Future from the Balkans

ZdEnka BadOvInaC

The current refugee crisis in Europe, largely triggered by the war in Syria, brings up once again the tired question: What can art do in times of war, exodus, and genocide? I want to reflect on this question in light of the work of various contemporary artists and theorists on the current refugee crisis, as well as of artists and theorists associated with the downfall of the communist regime and the most recent war in the region of the former Yugoslavia. Given the fact that the Balkan refugee route has, until recently, run mainly through former Yugoslav countries, it seems almost unavoidable to trace parallels with the effects of the 1990s war in the region, and to reconsider the notion of collectivity. On the one hand, in the socialist era, collectivity was an official ideology that meant, among other things, that responsibility was everyone’s and no one’s; on the other hand, there was a genuine spirit of collectivism among the people. In Yugoslavia, founded as it was on communist notions and an ideology of brotherhood and unity, the collective habitus had become strongly rooted among artists, and, as I will show, it is still operative in the current environment of refugee columns and razor-wire fences. This is evi- denced, among other things, by the fact that artists in the region have paid rela- tively little attention to how contemporary crises affected the individual, focusing instead on how they challenge us to reexamine notions of community.

Brotherhood and Unity Highway Choosing the Balkans as one of their major corridors into Europe, the refugees could hardly have resurrected a better metaphor to suggest the decay of collectivity and sociality. The Balkan route through the region of the former Yugoslavia generally followed the Brotherhood and Unity Highway, as it was known in the era of Tito. Obviously, most refugees would not have known the history of this highway. But for many of us living in the these territories, this highway, constructed mostly by youth labor brigades after World War II in order to connect the whole of Yugoslavia, from Slovenia in the north to the Macedonian border with Greece, symbolizes important notions of collectivity and solidarity. Things have changed drastically from the time of socialist Yugoslavia, with its free health

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insurance, schools and kindergartens for all, and a community center in nearly every village and functioning museums in every town. now education and health care have to be paid for individually, most of the principal museums in the region have closed or are barely surviving, and unemployment is on the rise. Some of the main refugee centers on the Balkan route were set up in factories where, until recently, workers from various ex-Yugoslavian republics had come to work. Many of these factories failed or were downsized after the recent economic crisis. While the whole of Europe has been affected by ruthless austerity measures, it was Balkan countries, starting with Greece, that have suffered the worst consequences. Thus, the Balkan route has come to symbolize not only the refugees’ loss of home but also the loss of our own community, not only the loss of our former shared country but also, above all, the loss of a society of solidarity and welfare. It is true that one of the mechanisms whereby the socialist regime “protected” its people was the relative isolation of the country, and in one way or another, artists took up this isolation as a subject for their work. One of the ways of tran- scending it—although it needs to be emphasized that of all socialist countries, Yugoslavia’s borders were the most open—was for artists to establish contact with like-minded colleagues both nationally and internationally. This was done via various collective artistic projects and networks of communication, such as mail art. Of course, the relative lack of freedom also meant that many artists retreated to their ivory towers. Yet the collective desire was clear: Freedom meant mobility. How, then, are we to account for the fact that of all European countries, it is precisely the ex-socialist ones—countries such as Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland—with their largely bitter past experiences of isolation, that have championed the most restrictive politics on the current refugee question? When Hungarian president viktor Orbán initiated the building of razor-wire fences along the southern Hungarian border, he quickly found emulators in other countries. not only that: Just before the EU and Turkey concluded their agreement on immigration policies, the governments in the region decided to close the Balkan route to refugees. The EU-Turkey agreement itself, which was intended to stop the uncontrolled mass influx of refugees to Europe, was assessed by a number of critical observers to effectively constitute a bribe in which responsibility for hun- dreds of thousands of people was shifted from the EU to Turkey. European leaders not only promised Turkey an additional €3 billion in financial assistance and to abolish the visa requirement for Turkish citizens, they adopted a model of exchange of refugees that breached international law: For each Syrian refugee returned from Greece to Turkey, one Syrian refugee was to be resettled from Turkey to the EU, at the expense of the latter. The fate of refugees of other nationalities was left unresolved. Thus, in order to solve “its” refugee crisis, the EU concluded a questionable agreement with the autocratic regime of Turkey, which, according to amnesty International, has not even ratified the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees and has, since 1968, granted refugee status to European seekers only. In practice, this means that international law does not really oblige Turkey to treat refugees as refugees.

