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Andreja Kulunčić: Art can Create Tools for Change
Nada Beroš
Interview of Nada Beroš published on the NOVOSTI web portal
I learned a lot about the way of self-organization of the community, about the struggle for workers’ rights, about the effort to preserve the indigenous language, culture, and nature, working on a project with four different communities living on the outskirts of Mexico City. One of them is a community of liberation theologians, who live with the workers, work in the mines empowering the workers in the fight for their rights.
After completing sculpture studies in Belgrade (1992), and then in Budapest (1994), Andreja Kulunčić decided to take a different path. She opposes the chaotic and dark nineties in our region with a disciplined and demanding artistic work that in many ways was more reminiscent of scientific research than her basic profession — sculpture. While at the end of the nineties, the majority had just mastered the basics of internet literacy, she bravely explored not only new digital technologies, but also new topics such as genetic engineering (‘Closed Reality — Embryo’, 1999 – 2000), social justice (‘Distributive justice’, 2001; a project which, at the invitation of the selector Okwui Enwezor, was presented at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, the most prestigious exhibition of contemporary art in the world), dealing with these politicized topics continuously and dedicatedly with the help of numerous collaborators-experts in these fields, which she considers equal co-authors. Although she was often invited to numerous international problem exhibitions, Kulunčić, the founder of the MAPA association, shows by her example that one should not wait for ‘customers’, but that one should self-organize and ensure maximum freedom in the idea and execution of projects. Deeply believing in art that can stimulate social change, she continues to work on several multi-year projects at the same time, among which she is just starting the one on Goli otok, which focuses on women political camp.
In a new project-in-progress, you are dealing with a little-known story — the suffering of women on Goli otok, and you are planning one of the workshops/performances for July 21. in the former women’s prison on that island. The very title makes one shudder: ‘You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it’. Women’s trauma is often the focus of your work?
“You betrayed the Party just when you should have helped it” is a sentence of Marija Zelić, the first manager of the women’s political camp on Goli otok. They say that she was particularly cruel to female prisoners, but also that she was put in that position for that reason. Namely, Goli otok and Sveti Grgur were places of repressive de-Stalinization. It is known that they were created in 1949 as the Party’s response to the split between Tito and Stalin with the intention of “re-educating” unfit members of the Party. Tito’s idea that information bureau officers should be broken, not killed, led to the introduction, in addition to the established camp methods, of a series of specific characteristics of the Goli otok political prison island, especially towards women. According to the research of Renata Jambrešić Kirin, the violent, destructive and misogynistic biopolitics in the camp, which systematically attacked the reproductive health of female prisoners, excluded their gender specificities and at the same time turned female prisoners against each other, resulted in deep trauma and long-term silence of women about the experience. Society treats women’s trauma in a patriarchal way, and the prisoners themselves felt ashamed of what they had gone through, so, according to several researchers, they are not even present in the public discourse about totalitarian violence in Yugoslavia. That’s why, at the invitation of Darko Bavoljak and the Ante Zemljar Association to make a project on the theme of Goli otok I turned to women. There were much fewer of them, but that does not diminish the importance of the topic and the need to record their suffering. For the sake of illustration, on part of St. Grgur, where the women’s prison used to be, can only be disembarked in calm weather, and when you succeed, the only info-board you will come across is that you have come to the “deer hunting grounds”. Together with the collaborators on the project, ethnologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin and psychotherapist Dubravka Stijačić, we primarily want to place information panels in front of both women’s prisons (both at Grgur and Goli), then to research as much as possible in the archives and existing testimonies, and then through the project to open up different forms of dealing with space of dehumanization. A permanent part of the artistic intervention will be the visual punctuation of a dozen points of female memory/trauma on both islands, which would not be visible in the landscape, except when you as visitors are familiar with where the ‘traces’ are located, and on the opening day of the installation, in July 2020 ., we are planning a live performance at the intersection of space, movement, instrumental and vocal articulation. That is why, on July 21 this year, we will hold an international instrumental-vocal improvisation workshop in the women’s prison on Goli otok for professional musicians. The leaders of the workshop are Annette Giesriegl, a jazz singer and vocal improviser from Austria, and Jasna Jovićević, a jazz saxophonist and composer from Serbia.
Sharing of authorship
You sign many projects in co-authorship with numerous collaborators from artistic and non-artistic fields and disciplines. What does it mean for you to share co-responsibility with your colleagues today, and what was it like when you started?
The ‘genius’ of artists, more rarely female artists, and the art of expression with certain artistic techniques is no longer an exclusive factor, so sharing authorship with philosophers, dancers, activists or Bosnian workers is not as foreign to the museum-gallery establishment today as it was 25 years ago, when I started. For me, collaboration and sharing of authorship are an important part of the process, I don’t see myself as someone who leads and determines everything within the project, but rather as someone who enables and connects, opens up and shares his with the tools, methods and knowledge of others. It is valuable to hear and take from others and work to harmonize all differences into an artistic work that communicates well, clearly, openly, demystified with the audience. In the last two years, I pushed the boundaries of sharing authorship and taking responsibility within the project even further, so I founded the EQUALS collective with a group of women from Zagreb of different ethnic, religious, racial and sexual identities. Our goal is to warn about the presence of discrimination in Croatian society and raise awareness of the importance of accepting diversity. We focused primarily on the problems that minority identities face on a daily and institutional level, which are the result of discriminatory forms of behavior and discriminatory legislation. For example, from their fear of passing through certain parts of the city because of their skin color or religious features (hijab), through discomfort due to the use of their own language, to the impossibility of adopting a child in a same-sex union or obtaining asylum. We designed a public campaign in which the mentioned problems are manifested as a symptom of society, and not only as private problems of a certain group (https://isteonline.wordpress.com/)
You have worked on complex, multi-year art projects in very different environments, from South and North America, through Great Britain, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to India. Where and from whom did you learn the most?
