With kind permission of the editor of the site and the author of the text.

**
I arrived in Ljubljana the day after protesters occupied the platform in front of the Ljubljana Stock Exchange. Activists talked about mass participation, about variety of people and different calls that marked the protest on 15 October, and about the support granted after a successful occupation of this place that became public only because of it. I started searching for photos in the Internet to find out what I missed and I found a photo showing a female activist sweeping the floor between tents in front of the stock exchange building in one of the most popular media. I completely overlooked the figurative meaning of the photo (Sln. “sweeping in front of “foreign” doorstep” meaning ‘mind one’s own business’, which is ‘foreign’ only because it finally alienated the excess value of our work from us) because I had my mind on the thought that the media wanted to reduce the meaning of the new political space and public being created in any way or another. There were readers who equated the photo with the actual division of work in the movement being created and the photo confirmed their suspicion that it should not be taken seriously because it uncritically copies behavior patterns calling for a popular feminist graffiti from the time of Socialism: “Proletarians from all lands, who washes your socks?” Female readers and certainly some male readers, whose beliefs were only made stronger by the photo that the presentations of women in Slovenian media are terrible, continue to support the movement anyway that tries to function in an egalitarian and inclusive way. Patriarchal sexual division of labor, according to which household and caring work should be done by female activists, while male activists should take over technical and intellectual tasks, would catch the movement lying faster than what it is being unsuccessfully accused of by cynical commentators for this whole time; it “doesn’t know what it wants” because of its name fight for. Something else would also catch the movement lying: its inability to create a public space, where members of sexual, ethnic, class and other minorities would feel safe; so a place where they—we—are not afraid of alienation or/and violence.
I kept returning in front of the stock exchange and saw women and men switching their tasks and hanging out: female activists were sweeping, opening cans, chopping vegetable, making tea and offering it to passers-by who stopped to chat, or to what Mrs. Ana did who brought two jump ropes (“This will warm you up when you’re cold.”), candles (“For more pleasant atmosphere.”), and a home-made strudel with a promise it will be followed by new ones “if you will like it and so that my support won’t be only moral”. Some female activists moderated autonomous gatherings, initiated and led workshops, made and distributed leaflets, edited and wrote the www.15o.si blog, transported chairs from Metelkova City to the stock exchange, changed gas bottles and did (more than) what guys did. Despite the impression that everything is ok, I asked some of my new and old female acquaintances if they felt safe in front of the stock exchange; among them a sociology student, a writer, a doctor and an artist-single mother who cried after the first night of work in this new Ljubljana club Circus because hostesses were harassed and inappropriately touched. Some of them were surprised why they shouldn’t feel safe. The others didn’t understand what I wanted to find out and I said that I wondered how it looked like to share a tent with people you didn’t know, especially with men. And about the fact that police watched you day and night. I added I understand that the occupation is something special, that you are enthusiastic, that you smell a revolution like you smell winter coming, and that everything seems cool to you because of all that.