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The closing of the Balkan route precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe in Greece and the forced return of refugees to Turkey. Far from being a safe country, Turkey is where these people are exposed to further human-rights violations and even sent back to Syria, against the terms of the deal. The agreement between the EU and Turkey was supposed to establish order; what it brought about was a viola- tion of international law and, as a result, an indirect refusal of any political-civil identity to the refugees and migrants.

Noncitizens a similar issue of depoliticization was raised by Tomaž Mastnak in 1996, speaking at the symposium “Living with Genocide: The War in Bosnia, Political Theory and art,” organized by the Ljubljana Museum of Modern art.1 Mastnak’s key thesis was that contemporary political theory failed to grasp the war in Bosnia. Unable to understand the war in the context of wider changes in the world, it also neglected the question of the Bosnian state and that of the sovereignty of its citizens. The consequence, according to Mastnak, was that in public discussions, the citizens of Bosnia morphed into “Muslims” and their state into a “Muslim state.” The question of the state thus found itself transformed into a question of ethnici- ty, facilitating the justification of the thesis that the war in Bosnia was about local ethnic conflicts rather than any wider political interests. The resulting impossibili- ty of analysis, of positing a political interpretation of the war in Bosnia, played into the hands of those who refused to take a clear political stand in the war, let alone help the Bosnian state to mount an armed resistance against the Serbian aggres- sor. Highlighting the problem of the depoliticization of war, Mastnak noted that “by addressing Bosnians as simply humans and not citizens of a state that fell vic- tim to military aggression, humanitarianism denies their civic existence. In the world today, it is only as citizens that people can hope to have a say in what hap- pens to their lives.”2 Slavoj Žižek was another thinker who pointed out how the collapse or malfunc- tion of the state leaves its inhabitants at the mercy of transnational interests. In an essay published in the catalogue of the nSk State pavilion3 at the 1993 venice

1. “Living with Genocide: The War in Bosnia, Political Theory and art,” international symposium, Museum of Modern art Ljubljana, May 23–26, 1996, consisted of two parts: “art and the War in Bosnia” (conceived by Zdenka Badovinac, IRWIn, and Igor Zabel) and “Political Theory and the War in Bosnia” (conceived by Tomaž Mastnak). Participants in the section “art and the War in Bosnia” includ- ed Marina abramović, dunja Blažević, david Elliott, Jürgen Harten, IRWIn, alexandre Melo, viktor Misiano, Edin numankadić, Peter Weibel, Igor Zabel, and denys Zacharopoulos. This part of the symposium was documented in M’Ars, Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art 11, no. 1–2 (1999). 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. In 1984, three groups—the multimedia group Laibach, the visual-arts group IRWIn, and the theater group Scipion nasice Sisters Theatre (SnST)—founded an art collective called neue Slowenische kunst (nSk). nSk then established further subdivisions: the design group new Collectivism, the department of Pure and applied Philosophy, Retrovision, Film, and Builders.

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Biennale, he wrote of the collapse of Bosnia and Herzegovina as predicting the future of Europe: “Europe is coming closer and closer to a state of non-statehood where state mechanisms are losing their binding character. The authority of the state is being eroded from the top by the trans-European regulations from Brussels and the international economic ties and from the bottom by local and ethnic interests, while none of those elements are strong enough to fully replace the state authority.”4 Žižek, however, did not argue for the preservation of the nation-state; after all, one of the points of the venice Biennale catalogue of the artists’ state of nSk, where the essay appeared, was to denounce the very concept of the venice Biennale, based as it is on national selections.5 Rather, he emphasized the impor- tance of an artistic utopia geared “towards a state without nation, a state which would no longer be founded on an ethnic community and its territory, therefore simultaneously towards a state without territory, towards a purely artificial structure of principles and authority which will have severed the umbilical cords of ethnic ori- gin, indigenousness and rootedness.”6 Here, Žižek invoked the subversive character of art, which, as such, can only serve an as-yet-nonexistent state. The fact that former Yugoslav countries closed their borders to refugees and migrants even before directly ordered to do so by Brussels indicates that in the present day, nation-states obey the master’s (in our case, the EU’s) desire even before it is expressed, eroding the authority and power of their governments in the eyes of their own citizens.

