RESIDENCY SESSION:FEBRUARY-MARCH, 2021, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN
DEADLINE: November 20, 2020 | 11:59pm/ 23:59 (Minsk time)
The Call for applications for a 2-months residency program for Belarusian artists is announced by the STATUS project. The STATUS project was launched in 2018 as an exchange between Belarusian and Swedish artists, cultural workers and organizations with the aim to observe and analyze the role of artists in changing society. It is coordinated by Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and gallery KX in Brest and funded by the Swedish Institute.
RESIDENCY PROGRAM
The residency program is a part of the STATUS project 2021-2022 and focuses on the areas:
Self-organization
Freedom of expression
Equality
LGBTQ
Heritagization (Heritage making)
Climate crisis
Experience and interest in working in these areas mentioned above will be prioritized, though other fields of interest can be considered as well.
Participants in the residency program will have an opportunity to meet with other artists-in-residence from Belarus, collaborate with Swedish artists interested in the same field (residency companions), and share their work in different ways – publishing or blogging on the project’s platform statusproject.net, participating in public talks and presentations in Sweden and Belarus, and in the Second Congress of Belarusian Cultural Workers in 2022 in Minsk.
CONDITIONS AND FACILITIES
The residency offers artists-in-residence accommodation, a stipend covering living costs, working space, technical guidance, access to organizing public talks and events, and an established network of professional contacts.
WHO MAY APPLY FOR RESIDENCY
Artists with documented work shown, performed, or published during the last 5 years.
Curators and art managers connected to art organizations and art communities with experience of working with the next fields of interest: Self-organisation, Freedom of Expression, Equality, LGBTQ, Heritagization (Heritage making), Climate crisis.
Applicants should be living and working in Belarus or had to leave Belarus lately because of political persecution. We introduce this limitation as one of the residencies aims is to support Belarus-based artists in difficult conditions of ongoing repressions.
Taking into consideration the need to communicate with the Swedish artistic community, basic knowledge of English is required.
HOW TO APPLY
Please, fill in the application form by the link until November 20, 2020.
The organizers will ensure secure communication and privacy of the provided information.
All applicants will be informed about the selection results via email on November 30, 2020.
ADMISSION
A selection committee of the project team and partner representatives will consider applications by the content of the portfolio and experience and interest of working in the areas of the project’s focus. The long list of selected applications will be sent to a reference group of future collaborators. After feedback from the reference group, the selection committee will make the final choice. If necessary, video calls will be organized. Also, the project will ensure representation balance.
The Selection Committee will be represented by STATUS project leaders –Mona Wallström, Denis Romanovski, and Inga Lindarenka, STATUS online platform Commissioning Editor – Vera Kavaleuskaya, gallery KX art director – Lizaveta Mikhalchuk, ‘The Collective Brain’ network representatives.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the dates of the residency can be changed.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
STATUS is a collective research project (launched in 2018) that brings together artists and cultural workers with a common goal to analyze the conditions of artistic practice and give visibility to the people who conduct it in today’s world. Moreover, it encourages them to see their political potential in initiating change. The STATUS project has been created by the joint coordination of Swedish and Belarusian partners: Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and gallery KX in Brest with main support from the Swedish Institute.
The STATUS has its online platform that makes produced knowledge visible and available to the broader public and professionals. The content of the platform is a collection of contributions that have been created in the process of the STATUS project within the artistic research groups Hidden Life, Heritagization, and (non)work, and commissioned texts by other authors from various relevant fields.
In the frames of the project, a range of exhibitions, workshops, public talks, artistic camps were organized in Belarus and Sweden, including the Congress-performance of cultural workers hosted in Minsk. Also, the publication ‘Artistic Positions in Changing Society. Observations from Belarus and Sweden’ that contains texts and artworks documentation in terms of STATUS project was published.
This
text was written at a specific historical situation and for a
specific audience. During some weeks and months in autumn-winter
2017, I was one of the initiators of a #metoo-appeal for the Swedish
Art World, #konstnärligfrihet (#artisticfreedom). As an old feminist
activist who had been close to burn out many times during the course
of third wave feminism in Sweden from the late 90s and during the
00s, I was at first reluctant to stand on the barricades once more.