“It’s too cold to sleep in a tent,” said the first one. “I’m here only when I’m on duty and I do it with my friends.”
“The police don’t interfere, except when writing punishments to guys who peed around the corner,” said the second one laughing and added that at gatherings, when discussing general behavior rules, it was clearly stated that a respectful attitude toward all participants is expected and alcohol is discouraged because they want to avoid violence.
I was wondering if they had to deal with homophobia, sexism, racism, and attacks on other minorities who would require more rigid rules in front of the stock exchange. My acquaintances shook their heads and I was happy that my questions about Ljubljana went in the wrong direction.
On Tuesday, 15 November, an incredible month of ‘the fight for’ passed by. During the “month walk” past the court, the bank Nova ljubljanska banka and the parliament which was attended by, as reported, about hundred people, I sat at work and remembered Angela Davis’s solidarity statement to activists in New York. Black activist, lesbian, once a member of the Black Panthers and American KP, which investigates “the prison-industrial complex”, which she experienced on her own skin, said to them: “You’re changing political space. You’ve revived our common desire. You reminded us that protest groups could still be created. You are devoted to collective work and you reject class, ethnical, and sexual hierarchies.” She added that the decision for a collective act, a unified protest, brought great responsibility, because we had to find an answer to the question how to combine forces without oppressing or simplifying complex relationships between individuals involved in the movement. How to create a complex and emancipating community? Angela Davis answered it with a quote by a black lesbian and feminist poet Audra Lorde: “Tolerance is not enough; we have to understand differences as being a source of inevitable polarity, where our creativity dialectically appears. She concluded that only in a complex community we could say “yes to life, yes to happiness, yes to community, yes to education—free education—yes to equality, yes to imagination, yes to creativity, yes to hope, and yes to future.”
A long list of workshops, discussion, statements, and public appeals moved to the 15o.si web site in just a month. But among them I still miss what Angela Davis talked about (the discussion on traps of simplified impressions about the movement as something homogenous) and even more the discussion on how division of labor affects women, especially older women, poor women, lesbians, and women from ethnic minorities in Slovenia. Because the person who proposes a new event at gatherings is expected to (co)organize it, I could conclude there are neither feminists nor lesbians in the Ljubljana movement, who are willing to talk about it. I didn’t give a chance to the possibility that feminism in Slovenia is unnecessary because we, women, as I often hear, have achieved equality a long time ago. I rather wondered if this means that the 15o movement is not inclusive enough despite all this or that other female activists have different priorities or that feminists and lesbians are invisible because there is to little of us and because we aren’t connected to each other?
Even in towns where feminist and related groups help to create a movement (I mainly observed how American groups function), more attention to safety of all participants was paid only when it turned out it was hard to ensure safety at large-scale gatherings, which is evidenced by numerous reports on intimidation, harassment, and also rapes. Some movements have agreed on principles and practice of safe gatherings before the sexual assault occurred but it was clear that even the most well-intentioned statements couldn’t stop violence, and female activists therefore organized separate tents for sleeping, in which men were not allowed. In some places, female experts were invited to participate and then they led workshops on consensus, on supporting victims of sexual violence and abuse, on handling racism, and on ways how to oppose domination techniques and male chauvinism. What do American activists imagine under the term “a safe gathering”? The Women Occupy group from New York defined it as a chance for women “to initiate discussions on the effects of social inequality, to participate in them, direct them and also conclude them” and as “a possibility for them to do all this in an environment without police violence, without sexual harassment, and without objectification. We need women in the fight,” group members concluded, “but all mentioned takes power away from them.”

On the Occupy Patriarchy! web site, feminist activist Lucinda Marshall analyzed decisions and the language of statements, with which activist groups responded to cases of sexual violence in their midst. She also discussed the case from Glasgow, Scotland, where a group of men raped a minor girl. The first reaction of the Occupy Glasgow group? Minors were banned from sleeping overnight in the occupied park, which means they rather punished the more vulnerable ones (minors and thus indirectly also the rape victim) than provided safety for all participants. Moreover, activists distanced themselves completely from the crime and the victim in their first statement. Her sex was not mentioned at all (“we regret injustice caused to a person in the park”), and they wrote about “an alleged sexual assault” instead of a group rape. Considering activists’ comments arguing that this was an isolated case and couldn’t be generalized to the entire movement, it wasn’t difficult to conclude that many people were more concerned about bad reputation of the movement than abuse of the girl. This statement was replaced by another one overnight. They wrote in it that they extensively discussed “this despicable and unacceptable crime and its consequences” at the gathering on 26 October and that they are obliged to strictly observe safety rules established at the beginning of the movement. They organized a vigil for the victim and asked local feminist and LGBTI groups to join the movement. This means that these groups weren’t visibly involved in the Occupy Glasgow movement until then. I couldn’t find out why not and if they accepted the invitation, which must have sounded quite bitter, if we take into account that activists remembered a minority in their circles only when they had to face brutal consequences of sexism. “A movement that allows sexism discourages women from participating and when women leave the movement, only men—including sexist men—speak on its behalf,” said Lucinda Marshall in the end.
We know what follows: in groups dominated by men, sexual harassment is fast reduced to the victim’s “personal problem” and, in economic discussions, the respect of sexual division of labor is considered as “moving away from the problem” or as “a particularization of the problem”, which is class-oriented “in its basis”. Slavoj Žižek played the same tune at Wall Street saying that the western left first gave up “the so-called essentialism of class struggle” and replaced it with numerous anti-racist, feminist and similar struggles, but now it appears that “the correct name” of the basic problem is, however, capitalism. Well, as it seems, patriarchate, which is older than capitalism, will survive the latter without major troubles. If anyone, feminists and other minorities will cause trouble because they can’t agree on the homogeneity of the left and the dictate of the activist majority.