On the one hand, nSk’s art seemed paradigmatic of the 1980s; on the other, it was radically different from the postmodernism typical of the time. Rather than noncommittal postmodern “collag- ing,” it used appropriation and fusion of antithetical aesthetic concepts to take a clear stand on topical issues, challenging its audience to do likewise with its often provocative interventions. nSk countered the mania for citation prevalent in the 1980s with its retro method. On its multiple fronts of resistance, nSk was invariably ambiguous, bringing together contrasting artistic traditions, nazi and communist symbols, quotes from speeches by socialist and capitalist leaders, as well as using such obscure sources as the bylaws of a hunting club. Though calling itself new Slovenian art, it operated with anachronistic images and used the German language in its name in order to allude to a more than thousand-year- long German political and cultural hegemony over the small Slovenian nation. 4. Slavoj Žižek, “Es Gibt keinen Staat in Europa,” Padiglione nSk-Irwin, guest artists in Slovene pavilion, ateneo San Basso, Piazzeta dei Leoncini, June 11–august 21, 1993. 5. The pavilion, called Padiglione nSk–IRWIn/Guest artists, formed part of the Slovenian pavilion in 1993, the year of Slovenia’s first independent presentation at the venice Biennale after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The formerly shared Yugoslav pavilion remained closed, having been appropri- ated by Serbia. as commissioner of the Slovenian pavilion, I asked the then-director of the biennial, achille Bonito Oliva, for help with finding a suitable venue. The attempt failed, although Bonito Oliva did suggest that national pavilions host artists from other states. When Slovenia finally found its own venue outside of the Giardini, we presented Marjetica Potrč as our official artist and the group IRWIn as representatives of the guest state of nSk, thus commenting on the attitude of the venice Biennale towards new states in Europe at the time when the region of the former Yugoslavia, in the immediate vicinity of Italy, was still torn by civil war. 6. Žižek, “Es Gibt keinen Staat in Europa.”

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The Cultural Landscape of Europe One of the questions to be asked here is to what extent the nation-state emerged as a means of self-protection against what is different and incomprehen- sible. Even the highly transnational character of modernist styles did not prevent individual national cultures from adapting them to their established cultural patterns. Faced with the current situation in Europe, some artists have taken to drawing attention to the ways “universal values,” whether of humanity or of art, sooner or later find themselves captive to a politics of exclusion. These are increasingly taken up by both the EU and its individual member states, which now use appeals to shared foundations of European culture to further bolster the defense of their respective national identities. Slovenian artist nika autor, for instance, points to the current situation as an anchoring point (point de capiton) revealing connections between landscape painting, nationalism, modernism, and the present time of perfect surveillance. In her 2011 work Impressions: Landscapes: Paradise of Slovenia, which incorporates both video and photography, autor reflects critically on the fact that Impressionist paintings often served as representations of the national landscape, even supporting its symbolism. Impressionism is based on the concept of originality and established itself as an international modernist language, that is,

Nika Autor. Impressions: Landscapes: Paradise of Slovenia. 2011. Photograph by Dejan Habicht.

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as a supra-national phenomenon. It has long been known that this supposed “uni- versality” did not at first reach much beyond the confines of Europe or, in the best of cases, the Western world. and at first glance, the blurred contours of autor’s landscapes do recall Impressionist paintings. Yet rather than being in color, they are in black and white; and rather than being original expressions of their author, they derive from the video archive of Slovenia’s national public-broadcasting orga- nization. The footage was taken with heat-sensitive cameras, registering the movement of bodies—including refugee bodies—in the landscape. In autor’s represen- tation, the Slovenian landscape is alive and mutable, owing not only to light conditions but to living bodies; as such, it is not something that could serve as an eternal symbol of the nation. Since thermal cameras are intended for supervision of the landscape rather than for maintaining awareness of its beauty, which can only change with the seasons, any other “unnatural change” must obviously constitute a disturbance requiring a response, if not violence and the removal of said disturbance. It makes little difference whether it is the European landscape in general or the Slovenian national one that is affected, since the EU nations are quick to brandish identities based on their shared European foundation when it comes to enemies from outside Europe. It is no accident that in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” theme was adopted as the European anthem, given its celebration of the common element shared by European nations: Christianity. “Ode to Joy,” written by German poet Friedrich Schiller in 1785, celebrates brotherhood among people—that is, among people belonging to the cultural landscape of one and the same deity: Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, daughter from Elysium, We enter, drunk with fire, Heavenly, thy sanctuary! Your magics join again What custom strictly divided; all people become brothers, Where your gentle wing abides. (tr. John Glenn Paton) Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 and the “Ode to Joy” chorus in its final movement have recently become the subject of a theater show created by the Slovenian group via negativa. The accompanying booklet, The Ninth, features the most char- acteristic statements on the final movement, one of the most famous moments in the history of music: “masterpiece of the Western civilisation”; “giant and complex,” “sublime,” “striking example of the human spirit,” “triumphant vision of brotherhood.”