So I waited for others to take the lead this time. But as days and
weeks passed during the autumn of 2017, and other professional groups
came out in the media with their collection of testimonies, I decided
to speak up on social media with one of my own recent experiences of
sexist oppression on the Swedish art scene. Shortly after that I was
contacted by other women around Sweden who also felt that it was time
to organize. So we did. The weeks to come would be a journey into
darkness. For days and nights we administered thousands of stories
that came in to our group email and posted them anonymously in the
hidden Facebook group that had exploded with thousands of members
within a few days. Hundreds of members were suggested each day, and
there was no way we could add all of them. A range of testimonies
from minor physical offences, verbal comments to brutal rape were
streaming in to our email and Facebook group. At some point I had the
ambition to read it all. I scrolled and read day and night, until my
eyes hurt. This period of our lives was very upsetting to all the
members of the admin group. Since we lived in different cities we did
not have the possibility to meet to support each other regularly, but
we did try to meet in person when we could, skyped and phoned each
other for support. We answered every courageous person who came in
with her story, we cried, forgot to eat and sleep, manically trying
to keep up with the never ending flood of stories. During this time,
friends and strangers, women, men, and trans people opened up to each
other and started talking about abuse, sex, and power in a new way.
Finally, we could be open, and vulnerable. The aftermath of this
revolution is something we are still processing.
Illustration: Vasilisa Palianina. Children of Louise Bourgeois in the arms of their mother. Mixed media on canvas, 2020.
On
December 13, 2017, the Modern Museum in Stockholm organized a panel
talk where some of the artists that were active in the movement
questioned the directors of the most important art institutions and
art academies in Sweden. I was one of the artists who was invited as
an opponent. The auditorium was filled to the last chair, 300 people
were in attendance and the ambience in the room was intense with many
people visibly upset. Since I was still processing the impact of
sharing all the strong stories that had been handed over to the admin
group, I knew that I might not be able to speak coherently. So the
night before the event I wrote down a short explanation of my
understanding of the specific type of sexism fostered in Western Art
History. When I was asked to come on stage, something happened that I
never experienced before; in front of a great portion of the
Stockholm art world, to whom I tried for twenty years to come across
as professional, I started crying uncontrollably. And then I read the
following:
Dear Art World,
Today’s
concept of Contemporary Art is rooted in Western modernism, with its
cult of the male genius, that praised men who created masterpieces
with inspiration from their muses, underprivileged girls from lower
classes of society, who often lived in prostitution. The art
professor’s authority over his pupil goes back to an Academy system
founded in the 17th century, which in itself builds on the medieval
guild when a painter began as an apprentice with a master at a young
age. In 1611, at the age of 19, Artemisia Gentilleschi was raped by
her teacher. Still today, we carry an Art History heavy with sexist
power, where men, in the protection of their alleged genius, power,
and status, have exploited and violated younger women.
I
think of the Édouard Manet’s painting
Un bar aux Folies Bergère,
which represents a bartender girl with deep décolletage,
strangulated waist and shiny eyes looking tiredly at the viewer. I
think of the nobleman Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s portrayals of
‘public girls’ who were making a living from showing their legs
at the Moulin Rouge. And at Edgar Degas who, like other gentlemen
from the Parisian bourgeoisie, could enter the changing rooms at the
Paris Opera to hang out with half-naked teenage girls, whose poor
parents hoped to marry them up on the social ladder. Thinking of Paul
Gauguin, who traveled to Tahiti, exoticizing girls in his paintings
and sexually exploiting them. We carry this legacy with us.
A
patriarchal class society is maintained through networks. Networks
between men and networks in the upper middle class. The cultural
sphere and the art world are privileged places with resources, room
for self-expression, opportunities to realize visions, portray them
and find an audience, get recognition, be seen as a subject. There
are many who compete for a place on the art scene, to enjoy this
status with all that it brings with it of a good life and influence
over the public conversation. But we do not compete on equal terms.
Some are born into this network, they know how to navigate the system
from the beginning, the contacts are in the family. While others, who
are born in underprivileged groups, are excluded. This network is not
only undemocratic, it also preserves an elitist, colonial concept of
art that continues to exclude those held back by intersectional
subordination.
The
tyranny of the lack of structure that has long prevailed in the art
world, where nepotism, informal hierarchies and status fixation
continue to dominate despite the discussion we have had about
structural injustice for at least 20 years, must now be challenged.
We
have all now to ask ourselves: What do we do to change the art scene
so that it becomes more democratic, equal, open, permissive,
inclusive and thus more fun, more creative, more interesting and more
urgent for everyone in our society? What do you do?
