sharing Session: As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future Speakers: Biljana Ciric (interdependent curate), Sinkneh Eshetu (writer), Yabebal Fantasy (astrophysicist and data scientist), Robel Temesgen (artist), Jasphy Zheng (artist). Moderator: Zheng Peihan (Interim Education Manager of Rockbund Art Museum) Stories from the Room in Addis Ababa As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future in collaboration with Rockbund Art Museum Curtain project and Addis Ababa based collective, Contemporary Nights presents you a call for participation of Stories from the Room, a public project by artist Jasphy Zheng. 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. A conversation between Yabebal Fantaye, founder of Astrobus, and Biljana Ciric on the initiative. Support mask making for Ethiopia Robel Temesgen one of the participants of the project with his friends initiated mask making for communities that can’t afford it. Open Call for Maritime Portal Residency A collaborative initiative of All the Way South x As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future. It bridges many understandings of the south that only overlap partially with the geographical South and engages the histories and realities emerged from long lines of maritime mapping and entanglement. Announcement: Ash Moniz's Research on Cartographies of Solidarity is Selected for Maritime Portal Residency in 2021 The MPR is a collaborative initiative of All the Way South x As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future. It bridges many understandings of the south that only overlap partially with the geographical South and engages the histories and realities emerged from long lines of maritime mapping and entanglement. As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future | Symposium Dates: March 22nd to 31st 2021 | Time: 11am Ljubljana time / 9pm Melbourne time / Addis Ababa 1pm / Shanghai, Guangzhou 6pm / Astana 4pm Livestream via WCSCD / Moderna Galerija / Artcom Platform / Rockbund Art Museum / Facebook / Youtube As you go… roads under your feet, towards the new future | Film Program Symposium presenters: What Could Should Curating Do and Moderna galerija , Ljubljana, Slovenia Duration: 22 – 31 March 2021 Приче између зидова у Народној библиотеци Бор Новембар 2020 – Шта би кустосирање могло/требало да буде (What Could/ Should Curating Do – WC/SCD), кроз пројекат Новим путевима у будућност (As you go…roads under your feet, towards the new future), у сарадњи са Народном библиотеком Бор, позива вас на учешће у јавном пројекту уметнице Џесфи Џенг (Jasphy Zheng) Приче између зидова (Stories from the Room). Preface February 4th 2020 2pm – 8pm Guramayne Art Center Addis Ababa. Organized in collaboration with Biljana Ciric & Guramayne Art Center < Cells Curatorial Inquiries Online Journal >

REACHING OUT TO THE MARGINS Once we start questioning the infrastructure of art, the first thing that stands out is the centralisation of institutional activity - be that geographical dislocation, distribution of finances and resources, and last but not least, the narrow focus on the actors and beneficiaries of the ‘art machine’. Peripheral city districts, vulnerable social groups, ecologically fragile and otherwise problematic areas - are generally at the bottom of the list. Although art can be the tool to highlight and empower particular discourses, the discourse of the ‘marginal’ still stays on the margin, and is of interest to few artists and institutions. In this section we propose to look away from the center, step outside the institutional walls and frameworks, and go exploring the periphery. This block is curated by Anastasia Albokrinova, artist, researcher and curator. BLOCK 5.1 Intro REACHING OUT TO THE MARGINS: A GLANCE AROUND Let us first define the notion of ‘margin’. This simple exercise is not only a question of understanding, but also a tool to situate yourself in the center-periphery model and a possible key to reinvent it. How do you define what is marginal/peripheral? Is ‘margin’ a place/ a social group/ a practice? Are you part of a margin/what margin you belong to? What is a margin? Make a list ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ ______________ Task Reaching out to the margins can be something outstanding to your daily experience and arouses a number of questions. How to act? What to pay attention to? How to talk with people? How to not just gather information, but build action based on reciprocity? You can continue the list. Think of a margin you can reach. Choose a time to visit it. Make this first encounter open-ended. Try to gather maximum information and welcome any experience, but don’t forget to take care of yourself and be careful towards others. Remember: your margin visit might be only for this exercise, but what we actually need is establishing a long-term relationship. So you will need to find a way to come back. And this coming back should be with purpose. During your journey you will need to discover what is your purpose other than the visitor. Take this set of words as a departure point to tell about your ‘margin’ experience. Navigate through them, stopping and expanding those that were of use to you in your journey. Add new notions that you find important. intuition improvisation limitation risk trust autonomy collaboration confrontation curiosity exchange exhaustion affective labor Use visual + text format to document and reflect on your journey. You can be free in the choice of visual approach - it can be a photographic image, a drawing, a collage, etc. Additional materials In this journey we will draw inspiration from the practice of Skart, an art collective founded in 1990 by two students at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade - Dragan Protic and Dorde Balmazovic, also known as Prota and Zole. Their story throughout 3 decades is told by Sea Yildiz in a book “Building Human Relations Through Art. Skart collective (Belgrade) > from 1990 to present” published by ONOMATOPEE 224 IN 2022. SKART_Error as a trace of humanity Self-feedback At this point you can stop and reflect on what was done. Here are some questions that may help: What were your spontaneous impulses? Where were you driven? What scared you away? Did you surprise yourself? Did you face your limitations? What will you do the next time you come back? BLOCK 5.2 Intro REACHING OUT TO THE MARGINS: A GESTURE You’ve found your ‘margin’. First time you went with an empty head and empty hands, now you can come back having something in both. But what is this ‘something’? It lies in the narrow gap between the ‘possible’ and the ‘visionary’, the ‘banal’ and the ‘weird’, the ‘caring’ and ‘cautious’. Task Draw a line. On the left end write the smallest, simplest or funniest gesture you could do at your margin. Now turn to the right end of the line and dream big: what could you do if you had unlimited resources? Now start filling the line on its sequence. What would be your gesture if you had ‘this’ or ‘that’? What could you do if you united forces, found allies? What could be done if you partnered with an institution? Select a point on this line that sounds doable. Make a ‘to-do’ list to make this gesture happen. Now think of your gesture in the paradigm of time. Is it a one-time intervention or a structural approach? Is it spectacular or non-spectacular? What change it may bring, how may it impact the established infrastructure? May it hurt? May it heal? Being aware and prepared, reach out to the margin again and make your gesture. Additional materials SKART_The beauty of working together Self-feedback Now is time to estimate your actions: What went as planned, where you had to improvise, what appeared to be unrealistic? What would you change if you did it again? Finally, how could you implement this exercise in your structural thinking about profession? Let’s also zoom out and think institution-wise: What would you propose to do for the institutions to be more sensitive / aware of the margins? Would that be a program/ a structural change, a staff member proposal? What resources would that require?