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In The Ninth, six performers wear horses’ heads and digital patterns are pro- jected onto their nude bodies. Their movements are limited, cautious, repetitive. They are not human-animal hybrids; their bodies have been touched by the third hand of civilization. They are what Europeans have turned into; what the dressage trainers of purebred Lipizzans at the Habsburg court may not have fully succeeded at creating. not insignificantly, Lipizzans are named after the Slovenian village of Lipica, then under the rule of the austrian-Hungarian monarchy, as indeed was the case for the whole of Slovenia. However, the via negativa performance has to be understood primarily with reference to the current refugee crisis and the atten- dant passion for the conservation and fostering of “purebred” culture. European involvement in wars and European interference in the domestic affairs of Middle Eastern and african countries have contributed strongly to millions of people being forced to abandon their homes. not all of the refugees arriving in the so- called old continent can be turned into perfectly trained Lipizzans; most will be demoted to the level of terrorists and rapists—of animals, as it were. This is how the subjectivity acquired by Europeans along our long road to freedom, brotherhood, and equality is described in The Ninth: “nothing great about us. nothing sublime. naked and suspicious. not complex but reduced. not sublime but explic- it. not romantic but digital. Switched on or switched off. Repetitive. Blinded by images that we’ve seen. deaf from sounds that we’ve heard. Looking for a connection with the animal.”

Culture over Animality Many thought that the closing of the Balkan refugee route meant that order had been reestablished and that we were genuine, cultural Europeans once more. Peter Weibel, speaking at the “Living with Genocide” symposium, interpret- ed war and genocide as the results of civilization and culture themselves. according to Weibel, any art that contents itself with simply denouncing violence and aspiring to purity and order thereby contributes to the reproduction of the very civilization that produces war. “We must recognize that in our century it has been just this kind of strong identification that has created war by creating the other. art therefore produced, as Freud called it, Gefühlsbundung, these emotional bonds between group members. art is not against war. Only art which opposes identification processes, which does not produce Gefühlsbundung, which does not produce emotional bonds, is against war, against violence.”7 Identification processes are not unidirectional; furthermore, they are not limited to shaping the self-image but also require incorporating others’ image of

7. Peter Weibel, “anatomy of art. art and Power, Culture and Power, Complicity or Contradiction, affiliation or Opposition,” M’Ars, Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art 11, no. 1–2 (1999), p. 56.

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the self. Those Middle Eastern and african refugees who manage to obtain European citizenship will never be the same persons they were before. Even now, we can certainly look to the experiences of Eastern European artists over the last two and a half decades—the period when strategies of inclusion and exclusion based on similarity and difference have become more obvious than at any previous time in history—to help us understand how the European gaze will contribute to shaping their selves. according to Western European clichés, the Eastern European is less civilized, still ruled by instinct. If European integration policies were based on what many Europeans really think, Eastern Europeans (as well as the current refugees) would be required to shake off what Western Europeans see as their instinctiveness and irrationality, their quasi-animality, in order to become more useful members of the regulated world. against such expectations and stereotypes, some Eastern European artists opt to foreground this irrationality and animality as something to take cognizance of and accept. One of the most straightforward statements on this issue was made by Russian artist Oleg kulik. In his performances in the 1990s, kulik often took on the persona of a dog. all was well and good until an incident in 1996 when his identification with the role went a step too far. at the opening of the exhibition Interpol at the Fargfabriken Contemporary art Center in Stockholm, dedicated to dialogue among Eastern and Western artists, kulik and his Russian colleague alexander Brener attacked and bit visitors before being removed from the venue by the police. Renata Salecl wrote about the incident in the following terms: “In regard to kulik’s performance it can be said that the West finds an aesthetic pleasure in observing the Russian ‘dog,’ but only on condition that he does not behave in a truly dog-like man- ner. When kulik ceased to be a decorative art-object—the Eastern neighbor who repre- sents the misery of the Russian dog-like life—and started to act in a way that surprised his admirers, he quickly became designated the enemy.”8 In addition to criticizing Western notions of Russians as uncivilized sav- ages, kulik called for a different style of communication. according to the artist, every- Via Negativa. The ninth. 2016. day language and narration Photograph by Marcandrea. had become insufficient; the only adequate tool that remained was to shock the audience. Such a state of affairs was intended to constitute a proof of the end of culture and of the emergence of

