Osage Gallery, group exhibition “South by Southeast”
Hong Kong, 2015 Toolikit spatial element Mirna Horvat, graphic elements Luka Juras
Creative Strategies is a part of a long-term multidisciplinary project that encompasses theoretical research, art production, activism and processes of critical reflection. It is an ongoing project that Andreja Kulunčić started in 2010, with the purpose to map and facilitate creative strategies to articulate social problems and give support in seeking solutions on micro- and macro-levels. So far, three modules have been realized within the project framework, Everyday Divergences (Zagreb, Croatia, 2010 / Usti nad Laben, Czech Republic, 2011) about the potential of public spaces, Conquering and Constructing the Common (MUAC, Mexico City, 2013) based on the experience of self-organization within different communities in the deprived neighborhoods of Mexico City.
The presentation for “Survival K(n)it” exhibition introduces a segment of the third module of Creative Strategies that was inaugurated in Gallery Nova in Zagreb in 2014, under the title Begin the Best We Can: Toolkit for a Joint Action. The project engages with the current problems of workers’ self-organizing and other citizens’ initiatives in Croatian context, along with a wider gamut of social themes. Andreja Kulunčić realized the project in close collaboration with number of local activist groups and workers’ unions, such as Direct Democracy in schools group, as well as with the New Union and groups such as BRID - Organization for Workers’ Initiative and Democratization, Women’s Front, Fem Front or Right to the City, and also with a string of other organizations and individuals who participated in the project with their numerous discursive activities during the show, or who took part in the making of the toolkit for joint action.
The project was determined by erosion of social security, massive unemployment and unstable labor market in Croatia, with a special emphasis on the phenomena the rising poverty, workers’ self-organizing, direct democracy, social solidarity, self- organized citizens’ activities, and contextual theology. Named after the video “What has our struggle given to me?” Kulunčić realized within the framework of Zagreb module, the presentation in Riga centers around the film that examines possibilities of workers’ struggles and self-organization in the troubled circumstances of corrupt privatization and social erosion in Croatia.
This is an ongoing project that started in 2014 and it continues throughout 2015. Realized as a series of interviews with the protagonists of various workers’ struggles the video presents workers, factories and companies, trade unions and non-governmental organizations who protest and defend workers’ rights in dramatic collapse of the social security system. What are the potentials of workers’ self-organization today?
What is the involvement of trade unions and non- governmental organizations to protest and to defend workers’ rights? What are the concrete possibilities of workers’ strikes, public advocacy campaigns?
Along with the video, the installation in Riga encompasses a spatial unit and a portable glossary. Those elements call for the audience attention to take them in their hands in order to encourage joint actions in finding alternative solutions to discontents of capitalism.
Artist's Bio:
Andreja Kulunčić’s art practice is based on exploration of new models of sociability and communication situations, an interest for socially engaged themes, confrontation with different audiences, and collaboration on collective projects. She sets up her own interdisciplinary networks, seeing artistic work as a research, process of cooperation and self-organization. She often asks the audience to actively participate and “finish” the work. Some of Kulunčić’s frequent subjects are correlations between economy, transition, feminism and racism.