December 2017 / May 2019
Illustration: Vasilisa Palianina. A boy surrounded by women from the Marina Abramović video Balkan Erotic Epic. Acrylic on canvas, markers, 2020.
Work is always repressive. It ties to a place and imposes more or less stable relationships of subordination, discipline, and power. There is only one record of official employment in my employment book: at the age of 17 I had a construction job for a month. The path of my academic education – undergraduate, first and second masters programs – happened to be sufficient enough to form a certain zone autonomous from work, creating space for self-education, interesting personal projects, and leisure. However, freelance work in the cultural field of Belarus is an area of refined exploitation: be it writing an article for 30 euros, organizing a large collective exhibition with commissioned works for 1200 euros and a festival for 180 US dollars, or free editing, psychological help and counseling for artists.
Introduction of a new parasite tax in 2015 became a certain threshold. A coercion to work was added to the habitual exploitation in the background: a disciplinary hand, which forces to seek employment and takes money out of your pocket if you refuse to work, has returned. This hand delicately looks after the cultural workers, the ill, the broke, and the anarchists. It brings forms of control, unusual for developed capitalism, including tax office card indexes, postal notices, detentions, fines and, finally, police violence against people who disagree with the law. Naturally, the power of a rubber baton is adjacent to and intertwined with the self-discipline, the micro-policies of power, and the economic mechanisms of a society of a developing authoritarian capitalism.
1. EASTERN EUROPEAN LAZINESS AND COERCION TO LABOR
In an important text In Praise of Laziness, unfinished due to his own laziness, Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović writes: “Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time — total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, of futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.” Learning from capitalism and socialism, Stilinović says that there is no more art in the West – only competition, production of objects, gallery structures, and hierarchies. The East (Eastern Europe) in its turn has always maintained a gap, in which an artist could practice beyond the market or expertise. This text does not aestheticize or essentialize laziness but rather characterizes the place of art in the system of late socialism and during the transition period, pointing out the instability of its forms, the lack of equivalence and the formalization of economic relations. The place of art is the place of boiler rooms and watchposts, which were occupied by intellectuals in order to free space for art and research – which then, however, wouldn’t be converted into economic capital. It is a counterproductive power of work. These “low” workplaces were important as an element of resistance to the coercion to labor, as an attempt to bypass ideological rituals and to wrest hours of free time from state-sanctioned “socially useful labor”. The law on compulsory employment “On Strengthening the Fight against Persons (Loafers, Parasites) who Avoid Community Work and Lead an Antisocial Parasitic Lifestyle”, adopted in 1961, primarily fulfilled the function of ideological control and in the 1980s led to the formation of various practices of subversion and evasion from the coercion to work.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the coercion to labor was internalized: work became necessary for not dying from hunger and poverty. There became even less laziness with the arrival of Western funds. The necessity to understand the operational mechanisms of a Western cultural field arose: how to build a career, receive recognition, and work on projects. On April 2, 2015, Decree No. 3 of the President of the Republic of Belarus on imposing a parasitism tax (Decree on the Prevention of Social Dependency) came into force in Belarus. The Decree obligates citizens who have been unemployed for 183 days to pay a tax of 20 base values1 during the calendar year (in the Spring of 2020 it was about 205 euros). In fact, an old form of the coercion to labor but in a new ideological shell and with new modes of economic exploitation, has returned to its place.
Daria Danilovich, “Labor incubator” – Assistance to Those Affected by the Decree. Video screenshot.
Despite the fact that the questions of labor and laziness of an artist has always been considered essential in the art of Eastern Europe, in Belarus, for a number of reasons, this topic is only beginning to play such an important role. It is further complicated by the economic conditions, including the absence of a law on freelance, the criminalization of foreign financing, the inarticulate status of cultural work, the lack of education and private capital in the field of art.
In the case of Belarus in the 2010s, this Decree was initially adopted in an attempt to find money for the budget during the economic crisis. It was primarily aimed at Belarusians working abroad and not paying taxes in the country but in an unexpected way the directive shed new light on the socially unprotected types of labor: the labor of a mother-housewife, the inexpensive labor of an artist, and the labor of a freelance journalist. In fact, the Decree became a powerful monitoring tool, which also showed the complete erosion of the concept of “social state”, which is so actively used in Lukashenka’s Belarus. This was a kind of authoritarian measure of extreme economy: the financing of social sphere was not just cut as in neoliberal capitalism but was pulled out of the hands of the sick, the disabled, and the anarchists, disciplining everyone else and completely wrecking social state and its fundamental social democratic idea of social security: if you want to get “free” education and healthcare — work! The only difference is that with the introduction of this Decree, control is exercised not so much through the level of ideology as through the economy: if you don’t want to obey – pay!