8. Renata Salecl, “Love Me, Love My dog,” Index. Scandinavian Art and Culture 3–4 (1996), p. 117.

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post-humanism. kulik’s animal projects go beyond commentary on East-West communication issues; they also carry an ecological message and critique of anthropocentrism, as the artist has repeatedly advocated a society in which animals receive the same treatment as humans. The charge of being uncivilized and uncultured is one that has been leveled at the nations at the margins of Europe throughout its history; these characteristics have also been invoked to account for the most recent Balkan wars. Particularly after the collapse of communism and the wars that followed, artists from the region and from Eastern Europe in general have been testing, firsthand, the extent to which borders can really open and walls come down between the two Europes. What artists with the experience of migration share, above all, is the sense of loss of human dignity. Why a person has lost their home country—whether because of war, economic crisis, climate change, or because their country lost international credibility, resulting in its isolation—hardly makes any difference in this regard. after the last Balkan war, a number of artists from the region of the former Yugoslavia emigrated to the West, including many Serbian artists. Because of the negative role their country had played in the war, the latter needed visas and were generally subject to restrictive immigration policies in Europe. In 2000, Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić published an online advertisement: a photograph in which she appeared naked, with a shaved head and body, accompanied by the title “Looking for a Husband with EU Passport” and an email address to send offers. Thanks to this ad, Ostojić actually married a German artist and was granted temporary residence in Germany—first for three months, then for three years, after which her residence

Tanja Ostojić. Looking for a Husband with EU Passport. 2000–05. Photograph by Dejan Habicht.

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permit was extended for two more years, rather than being converted into perma- nent residence. Running from 2000 to 2005, the artistic project tested European immigration policies “in the flesh.” The image used by Ostojić to find a European husband was shocking, her naked, emaciated appearance drawing attention to the bare life of those lacking an appropriate passport. In his book The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio agamben points out that biopolitics, the administration of life, has been present in Western politics ever since Greek antiquity, with aristotle’s Politics already conflating human life with the life of a citizen of the polis.9 What can exist outside of this frame is the lives of deities or animals, that is, the lives of nonhuman beings; in this sense, life itself is no more than raw material in the hands of political power, enabling its self-reproduction.

The Collectivism of Unstable Relations now that the Balkan refugee route is closed and refugees are being trans- ferred to Europe in a more orderly fashion and in drastically limited numbers, according to the terms of the EU-Turkey agreement, it is scarcely comprehensible why wire fences are still up along our borders. When one sees Slovenia surround- ed by razor wire, it is difficult not to think of prisons or even concentration camps. Even when the razor wire still served its purpose, an observer compared the para- noid Slovenia it protected and the stream of refugees to two ships with passengers mutely observing each other as they pass by. Yet these ships have more in common than might be apparent at first glance. What they share is loss: loss of community, whether of their home country or of a society of solidarity, to be replaced, in today’s Europe, by one of austerity and “security.” It would be difficult to claim that life in Eastern Europe today is unequivocally better than during the socialist era. In particular, this cannot be said of the lowest classes, which is the group that many artists belong to, with their living and working conditions deteriorating by the day, especially since the crisis in 2008. Faced with crises—economic and ecological, as well as the refugee crisis—artists have been obliged to invent new notions of collectivity. new types of collectivity have been made possible, among other things, by the increasing use of the Internet, especially of social media. as early as the beginning of the 1990s, the development and wide- spread use of digital technologies inspired some Eastern European artists to turn to utopian scientists and thinkers of the early twentieth century who had been interest- ed in environments outside of our planet and in all-encompassing control of the human being. all of this has led to, among other things, an awareness of post- humanist circumstances as determined by the twin facts that we, human beings, are not the sole inhabitants of the Earth and that our environment has long ceased to be limited to the planet: We have been leaving litter in space for decades, and even on Earth we are affected by various cosmic processes. as living conditions get pro- gressively harsher, as xenophobia and even fascism thrive in Europe, explorations of post-humanist ideas—such as space culturalization, forming community with the

