Since 1990, when the textile and apparel industries in Croatia employed more than 125,000 people, mostly women, to date, 110,000 textile workers have lost their jobs. According to the Union of Textiles, Footwear, Leather, and Rubber of Croatia in 2009, there were 280 textile manufacturing companies and 131 garment manufacturing companies.
The United project brings together workers who have been laid off as redundancies over the last twenty years and still working women workers, union commissioners and those who are distrustful of the union, those who worked in silence and those who protested. Although they have similar fates and similar work and life habits, they have different perspectives on life and in different ways cope with the conditions in which they work or have worked, and ultimately, loss of work, loss of financial stability, but also a sense of belonging. They are all bound by the experience of working in textile, so-called. women’s industry, experience of working under the norm. Middle-aged women who have been invisible for years working in the facility, in precarious and inhumane working conditions, are often intimidated that if they talk about working conditions, they will lose their jobs. Even today, they are completely invisible in the labor market at the age of 45+.
This exhibition is set up as a kind of triptych. One segment consists of a photo showing a female worker on a break – this photo was glued to the cabinet of one of the textile factory workers in Slavonia for years. Break time is a break, but it is part-time and so is work time. The second part of the exhibition is a kind of photo extension. Four empty chairs and four audio tracks; about existential and economic uncertainty, about the legacy of the working class and the transmission of poverty, about anger and rebellion. The last part of the work is printed on the gallery walls and represents the “performance log”. The name is taken from the terminology of the textile industry and is a kind of dystopian manual for standardizing (and violating) labor rights. Employers can monitor the performance of the implementation of the given norms of individual workers by the performance log. The collected and interwoven articles of the Labor Law and transcripts of interviews with workers on working conditions in the textile industry were printed on the walls. What does it mean to work under the norm? Binding wages to the production standard, regularly changing and increasing the standard is part of the capitalist logic that systematically violates and degrades the social security of female workers.
Nevertheless, talking about the textile industry in the context of layoffs, bankruptcies and the downfall of factories has become almost a common place, not only in the media, but also in culture and the arts. It is necessary to show the strength and courage of the workers, but at the same time to point out the inhumane cost of the labor paid by these workers and, by Marxist vocabulary, their alienation from their own work. Although they worked under inhumane conditions even before the war, most women workers often fall into the trap of nostalgia for socialist times where the worker was valued and “lived better”. It is important to dose and reassess that nostalgia and rediscover space (s) for rebellion and change.
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Nikolina Hrga was born in 1989 in Rijeka. In September 2014 she graduated in Cultural Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka, and in September 2015 she graduated Media Arts and Practices from the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka. With the support of the Ministry of Culture, she has published a series of texts on plagiarism in higher education. He works with several non-profit organizations active in the fields of culture and the arts. For the development of the script and project for her first documentary, she received the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Center. With this project, she participated in the European Social Documentary 2016 international educational program and several smaller, national and regional film workshops and festivals. The movie is currently in production. Her first and primary medium is writing, but she creates and finds stories that can sometimes (and necessarily) be told through film, theater … This is her first solo exhibition.
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The work of “United” by Nicola Hrge was produced as part of the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery Factory project.
General sponsor of INA – Oil Industry d.d.
The factory is funded by the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture.
The work of the Gallery is supported by the Nova Culture Foundation.