Against the backdrop of an extremely difficult economic situation, the Decree (the enforcement of which began a year later with the start of a new tax cycle) provoked one of the most powerful waves of civil protests unaffiliated with the official political parties or movements. At first, the protests were held without any intervention from the government but from the beginning of March, riot police began to detain and disperse. On March 15, an authorized march against the Decree took place in Minsk, after which riot policemen in plain clothes detained anarchists and other passengers traveling from the rally by public transport. All of them, induced by the perjury of riot police, were sentenced to administrative arrest for a term of 12 to 15 days. On March 24, the number of detainees exceeded 300 people, and dozens of those were fined. The demonstration on March 25 was in fact blocked by the authorities: city transport did not stop in this part of the city, police and riot police detained almost all passers-bys, and the column of anarchists was seized as they were approaching the venue.
The exhibition of Maxim Sarychev “Blind Spot”, which took place shortly before these events inside the Minsk exhibition space CECH, was dedicated precisely to this topic. Powerlessness in face of the police apparatus, fear and paranoia in face of a possible search and detention, psychological and physical violence were metaphorically conveyed through gloomy images of billboards mangled in the 2016 storm, disturbing landscapes and pits, illustrations depicting body parts most vulnerable for striking blows. It is not surprising that the activist depicted in one of the portraits of the series ended up behind the bars again.
2. FREELANCE AND THE UNION OF ARTISTS
In an interview with a German artist Hito Steyerl, Oleg Fonaryov, a Ukrainian developer and programmer, gives an example of transformation of the global economic ties, using the concept of “nearshore” as opposed to the concept of “offshore”. In the field of information technology, the countries of Eastern Europe began to appear as the source of outsourced labor – competent, high-tech, and cheap. It is not surprising that in the close proximity to the real combat actions, virtual military simulations, computer games, and 3D graphics are being created. This is characteristic of one of the several trends that determine the Eastern European regimes of labor and leisure. If the work of a programmer pulls the average salary level to its high horizon, then the work of a cultural worker remains at its lower horizon.
For example, the work of a librarian is considered one of the lowest paid with the full rate of 160 euros, including bonuses, (as of the summer 2017). The introduction of the decree on parasitism became a catalyst for discussions about labor and the status of the artistic labor specifically: how it can be determined, paid, and defended.
While the decree on preventing social dependency in Belarus primarily focuses on “black” economic activity, it is in the cultural sphere that its ideological effects are revealed.
How can an artist avoid paying parasitism tax?
One could become a freelancer, obtain the status of a creative worker, organize a fictitious sect, combine art practice with official employment, become a member of the state-controlled union of artists, designers, or architects; study abroad, obtain a disability certificate, move to the countryside and get permission from a kolkhoz to cultivate the land, become a craftsperson.
All of these forms of tax evasion are widely practiced and discussed in the artistic field. Since the average income of an artist is extremely low and there is no more or less reasonable legislation on freelance, combining several jobs (programmer and photographer, designer and artist) remains the most common solution.
In Belarus, the official policy of the Ministry of Culture foremost recognizes structures that have not fundamentally changed since the Soviet era: for example, the Union of Artists or the Academy of Arts. Obviously, in many ways this is done to maintain a high level of ideological control. At the same time, private corporations or enterprises construсted with oligarchic money began to actively earn symbolic capital, such as the projects of Belgazprombank (a subsidiary of Gazprom) or Dom Kartin (The House of Paintings – the project of the runaway Ukrainian oligarch Igor Yakubovich). These intersections give rise to the hybrid institutional forms combining bureaucratic management, private capital, and ideological censorship. All official members of the unions of artists, designers, and architects are exempt from tax, which highlights a top-down way of managing culture.
Freelance artists, designers and photographers remain outside of the legal framework of the parasitism tax. Despite the fact that there are legalization methods (for example, through registration of individual entrepreneurship), many of them remain predatory in practice.
For those who are not members of official unions (in order to become a member of the Union of Artists it is necessary to obtain a higher art education in one of the Belarusian institutions and participate in republican exhibitions), there is an option of submitting an application for consideration of assigning the status of a creative worker. The committee deciding whether the applicant is a creative worker includes all the same bureaucrats and the heads of the official unions. The commission is headed by the First Deputy Minister of Culture. As a result, there are cases when electronic musicians do not receive a certificate due to their lack of knowledge of scores and notations; artists’ painting may be considered too abstract or insufficiently academic; an applicant lacks recommendations and references in the state press.