9. Giorgio agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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dead (to be revived thanks to technological advances), or representing animals alongside humans in political parties—may appear as so many ways to evade reality.10 Yet it seems that these utopias may in fact constitute a significant contribu- tion to the understanding of various crises of our time, which share a common foundation: the crisis of capitalism. Whatever the outcomes of these assorted crises, change on a massive scale seems unavoidable and requires preparation—not least by investigating the potentials of different forms of collectivity already extant in our present-day reality. Our future collectivities will be shaped by the contents of our current crises—not by the underlying issues but by their very interconnectability, by their shared emergencies, which will coalesce, in part, into short- or longer-term states of rebellion. and it is artists—who else?—who have already started to imagine the future through themes that go against currently predominant ideas of society and of reality in general. artists exploring issues of post-humanism, for instance, suggest that prevailing ideas of humans as rational beings, as the only ones capable of decision-making concerning our life environment, have become a limiting factor. In tackling the refugee crisis, then, asking for more humanity is not enough. It could even be said that what is needed for a better world is less humanity, at least less of the sort of humanity that implies that the fate of the planet depends exclusively on the good human being. It is necessary to start thinking beyond anthropocentrism, since subjects of our reality include nonliving nature, flora, and fauna. all of these forces, not all of them necessarily human, as well as people who, for various reasons, find themselves pushed aside and humiliated today, must join forces at points of resistance to dominant forces of capital. at this moment, it seems that only shared problems can save us, and while it is important to remain attentive to individual stories, these can sometimes blur the very collective potential of the current crisis. a number of humanitarian, artistic, and cultural projects have been outspokenly critical of the new walls and fences being erected in Europe, of the mounting xenophobia, of the lack of empathy, and of the bureaucratic treatment of refugees. an often-raised criticism is that officials and the media treat refugees in ways leading to complete depersonalization. Journalists opposed to this trend have focused on haunting stories of the fates suffered by individuals or families, and some artists have taken to creating refugees’ portraits in order to foreground their individuality. These strategies attempt to highlight the fact that refugees are people like us who used to have jobs and homes, that there are among them intellectuals and artists, in short, people who could productively integrate into European society and make important contribu- tions to its development. It is right and proper to see each refugee as an individual with his or her own

10. Such explorations have been undertaken by various artists in Slovenia and Russia, such as anton vidokle, dragan Živadinov, dunja Zupančič, and Miha Turšič of the delak Institute, invoking, among other sources, the early-twentieth-century tradition of Russian cosmism, in particular the writ- ings of nikolai Fyodorov. Similar topics have been addressed by thinkers such as Boris Groys (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/boris-groys/) and keti Chukrov (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/keti-chukhrov/).

