"What do you find in a survival kit?" by Solvita Krese
“Something’s missing” – these two words, ever so often taken out of context of the opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” by the outstanding German playwright Bertolt Brecht, have been subjected to numerous interpretations and served as commentary for various epochs.
For Brecht Mahagonny is a city built on illusion. “A hypocritical place” where promises of human happiness are always linked to money and are never achieved anyway. Thinking of a world that is overwhelmed with the cult of consumerism and barely occasionally notices that something is missing, what comes to mind is the much-quoted conversation on the possibility of utopias between the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch in 1964, where Bloch refers to Brecht.
“What is this “something”? If it is not allowed to be cast in a picture, then I shall portray it as in the process of being (seiend). But one should be not allowed to eliminate it as if it really did not exist so that one could say the following about it: “It’s about the sausage.” [...] I believe utopia cannot be removed from the world in spite of everything [...] That is a geometrical picture, which does not have any place here, but another picture can be found in the old peasant saying, there is no dance before the meal. People must first fill their stomachs, and then they can dance.”
Has utopia, this “something” to long for, disappeared, turned into a conceptual “non-space”, empty rhetoric? What preoccupies the minds of people today, when the fiasco of liberal economics has shattered the world, when ecological balance has been destroyed and regional conflicts keep breaking out constantly? Waking up from the long-cultivated euphoria makes them revalue the former system of values and reconsi- der “the meaning of life”. The world is experiencing a great change, it is just unclear whether it is for the good or bad.
What could be that “something” that would help our society survive? The project “Survival kit” invites artists to reflect upon diverse survival strategies, offering creative solutions, “escape” scenarios, creative guiding advice or original recipes for survival.
What can an artist do in a situation like this? Develop daring experiments and indulge in a creative explosion, using the current situation to their benefit. If it is not the right moment for heroic narratives and large-scale representative events, artists can focus on the search for the poetic in everyday, footnote comments, spontaneous manifestations and interventions. By practicing DIY strategies, using the methods and ways of arte povera, ready-made and fluxus, as well as simply working together astonishing results can be achieved and witty ideas implemented.
Artists are urged to turn their attention to the changes that the current situation has made to the city environment, group around the active spots in the city where various creative initiatives are developing either spontaneously (like VEF factory buildings) or programmatically (like Spīķeri warehouses). We can occupy empty retail spaces and fill the gaps created by the economic crisis with creative energy. We can be mobile operative squads, operative detectors of changes in the situation, or exactly the opposite - creators of an illusory shelter where to let the tough times pass. Maybe it is time to pause, not to slip into workaholism and find time to contemplate economics becoming ecological, food - healthy, production - creative, politics - open to the society.
“Survival kit” project also offers a kind of a testing ground for city development, both probing for successful infrastructure solutions and enriching its social texture. In a time when shop display windows on the busiest streets are dotted with posters saying “for rent” and “for sale” the creative nerve of the city comes alive. The empty shops are inhabited by different art initiatives, creative incubators – a special bookstore and a discussion club, a second-hand fashion store, a soap workshop, a poetry club, a soup kitchen, creative workshops as well as exhibition spaces where next to interactive installations are objects made of found items, witty solutions to mundane situations, conceptual commentary, documentation of everyday events and people’s stories, search of spirituality etc.
A reference to a statement by art theoretician and critic Nicolas Bourriaud would be very appropriate here: nowadays artists “instead of utopian tasks search for possible solutions here and now”, instead of changing the world the artists of today are simply “learning to inhabit this world in a better way”. Instead of looking for utopias for the future, artists are creating functioning “microutopias” for the present. “Survival kit” project is one of the stations on the route of this process.