How Are Independent Cultures Born?

How Are Independent Cultures Born? A Genealogy of the Independent Cultural Scene in Post-Yugoslav Zagreb Student: Sepp Eckenhaussen Text: rMA-Thesis in Arts & Culture: Art Studies at the University of Amsterdam Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Crhista-Maria Lerm Hayes, University of Amsterdam Prof. Dr. Leonida Kovač, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb 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 Croatia 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 SOROS Foundation, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation, as well as funding by for-profit organisations such as the Viennese Erste Bank. Moreover, since the mid-2000’s, international funds have retreated, rendering the independent cultural scene more dependent on state funding than before, de facto incentivising the independent cultural organisations to engage actively in advocacy, self-institutionalisation and cultural policy-making. It is questionable, then, how independent or how non-institutional this independent cultural scene now really is. Is it a product of local urgency, or of neoliberal and neo-imperial phenomena like globalisation and cultural entrepreneurship? 1 MAMA/Multimedia Institute: www.mi2.hr, Center for Drama Arts: www.cdu.hr/about/index.htm, WHW: www.whw.hr, Medika: www.facebook.com/akc.medika/, Booksa: www.booksa.hr, BADco.: www.badco.hr/en/home/, BLOK: www.blok.hr, Clubture: www.clubture.org, Kulturpunkt: www.kulturpunkt.hr, Right to the City: www.pravonagrad.org. 4 At the heart of this debate is the question of the relation between artistic and cultural production, the institutional, the state, and the market in the context of global neoliberalism as it has historically played out in the specific context of the former Yugoslav area of Croatia. This specific Croatian situation is characterised by a discourse of continually contested notions such as ‘democratic culture’, ‘civil society’, ‘grass-roots’, and ‘NGO-isation’ that emerged over the past decades and started occupying the same discursive spaces as the discursive tradition inherited from the socialist era, featuring concepts like ‘self- management’, ‘common/communal ownership’ and ‘social art’. Furthermore, the discursive field has been inhabited by traditional or bourgeois art-theoretical notions such as ‘autonomy’ and ‘purity’, as well as counter-cultural tendencies. It is within this peculiar discursive field, reflecting a complex political and institutional condition, that organisations with critical practices have started self-articulating in terms of ‘independent culture’, ‘non-institutional culture’, and ‘civil society’. The vagueness of various central terms in the discourse around independent culture, independence, non-institutional, and civil society triggers a myriad of questions. During three months of in situ research in Zagreb, including sixteen interviews with actors of independent culture, a large number of gallery and museum visits, the reading of a number of ‘organic’ theoretical texts, and general engagement in the scene, I have sought an answer to the following questions: What exactly are the practices employed in the scene? What communities and publics are addressed by and involved in independent culture? What knowledge is produced in it? What is the relation between art, politics, and independent culture? What is the institutional status of independent culture? How did the existing practices of independent culture come into being? How does the independent cultural scene relate to the old national situation of Yugoslav Socialism and the new situation of Croatian nationalist neoliberalism? Whom does independent culture serve? Is independent culture a homogenous phenomenon in terms of genealogies, political orientations, practices, and identities? If not, what are the differences dividing independent culture? In short: What is independent culture? Independence: Four Levels of Significance (and the Aesthetics of the Scene) The first major problem in understanding independent culture is the very terminology used to define it, which will be puzzling to the uninformed outsider. ‘Independent culture’ is an organic term, which has gathered a set of specific meanings over the course of time. What 5 independence is at stake here? Although some degree of untranslatability should be cherished, I need to elaborate some layers of meaning of ‘independence’ in order to outline a preliminary basic terminological understanding: a hypothesis to be re-evaluated in the conclusion. For the moment, ‘independence’ will be considered to have four levels of supplementary, if sometimes contradictory, significance: formal, identitarian, systemic- positional, and subjectivising. The first of these levels of significance concerns the ‘intuitive’ (and therefore deceptive) meaning of formal independence: economic and governmental independence from any external body or force. The problem of this formal use is evident. Cultural production is always dependent upon either private money, public money, unpaid labour, or a combination of these. Hence, it is immediately clear that ‘independent culture’ cannot be understood as a straight-forward formal definition. However, on a programmatic level, independence defined as a far-reaching formal freedom in programmatic self-determination, can be achieved and is one of independent culture’s main characteristics. It should be noted that the concept of ‘non- institutional culture’ is regularly used as improved equivalent to ‘independent culture’ in its formal sense. However, the latter term is equally context-specifically defined (i.e. in opposition to the local ‘institutional sphere’ of large, government-run cultural institutions) and too formalist to my understanding. I will therefore adhere to the adjective ‘independent’. The second level of significance in ‘independence’ regards identitarian aspects of the term. Cultural workers often speak about independent culture in the first-person plural and actively use the word ‘scene’, which is unsurprising because there is a large overlap in people working for different independent cultural organisations. Many independent cultural organisations, such as MAMA, Booksa, and BLOK, actively employ the term ‘community’, invoking an element of locality-based positive

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