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story, yet this concern often stops at humanitarian gestures, leaving the political potential of refugees’ presence largely overlooked. This potential lies in their collectivity, and, even more, in the collectivization of their problems and ours, in rec- ognizing the common interests of refugees and underprivileged Europeans, which could potentially lead to calls for more radical changes in European society, which has lost the notion of community based on solidarity and equality. at a time when the welfare state is dying, artists—particularly those in the ex- Yugoslavia region—are taking up questions of the very sociality that, according to Boris Buden, one of the most lucid cultural critics and thinkers on the postcom- munist condition in the region of the former Yugoslavia, has ceased to exist; what remains is the cultural memory of a more just society marked by collectivity and solidarity, a society that has disappeared and is now making a comeback in cultural translation. “While the social utopia of the past was prospective, the cultural utopia of the present is retrospective. nowadays, the possibility of a better world only opens up in a utopian retrospective.”11 artists from the former Yugoslav countries, now subject to multiple redefini- tions as well as new erasures and constructs of history, have become highly sensi- tized to questions such as who makes history, how to revive the potentials of eman- cipatory traditions, and how to use art as a tool in the service of preserving the memory of those whose history does not find its way into history books. The latter question was central to a project conceived by Serbian artist Đorđe Balmazović: From 2013 to 2015, he visited various asylum facilities in Serbia, drawing maps of refugee routes to Europe. His maps are the result of direct work with refugees undertaken in collaboration with Belgrade Group 484 and other artists. according to Balmazović, participants in the project did not wish to see migrants through the lens of humanitarian paternalism, as victims, but rather as courageous individuals who had brought about radical change in their lives just by undertak- ing such journeys, fleeing war, and standing up to poverty. Hence his maps not only document refugees’ routes across forests or seas but also incorporate their answers to questions such as why they had undertaken their journeys, what hard- ships they had faced, how they had crossed borders, how much they had paid smugglers, and what their experiences had been with police and with the inhabitants of the countries they had traveled through. The drawings bear inscriptions such as “From Somalia, grew up in Saudi arabia but there was no future. not given citizenship only permission to stay.” “We left deposit of 9000 € for smugglers to help crossing the borders. deposit should be left in the Western Union or to friends in mobile shop.” “Six hours walking through jungle. Border police here is tougher.” Balzamović’s representations of the refugees’ journeys are limited to bare facts in order to draw attention to the absence of humane asylum policies in Europe. The refugees are pictured schematically, with children or bags on their

11. Boris Buden, “Prihodnost: utopija po koncu utopije,” in Cona prehoda: O koncu postkomunizma (Ljubljana: krtina, 2014), p. 156.

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Djordje Balmazović and the Škart collective. Map drawn from account of an asylum seeker in Bogovadja, Serbia. 2013–15.

backs, faceless and without identity. His maps transcribe oral testimonies, the histories of those in a position of inferiority with regard to the culture dominating the written word. They serve no counter-narratives; instead, their fragmentary nature is intended to highlight the multiplicity of histories, including the histories of those not entitled to write them down. The Balkan route is where common interests of all migrants in the world can be identified: the interests of those who have lost their homes as well as those bereft of society and history, and therefore bereft not only of necessary conditions for a better life but also of their dreams for the future.

Utopia Beyond the End of Utopias12 Identifying common interests that can become founding principles for new communities seems to be one of the foremost tasks of art in our time. not that art has much influence on the present—but it can impact the future. Eastern European avant-gardes had a close connection with utopian constructs, but so too did communism. Communism emerged from a powerful tradition of utopian thought; the very fact that socialism first took root in Russia casts strong doubts on

12. This sections’s title is taken from the title of the third chapter of Boris Buden’s book Cona prehoda.

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the accuracy of Marx’s criticism of utopian thinkers and their belief that a society could be created on the basis of a perfect plan. One such utopian plan is the nSk State in Time, founded by member groups of the collective neue Slovenische kunst in 1992, just after the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of the new nation-state of Slovenia. Earlier I quoted from Slavoj Žižek’s essay in the catalogue of the nSk State in Time pavilion at the 1993 venice Biennale. Soon after its creation, the nSk State began issuing passports. These mimicked real ones in both form and material. By now, over fifteen thousand people from all over the globe have filled in the forms and attached the photographs required for acquisition of citizenship in this artistic state. Most of its citizens hail from the world of art, especially from among Laibach fans.13 Yet a significant portion also come from regions devastated by past or present wars and characterized by repressive regimes and poor economic and social conditions. Some of the first nSk citizens in the early 1990s were inhabitants of Sarajevo, which was then under siege. There are a number of anecdotes and testimonies from individuals who found their nSk passports useful in crossing borders before the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina won international recognition, since their Bosnian passports were insufficient. at a time when new states were emerg- ing in Europe, border-control officials must have been faced with significant levels of uncertainty, and we can only imagine what happened when someone presented an nSk passport. However, the real chaos struck in 2007, when the official address of the nSk State in Ljubljana was flooded with thousands of requests for nSk passports arriving from nigeria. How this unusual story came to pass is still slightly enigmatic. Certainly an exodus of dramatic proportions in nigeria and in sub- Saharan africa generally had been taking place thanks to the poor conditions of life there long before Europe became aware of the refugee crisis. But a nigerian passport offers only rather limited possibilities for crossing borders. This may explain how their desperate search for ways of immigrating to Europe brought many nigerians to the nSk State website, where they learned about the possibility of applying for an nSk passport. What is not entirely clear, however, is how the myth of the utility of the nSk passport arose in the first place. However that may be, applicants for nSk passports flooded the Slovenian Ministry of Foreign affairs with phone calls to ask about visas and about the rights of nSk citizens. Obviously, what was happening was a misunderstanding on a massive scale, one that unex- pectedly brought IRWIn members face-to-face with moral questions and dilemmas