The project ‘Conquering and Constructing the Common’ is particularly important to me, because I wanted to do a project in Mexico while still studying sculpture in Budapest in the nineties. However, I was denied an entry visa on two occasions, so I travelled around South America for a year, but I was unable to enter Mexico. I finally managed to realize a project in the period from 2011 to 2013 in Mexico City. I learned a lot about the way of self-organization of the community, about the struggle for the rights of mine workers and their families after the death of workers, about the long-term effort to preserve the autochthonous language, culture, and nature, working on a project with four different communities living on the outskirts of Mexico City. Two are very poor, thanks solely to their self-organization they managed to create a nice settlement of dignified life, as they like to say, from a favela settlement. The third is a very well-organized indigenous community to which the city has gradually expanded, and the fourth is an extremely interesting community of liberation theologians, who live with the workers, work in the mines with them and empower them in the fight for their rights.
You have been advocating ‘art for social change’ for a quarter of a century, erasing the boundaries between life and art, the boundaries between disciplines, between actors… Do you sometimes doubt these ‘foundations’?
I still believe that art can open up real questions, provide different ways of looking at social situations, realize dialogue on other grounds, design and offer tools for change.
Many of your projects are self-initiated and do not go through the bureaucracy of the institution, so it seems that you can control everything, from the content and methods of work, to the participants and sources of funding.
Doing complex collaborative projects on your own means constantly looking for funds and dealing with quite a lot of bureaucracy. I have been doing this continuously since 2001, when, with a group of co-authors on the first two major projects, I founded the association MAPA — Multidisciplinary author’s projects and actions — for art, science and technology. On the one hand, it gives you freedom and some projects have been created solely because of it. But on the other hand, endless new rounds when applying for funds lead to fatigue because you are expected to be more and more a project manager and less and less a creative person. It is actually a ‘good’ bureaucratic tactic to dull the edge and relevance of artistic production in the Western world. It seems to me that since we entered the EU, the questions and restrictions in applications are more and more numerous every year, and the freedoms within the creation of projects are more and more limited. In any case, maybe it’s time to find new tactics if we want to stay relevant, free and keep up with what’s happening around us, and not just when something becomes a ‘keyword’ or ‘targeted outcome’ of the application.
“Dashes” about tourism
Do you also try to encourage the exchange of experience and the production of knowledge on a local, micro-level, such as the research project ‘Creative Strategies’ (2010) in which you included residents of the famous Mamutica, ‘housing machines’ from 1975 in the Travno neighbourhood of Zagreb?
This project deals with the origin, development, meanings and impacts of creative strategies, both on the individual and on the wider social community. It consists of three developmental, simultaneously implemented segments: theoretical research, artistic production and critical reflection on the very processes and results of the project. I organized the artistic production by modules, each module has a specific approach to the topic, and through practice, different methodologies and ways of analyzing the results are developed. So far, three modules have been realized in which a large number of participants have been involved from the very beginning. The first module on Zagreb’s Mamutica was related to topics of public space, the second to underprivileged communities in Mexico City, and the third, Toolkit for joint actions, dealt with the current issue of self-organization of workers and other civic initiatives in the Croatian context, considering a wider range of current social topics.
In addition to these complex, often ‘difficult’ topics, there are also occasional ones in which you touch on domestic social reality, most often tourism, in a humorous, sometimes cynical way, such as the actions on Trešnjevac market called “Sun’s income” from 2010. With these projects, you also try to ‘hide’, to be invisible as an artist. How do you see the position and function of artists in the future?
In the case of long-term collaborative projects, the work process requires me to “hand over” a lot of what I previously designed to others for addition, use, design — until the finalization of the work or as the work itself. In this sense, ‘invisibility’ is dictated by the logic of the project. In the case of short “dash lines” from our tourism, this is not necessary, in all these works I am also present as the performer of the action, because they contain a note of humor, cynicism, a kind of role reversal.
If I look back, the changes in the position of artists in our country over the past twenty years have been very small. At the end of the 1990s, we belonged to the interesting “Eastern block”, which had its own audience, collections, exhibitions, curators… and now we are becoming a much less interesting periphery of the European Union. The forty years we spent outside the West made us unique — now we are in a situation of ‘Western’ colonization, both in terms of economy, natural resources, workforce, and culture. Instead of arguing about the geopolitical position we have, I think it is up to all of us to position ourselves smartly within the given framework if we want to remain relevant.
ZAGREB, July 23, 2019.