Monday, Nov 18, 2013
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19:00 exhibition opening
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19:30 discussion as part of the program Micropolitics
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participants: Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić, artists, Iva Marčetić, architect and member of the Young Anti-Fascists of Zagreb, Nikola Vukobratović, member of the editorial board of the Croatian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and [BLOK]
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“A girl asks a monkey at the ZOO: Why do you live here? Isn’t it nicer where you come from?” This text opens Dušan Makavejev’s “Montenegro,” a film in which he shows the encounter of a wealthy American housewife, brought to Sweden by her businessman husband, with Yugoslav immigrants, who come to Sweden to look for work. The separation of the worlds, which leads the protagonist Montenegro (who gets a job at the ZOO) to his tragic end, is primarily class-based, but is also the product of a specific production of otherness, and his suicide is the final consequence of the clash between the imagined idea of the constructed “other” (the wild Balcan, attractive and intimidating at the same time) and his actual appearance – the man whose position is clearly determined by concrete economic and political processes, whose origins reveal nothing exotic, and whose workers’ nomadism contains nothing romantic.
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The exhibition Between Worlds II approaches the issue of migration in the contemporary economic and political moment from the position of the criticism of the production and use of images. In the video Postcards and the photo series Impressions: Landscapes/Paradise of Slovenia, the artist Nika Autor uses archival footage from Radio-Television Slovenia (RTV) in order to show “that the image by itself, determined by the mode of production (montage), implies the criminalization and victimization of asylum seekers, fugitives and migrants. (…) The mode of production establishes the optics of RTV’s gaze which reduces segregates, discriminates, excludes and constructs ‘the other’.”1 In the installation The Housing, the artists Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić present two specific cases of Roma deprivation, the Belgrade one and the Roman one, in order to put the so-called “Roma issue” in its right place, into class relations in the production of space. Through three videos they expose the image of Roma-nomads as a construct which conceals the fascistoid politics of cleansing the city of Roma, but they also relate such politics to the general tendency of “the market-oriented state to deny the lower class the right to the city,”2 offering different approaches to addressing the problem of migrant workers’ housing.
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Between Worlds II aims to draw attention to the issue of alleged mobility in the art field. Makavejev himself is in the position of the immigrant when he films “Montenegro” in Sweden, and the survey “How to suture a finger with a credit card and other stories” we include in the exhibition focuses on contemporary migrations of artists and cultural workers. Beyond the romanticized image of travelling artists and the supposed democratization of the art field, it represents a counter-image of the creative class as a reserve army of artists who, under the guise of the promise of the so-called global art, daily reproduce immigrant conditions.
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[BLOK] is a collective based in Zagreb that works in the interspace between art, urbanism and activism. Their projects are conceived and realized as platforms for the joint work of curators, artists, researchers, activists and all those interested in the issue of public space and the production of the common, as well as space for the production and reflection on artistic practices sensitive towards social circumstances and the conditions of production in which they arise.
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1 taken from the artist\’s website: www.autor.si
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2 from the text accompanying the exhibition Self Made Urbanism Rome: http://www.smur.eu/productions/raedle-jeremic/
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Design of printed materials: Rafaela Dražić
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Translations: Tihana Bertek and Ksenija Zubković
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Technical support: Srđan Kovačević
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Exhibition is supported by: the City of Zagreb and Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia
