How Are Independent Cultures Born?

A Genealogy of the Independent Cultural Scene in Post-Yugoslav

Student: Sepp Eckenhaussen Text: rMA-Thesis in Arts & Culture: Art Studies at the of Amsterdam Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Crhista-Maria Lerm Hayes, University of Amsterdam Prof. Dr. Leonida Kovač, Academy of Fine Arts,

Contact details: [email protected] +31 6 46792676 Krelis Louwenstraat 5A2, Amsterdam

Date: 4 July 2018 Word count: 23,368

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS INDEPENDENT CULTURE? 4

Independence: Four Levels of Significance (and the Aesthetics of the Scene) 5

Narrating Independent Cultures: Approach, Methods and Structure 9

Mapping the Civil 13

From Amsterdam to Zagreb 15 Tactical Transnational Networks 16 Neo-Imperialist Reason 17 The Native Informant and (Un)Translatability of the Other 18 I Take Position 21

GENEALOGY: WHERE DO INDEPENDENT CULTURES COME FROM? 22

1. Point Zero: The Disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 22

2. Independencies of Independence 26 2.1. Arkzin and the Anti-War Campaign 27 2.2. The Institutional Crisis 31 2.3. The Emergence of a Parallel System 36

3. Systemic Territorialisation 39 3.1. A Crack in the Political System 40 3.2. Tactical Networks 42 3.3. Hybridisation 43 3.4. Curatorial Collectives 44 3.5. Outreach 46

4. Prefigurative Praxes 47 4.1. Right to the City 49 4.2. A Bottom-Up Approach to Cultural Policy-Making 51 4.3. The Student Occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy 53 4.4. Historiographical Turn 56 4.5. Non-Native Research 59

5. Appropriation and Re-Orientation 63 5.1. Inside the European Union 63 5.2. The Neo-Conservative Backlash 64 5.3. Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism as Two Hands of the Same Body 65 5.4. The Emergence of New Civil Movements 67 5.5. Precarisation 70

2 5.6. Zagreb je NAŠ! 72 5.7. Independent Cultures as Generation-Specific Phenomenon 74 5.8. The Lack of Feminist Art History 75

CONCLUSION: WHOSE INDEPENDENT CULTURES ARE THESE? 78

BIBLIOGRAPHY 84

Interviews 84

Literature 85

3 Introduction: What is Independent Culture?

After the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the independent state of in 1991, a new field of cultural organisations not aligned to the state-funded cultural infrastructure emerged throughout the country, especially in its capital Zagreb. The most well-known and most established of these organisations include Multimedia Institute/MAMA, the Center for Drama Arts, What How and for Whom?/WHW, Attack!/Medika, Booksa, BADco., BLOK, Clubture, Kulturpunkt, and Right to the City.1 Amongst insiders, this field of cultural organisations is referred to as ‘independent culture’ or ‘non-institutional culture’. None of these independent cultural organisations work within the strict confinements of the art world or artistic production. Instead, their programming entails a broad range of cultural and social practices, and, as such, independent culture dwells on the intersections of various activisms, such as urban activism, anti-fascism, pacifism, commons activism, feminism and queer activism, decoloniality, and ecological activism. In its organisational and programmatic independence from the state and local governments, independent culture claims to work, indeed, independently. Since this independence is argued to produce space for criticality, independent culture is thought to produce more urgent cultural programming than government-dependent institutional culture, or, at least, relevant cultural programs that cannot be realised within that institutional sphere. Yet, from the moment of its emergence in the 1990s, the independent cultural infrastructure to a great extent existed by the grace of international philanthropist organisations, such as the SORO