In the end it should be repeated that the actual egalitarianism and openness of each social system, including new political movements, is measured by the level of safety, support and integration felt and experienced by minorities and not by the majority. If we don’t want that contents, tactics and protest scene disappear from an activist repertoire, which are anyway excluded as personal, private, apolitical or trivial stuff by institutionalized understanding of politics, then the understanding of the term protest should also be changed so that it won’t only include mass demonstrations against injustice but also one’s will to search for alternative strategies of survival and of daydreaming about a very complex but better world for everyone.

**

In the precarious situation that we are all in, we are forced to accept to work  under conditions that are not legally defined or guaranteed. Based on our own situation, we pose questions about our working and living situations: about the price of our work, the possibilities of a working space, working hours, health and social insurance, etc. To what extent are vague conditions and “contracts” prevalent – those based on dependence, flexibility, uncertainty , conditionality, blackmail and exploitation?

What is also quite noticeable is a lack of public debate on the above issues.  Additional areas of concern include the marginalisation of critical artistic production; the abolition of undesirable  cultural institutions; the practices of censorship and autocensorship in cultural production at various levels; the suspension of autonomous initiatives and spaces; non-transparent redistribution of budgets; as well as the concentration of power within the ruling political party framework. These are only some of the problems facing those employed in the sphere of culture today. However, one of the key  issues, it seems, are the new forms of exploitation of labour in the fields of culture as in all spheres of  social production.

Such contemporary capitalist system increasingly views culture as a field for achieving economic gains. Aggressive promotion of the concepts of creative class, creative industry and creative cities as part of the neoliberal deregulation, over and  exploit  various  social  goods such as public sector, public resources, public knowledge. By transferring matrices from developed capitalist countries, Serbia’s implementation of cultural policy has actively contributed, over the last few years, to establishing a relationship of domination and subordination, which ultimately places cultural employees in an impossible position.

The programme From Creative Work to Creative City takes the form of a two-day seminar. Through lectures and discussions, we shall review the observed problems pertaining to the conditions in which we all live, learn and work today.

Kontekst at the local community represents a continuation of our struggle for an autonomous space that began after we ceased to work on the site of the “Stari grad” Cultural Centre in October 2010. This struggle is  a self-organised pressure on the network of exploitation of contemporary art and culture, and will contribute to the development of different  relations of production in which the art would be are-politicised place of conflict as a driver of a new social relations. The process of research and communication with various administrative structures in the sphere of local cultural policy, resulted in signing a contract with the Municipality of New Belgrade that provided us with the opportunity of continuing our work on the premises of New Belgrade’s “Students’ City” local community. The period of our work in the local community we will use  to create a platform  for autonomous education as a possibility for a  new knowledge and knowledge relating to such political activity.

www.kontekst.rs

https://kontekstprostor.wordpress.com/

Neoliberalism extended social borders far beyond the police-protected frontiers of newly constituted states. Denationalization masked not only privatization and social segregation but also the unilateral appropriation and commodification of memories, languages, identities, lifestyles. Refugees and migrants travelling from “south” to “north” and from “east” to “west” were subordinated under the paternalistic protectorate of governments and civil society (in Slovenia already in the 1980s and 1990s). Meanwhile, internationally sponsored academic, artistic and political projects were reduced to speculative rediscoveries of the Western Balkans as the last resort of “distant nearness” even while they were opened to economic and military interventions. The dissolution of traditional public spaces was the result of a process of transition from bureaucratic socialism to neoliberal capitalism. In sociological terms: the result of the transition from welfare-state to workfare-states with highly mobile and flexible forms of biopolitical exploitation and alienation. Spaces of encounters seemed to disappear.