Events Lecture Series Participant Activities Lecture by Matt Packer / EVA International Saša Tkačenko, Flag from the WCSCD series, 2018. Photo by Ivan Zupanc THE CURATORIAL COURSE WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE A PUBLIC TALK BY: MATT PACKER EVA International MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART BELGRADE SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27 2018 AT 6 PM In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, the lecture within the series of public programs organized by WCSCD will be presented by Matt Packer — the Director of EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. The series is designed to offer new and different perspectives on the theories and practices of exhibition-making. The presentation by Matt Packer will evolve around EVA – Ireland’s longest running organisation of contemporary visual art. First established in 1977 to stimulate visual arts in the mid West region of Ireland, it since developed a model of inviting international guest curators to adjudicate (and in more recent editions curate) exhibitions of work by Irish and International artists. EVA adopted a biennial model in 2012 which continues today; the most recent edition, the untitled 38th EVA International, was curated by Inti Guerrero and took place across six venues in Limerick / Dublin in Spring-Summer 2018. Drawing on a number of specific episodes in EVA’s 40 year history, the recently appointed Director of EVA International will present examples of how EVA has coincided and responded to broader cultural and political changes, both within Ireland and internationally. These examples include EVA’s presentation of The Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment during the 2018 referendum campaign to overrule restrictive abortion legislation in Ireland, and the recurring address of partition between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. ABOUT THE LECTURER: Matt Packer is the Director of EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. Previous roles include Director, CCA Centre For Contemporary Art Derry ~ Londonderry (2014 – 2017); Associate Director, Treignac Projet (2013-2016); Curator of Exhibitions & Projects, Lewis Glucksman Gallery (2008 – 2013). As an independent curator, he has curated numerous exhibitions in Ireland and internationally, including They Call Us The Screamers, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway (2017), Disappearing Acts, Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway (2015) (with Arne Skaug Olsen); When Flanders Failed, RHA, Dublin (2011) (with Stephen Brandes); and Ice Trade, Chelsea Space, London (2007) (with Kim Dhillon). He was part of the selection committee for the British representation at the Venice Biennale 2017. He has written for numerous magazines, journals including Frieze, Kaleidoscope, and Concreta. The WCSCD curatorial course and series of public lectures are initiated and organized by Biljana Ciric together with Supervizuelna. The lecture by Niels Van Tomme is made possible with the help of MoCAB and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the additional support of Zepter Museum and Zepter Hotel. Project partners: The Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; GRAD—European Center for Culture and Debate; EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial, ’Novi Sad 2021 – European Capital of Culture’ Foundation and Zepter Museum. The project is supported by: the Goethe Institute in Belgrade; Istituto Italiano di Cultura Belgrado; the Embassy of Sweden; the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; the Embassy of Ireland in Greece; the Embassy of Indonesia; the EU Info Centre; Pro Helvetia – Swiss Art Council; and galleries Eugster || Belgrade, HESTIA Art Residency & Exhibitions Bureau, and Zepter Hotel, Royal Inn Hotel and CAR:GO. Media partners: EUNIC Serbia, RTS3. < Mentors Educational Program How to Apply >

Mentors Mentors Lecture Series Participant Activities Mentors Mentors of WCSCD program so far included: < Mentors Educational Program Menu >