Over the last quarter of century the countries of former Yugoslavia have seen the wholesale transfer of social ownership of the collective means of production and subsistence into the hands of the free market and private capital. Companies, banks, housing stock, higher education, health, natural resources, public space and infrastructure have been submitted to the repeated rounds of marketization, commodification and privatization. The re-alignment to full-blown liberal capitalism, which started in the late 80s with the structural adjustment programs that were supposed to end the enduring crisis of the Yugoslav social and economic model, and then further spurred by the vitriol of ethnic conflict and war in the 90s, had been legitimated by a promise of progress that the integration into the capitalist world-system would bring to everyone. It was a promise of normalized trickle-down capitalist progress that would paradoxically ensue after the end of history. But now that the crisis of 2008 has shown that the emperor is naked, that the capital cannot expand and reproduce without deepening social divisions across the global capitalist territory and that under this regime of supposed equal opportunities some face lasting prospects of poverty and destitution, the continuous accumulation by privatization is showing its corrosive impact.
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The competition between society and capital over the resources is unfolding both there where the potentials of sociality are intense – in public spaces, in mass education, in public services – and there where the potentials of sociality has been eviscerated – evicted buildings, closed factories and street-side shops. Accumulation by privatization parasites the potentials of sociality, but its working are frequently arcane and impersonal. The exhibition "Liquidation" interrogates how privatization, although not always visible, can nevertheless be made intelligible through artistic, social and political practices. The conference will bring together participating artists, prominent scholars and intellectuals, and activist from the region who have been opposing privatizations to reflect on these processes and the prospects of contestations of previous years that have spawned throughout the region.
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CONFERENCE PROGRAM
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The conference is taking place in INA building (first door on the left) in Subiceva 29, Zagreb.
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*The conference will be held in English.
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Saturday, 3/5/2014
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10:00 – 10:45 Boris Buden (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies): Those who make revolution half way …
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Discussion: 10:45 – 11:45
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12:00 – 14:00 The Primitive Accumulation and Industrial Action in the Ex-Yugoslav Countries
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Domagoj Mihaljevic (Baza za radnicku inicijativu i demokratizaciju)
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Milenko Sreckovic (Pokret za slobodu)
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Emin Eminagic (Front Slobode)
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16:00 – 16:45 Neil Brenner (Graduate School of Design, Harvard University): Urban Ideologies and the Critique of Neoliberal Urbanization
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Discussion: 16:45 – 17:45
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18:00 – 20:00 The Enclosures of Space, the Resistances of the Public
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Teodor Celakoski (Pravo na grad)
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John Hawke
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Volker Eick (Freie Universität Berlin)
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Sunday, 4/5/2014
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11:30/ Technical Museum
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Exhibition Art and Labour
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Guided tour through the exhibition (in English)
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15:00 – 18:00 The Afterlives of Labor
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Bojan Mucko
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Milijana Babic
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Mario Kikaš
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OUR (Alemka Ðivoje, Dalibor Prancevic, Robertina Tomic)
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