The experience of Radical Education grew from this situation. Radical Education was initiated by a group of curators at the Ljubljana Museum of Modern Arts as a project/exhibition that would produce a kind of ‘progressive’ micropolitical space within the institution: a critical anti-pole to both conservative and neoliberal tendencies dominating cultural production. Its potential was actually perceived as an “initiative that has nothing to do with either the arts or the academy”. However, limited by the gallery exhibition format, the project was in itself a practice of ‘capture’ of its anticipated ‘radical’ subjectivity. This problem began to unfold in conversations with militant researchers and social activists. They raised questions such as: In what way are we governed not by restrictions or rules “from above” but by individual self-control and self-domination within diverse institutions? How and to what degree has self-employment and self-management of projects captured some of the most sensitive minds that nurture the concepts and practices of anti-capitalist and alterglobalization struggles?

In response to this new situation, the Radical Education Collective was created. The aim was to overcome the dichotomy between institutions and movements and to reflect on the openings that this conflictual relation provides. The idea was not only to “learn from” institutions, but to pass on the knowledge to movements and collectives; to invent new conceptual, expressive and organizational tools in order to empower the “will not to be governed this way”.

Although it seems that public spaces have disappeared, there is a fertile realm of social and political experimentation that is reappropriating the meaning of public space through practice. Emerging new public spaces presuppose the transversal collaboration between individuals, collectives and movements “outside the consensus” of both transnational capital and institutions of governance (including parties, universities, unions, museums, non-governmental organizations, etc.). -1- Importantly, they are not just imagined “alternative” communities. They are potencia that act as counter-powers to the dominant production of knowledge and subjectivity.

The history of this reader begins in the midst of numerous encounters and inspiring conversations that we had with activists, artists, critical thinkers, curators, militant researchers and writers from Belgrade, Helsinki, Istanbul, Ljubljana, London, Priština and Prizren from 21 April until 13 May 2008 at the Ljubljana-based Rog social centre and the AKC Metelkova mesto. Those encounters challenged not only the distinction between ‘serious’ discussions and ‘informal’ debates (that instantly reproduce linear time and hierarchical space) but also our mutual ability to listen, talk and share experiences (instead of consuming information).

In the following months, we asked participants to write articles or simply e-mail us elaborated notes for publication. We have decided to publish them in full, with only minor editorial interventions, which has resulted in a book divided in two sections. The first section consists of articles that derive from reflections on rebellious “spatial knowledge” acquired through militant research and political action. The second section contains articles that explore the potential of arts in “re-inventing” new public spaces, including first-hand insights into the history of the contemporary art scene in Kosovo at the margins of the particular situation of “state-building”.

In the opening article Darij Zadnikar accentuates the importance of re-elaborating the community. He places the emergent communities into “no-go zones”, outside of the “political sadness”. By highlighting the traps of the seductive language of liberal intellectuals, party leaders or professional activists, he redefines the notion of dialectics and positions it at the core of militant epistemology.

The three articles that follow are each based on case studies, starting with that of the “occupation” of the former bicycle factory Rog. -2- The occupation of this abandoned factory was conceptualized as a “temporal alteration of its purposes” both to facilitate the legitimacy of the occupation and to rekindle the critique of privatization and gentrification of public spaces in general. Andrej Kurnik and Barbara Beznec articulate this event politically. They define the Rog community as the “community on the border”, and the border as the “territory of movements”. Yet, the broader question remains of how to prevent this singular new public space from closing down due to direct threats by the municipality, or transforming irrevocably given the more subtle menace to its organizational form presented by the profit-oriented “cultural alternatives” taking place within it.

The contribution by Polona Mozetič takes us to the inner structure of the Workers’ Dormitories. Her article is based on long-term co-research by activists and migrant workers whose first objective was to disclose and undermine the systemic violence embedded in these institutions. She poses the following question for further inquiry: How can new public spaces (assemblies and public tribunes within the Workers’ Dormitories) empower common notions such as “self-organization” and “self-emancipation”, not only to cause ruptures which might bring about  new visibility, but also to develop new perceptions and new devices to prevent the co-optation of the emergent community (in this case, of the Invisible Workers of the World) by representative trade unions, conservative “site-specific” art projects, etcetera?