13. Laibach is known internationally mostly as an industrial-rock band, although it is really a multimedia group; it first drew attention in the 1980s with its powerful visual language. Its 1982 manifesto provided the basis for the concept of the nSk collective, which Laibach co-founded in 1984. The opening sentence of the manifesto reads: “art and totalitarianism are not mutually exclusive.” Laibach was the German name for Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and was used for German-occupied Ljubljana in World War II. Thus the very name “Laibach,” as well as its black cross, reminiscent of the cross of Malevich, was a provocation to both the government and the public in socialist Yugoslavia. Laibach’s predominantly totalitarian, archaic, and industrial imagery, its heavy industrial sound paired with electronic, classical, and pop music, its militarist appearance, and its manifestos are aimed at exploring the relation between art and ideology.

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that they were wholly unprepared for. among these was the price of the passports, which barely exceeded the cost of their production; little for Europeans, but oner- ous for nigerian applicants. The very fact that the latter were prepared to pay the price demonstrates how seriously they took nSk passports. The situation reached the point where nSk members were obliged to publish a disclaimer on their website stating that the passports were not official ones but part of an artistic project. In view of these events, members of the IRWIn group traveled to London, home to many nigerian migrants, where they held a public discussion to clarify that their passports were in fact artistic objects and to learn about the motives of nigerian applicants. In 2010, IRWIn finally managed to carry out a similar project in nigeria. The nSk State in Time can be seen as a project with a double ontology: an artwork on the one hand, a useful object on the other. It per- sists in real time, and it must encounter various social reali- ties that are outside its control. It could be said that its citizens often take things into their own hands, thus building IRWIN. nSk Passport Holders. 2007. a community differ- Photograph by Haris Hararis. ent from most known community models. The community of nSk citizens has not formed according to a uniform principle, on the basis of a shared national, religious, cultural, or other identity. It is what individual citizens need it to be and—perhaps even more important—what they project onto it. Whereas in the past, art would serve a community, facilitating its self-recognition and bestowing a meaning on its existence, the art of persistence in time as exemplified by the nSk State in Time constitutes a location where a more or less accidental community can arise. This is a community whose individual members might occasionally meet in order to take stock of a certain social atmosphere or deal with a concrete social obstacle by means of art.

Culture as a Common in Becoming It may not be wholly unimaginable that a future society, possessed of more dynamic and open structures, might function in a similar way. Thus, Gerald

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Raunig writes of the production of the common, which he claims cannot be understood as a being-common, but rather only as a becoming-common, as a constant production of the common.14 If this common is taken to include culture, that would mean that in present-day Europe, with its unstable relations, culture is less about continuity and purity than about constant discontinuities and hetero- geneity. as for its bearers, they have long ceased to be exclusively recruited from among the members of European nations; more and more, they are individuals caught up in unstable identities and collectives, increasingly capable of organizing their own conditions for social interaction and thus for a different culture.

14. Raunig’s concept of the common is based on the post-operaist philosophy that “has been pointing out that the sphere of the public is increasingly moving from the political into the realm of production, thereby becoming ‘depoliticized’ in a specific sense. It is production that now assumes the structure of the public sphere by increasingly taking over the modulation of social cooperation.” a key question that follows from this is how to re-territorialize the values of social collaboration co-opted by post-Fordist production. In the field of cultural production, an answer lies in instituent practices and institutions of the common. For Raunig, the common means more than just common wealth. Following negri and Hardt, it means “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledge, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.” Gerald Raunig, “Flatness Rules: Instituent Practices and Institutions of the Common in a Flat World,” in Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art in a Flat World, ed. Pascal Gielen (amsterdam: valiz, 2013), pp. 11–35.

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