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

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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.

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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/

(a proposal)

Presence and absence constitute one of the basic dichotomies of the Western (philosophical) thought. Presence, as the meaning of the word suggests, is always about something dominant over something that is not there, not present.

In the same way, an archive, in the traditional sense of understanding, is hypomnesic; and hypomnēma according to Foucault (…) “constitutes a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation.”

But an archive is not only about the organized material presence of memory and experience, which is linked to the certain authority of knowledge, or can even become a powerful tool in legitimation of particular political issues; instead the archive is also about the imagination, the non-knowledge, desire, ..with other words – everything that is usually excluded from knowledge as unreal, which can not be represented or re-produced by the ‘archival apparatus’; something that has no (economic) value, no form nor stabilized signification.

The absent in the archive is the lived experience which can only take on the “form” of the event. The absence therefore represents a rupture in the archival structure, breaking up the absence-presence binary opposition. In return, the archive remains open to something new and different, to the activation of the present while allowing essential definitions, authorities (what is collected and what is kept, who decides, who has access to it) and “stable abstracts” that constitute the archive to be questioned and challenged.

The aim of the Absent Archive investigation is to create a collection of “absences”, that is, a project is an attempt of bringing up to the present that which was not included in the archives for various reasons; either as a consequence of personal choices, decisions made by the authorities of knowledge, or was omitted due to the political circumstances etc.

The research on absences will focus on the various (artistic) archives* from the time of the totalitarian regimes in Latin America and Eastern Europe, from 1960s to late 1980s.

The project will look for a collective kind of memory of the repressed knowledge, desires, points of connections where yet unknown relations might be brought about. It will question an already accepted facts and structures as well as tools of research and methodologies of classifications and representation within the archive. For this reason oral inquiries will be made and which will later form a “map”. This map of absences would not make a hierarchical distinctions between statements, concepts, gestures, speech, etc instead it would “foster connections between fields, as open and connectable in all of its dimensions” (Deleuze & Guattari).

It will become an event in itself.

Bojana Piškur (REC), 1 September 2011

* Archives to investigate: this of course would again demand of us to think of the ways / methods on what archives to research.