Tjaša Pureber reflects on Autonomous Tribune (an initiative developed through a collaboration between university students and the local A-Infoshop -3-), divesting the meaning of the term “revolution” of its historical state-centric disillusions and investing it with the hopes of alterglobalization movements. Gal Kirn and Antonis Vradis intervene with critical commentary on disjunctions between theory and practice, arguing that these unwelcome breaks have brought the social effervescence of alterglobalization movements into crisis. They also provide proposals for their further experimental cohabitation.

The section concludes with the joint art project by Andreja Kulunčić, Osman Pezić, Said Mujić and Ibrahim Čurić. The process behind this visual self-representation (the last three artists are also the migrant construction workers on the posters) of the migrant worker structure of precariousness (visa-work-residence-food-family separation) deserves far more than a brief observation.

The second section opens with an article by Bojana Piškur on art as the “act of creation” and politics as the “act of translation” and notions such as “ridiculousness”, “laziness” and the “right to do nothing” as preconditions for Art. Although these notions still await political translation, they are resisting the capitalistic valorization and commodification of arts. The inside story of the TEMP group, written by its members and their supporters, illustrates this contradiction. They not only provide a critical supplement to the article about the occupied Rog factory, but also partially answer the question of how artists and architects perceived Rog – once it was occupied – as an empty, not a political, space. Janna Graham draws from her own “border” experience of being both artist and activist at the same time, tracing in her article micropolitical transformations, de-codifying and re-codifying the position of art in the movements and drawing on the example of the Ultra-Red sound collective from the UK.

Mehmet Behluli and Dren Maliqi elucidate on how political isolation and social segregation in Kosovo in the 1990s motivated the “re-invention” of public space through urban clandestine webs of private homes and cafes, and how these webs were constitutive of the emergence and development of the contemporary art scene in Kosovo. Sezgin Boynik is not only interested in the development of the art scene in Kosovo but also in how contemporary art in general operates within representations of the ruling ideologies. The examples in the presentation by Marjetica Potrč draw on the neoliberal multicultural values; they are problematic since they evoke an image of the “artist on a mission”, fascinated by local achievements of capitalistic development. Minna Henriksson challenges the normality of the prevailing (nationalistic) homogenization of public spaces embedded in national symbols that have become so present they have turned almost invisible.

The reader is therefore an inquiry into questions that have been circulating in our recent conversations; a transcript of common desire to disturb, distract and subvert new forms of governance and to empower new public spaces; a collective contribution to critical thought that facilitates our walk.

1. Colectivo Situaciones, “Politicizing Sadness”, http://www.situaciones.org/
2. http://tovarna.org/
3. http://a-infoshop.blogspot.com/

New Public Spaces: Dissensual Political and Artistic Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context

Editors: Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, Bojana Piškur

* Gašper Kralj – New Public Spaces

Struggles for spaces

* Darij Zadnikar – The Places Of Rebellion And The Empty Space

*Andrej Kurnik, Barbara Beznec – Resident Alien: The Rog Experience on the Margin

* Polona Mozetič – Workers’ Dormitory: From Private Property to Public Forum and Back Again

* Tjaša Pureber – Problems of Resistance and Problems with Resistance

* Gal Kirn, Antonis Vradis – The Alterglobalisation Movement Today

* Andreja Kulunčić, Osman Pezić, Said Mujić, Ibrahim Čurić – Workers without frontiers

(Im)possible spaces of art

* Bojana Piškur – Art in becoming

* Temp – TEMP about TEMP, or a quick and unsystematic retrospective of the workings of one temporary and informal multidisciplinary group

* Janna Graham – Love in a Time of Hedging … Or How to Break Out of an Alien World

* Radical Education Collective – School of Missing Identity: Conversation on Politics, Arts and Education in Kosovo with Mehmet Behluli and Dren Maliqi

* Minna Henriksson – Altered Landscapes

* Sezgin Boynik – Cultural Roots of Contemporary Art in Kosovo

* Marjetica Potrč – Local Democracies