Today the Decree has just been put on hold for a year and no one knows what the next spring will bring: protests and grassroots cooperation movements, a real union of cultural workers, new forms of cooperation? Or, as it often happens, silence, apathy, locking oneself in the studios and workshops?
3. COMMUNITIES, FICTITIOUS RELIGIONS, PRODUCTION DRAMA
It is hard to tell that in the history of Belarusian art artists have often questioned changes in labor structures, working conditions within their field, or economic issues. In the 2000s Marina Naprushkina was in a dialogue with city planners and architects, Alexander Komarov compared the operation of Siberian mines to the Frankfurt stock exchange, Bergamot group threw coins at a gallery owner during a performance and tried to determine the status of an artist. The younger generation of artists began to directly criticize the conditions of their work: artistic routine and common problems of Eastern European art, such as the lack of exhibition spaces, corruption, nepotism, and the conservatism of the art mainstream. The examples include actionism and the trial against the National Center for Contemporary Arts by Aliaxey Talstou, photo montages depicting fictitious closure of all art-related venues in Minsk by Sergey Shabohin and his series of illegal lectures for the students of the Belarusian State Academy of Arts, an exhibition Diploma which criticized the system of art education, the work of Zhanna Gladko in which she researches unprotected and invisible care labor of an artist and the hierarchy within the art system.
The eeefff group composed of Dzina Zhuk and Nikolai Spesivtsev from the very inception of its practice was interested in how labor is transforming within its contemporary digital non-material state, in how the automation of labor functions, in the contact between its human and non-human sides, interfaces, algorithms. The eeefff is a part of Work Hard! Play Hard!, as well as of Flying Cooperation – projects that offered a new look at the relationship between labor and leisure after the introduction of the parasitism tax.
The series of events Work Hard! Play Hard! was developed to reflect on labor and leisure experience, productivity and laziness, intensification, amalgamation, and interpenetration of different labor regimes. The working group (Dzina Zhuk, Nikolay Spesivtsev, Olia Sosnovskaya, Aleksei Borisionok) was interested in not only the questions of working conditions of artists and curators, but also in the disposition of labor in general. The project and the invitation to participate placed greater focus on changes in this configuration, on operational models of a classic factory and a corporation, which are draining resources from the earth (for example, Belaruskali), on ways in which a new type of economy extracts emotional and cognitive capacities – be it outsourced work of a programmer, exhausting activist labor, woman’s reproductive labor, or leisure time of a raver, a philosopher, or a factory worker. WH!PH! is first and foremost an attempt to invent a space in which these subjects can be discussed in different discursive and performative formats, not only within the framework of a narrow local cultural field, but from a broader Eastern European perspective; a space where it is possible to invite friends and colleagues to create an event which is powerful and charged with the affect of co-participation.
In 2016, WH!PH! was dedicated to mapping concepts related to the culture of late capitalism, affects of labor and leisure: laziness, hedonism, over-productivity, fatigue, psychological stress. In 2016, a group of artists Flying Cooperation began to develop a draft of a project intended to help in deferring from the parasitism tax. Upon careful reading of the text of the Decree, the group found out that “priests, clergymen of a religious organization, members (inhabitants) of the monastery, monastic community” are exempted from the tax. This line of the Decree prompted the development of the fictitious cult Exocoid: to form a cult associated with a flying fish, a fake sect was created with its own history, rituals, places of worship and protocols. Within the framework of the exhibition Politics of Fragility in the gallery on Shabolovka (Moscow), Flying Cooperation invited visitors to become parishioners. The documents supporting the establishment of the fictitious cult were submitted to the tax office, but most likely have not been considered due to the suspension of the Decree. The foundation of a cult in this case is not a new-age, spiritualistic practice, but rather a new grassroot form of cooperation and self-organization (which is one of the main conceptual horizons of the FC), as well as a creation of new systems of kinship and friendship.
In an interesting way, the quasi-religious form of response to the parasitism tax, also combining the perestroika context of post-Soviet quasi-mystical cults and the black economy (financial pyramids, ‘charged’ drinking water), was suggested by Daria Danilovich. In a series of videos, on behalf of the fictitious organization Mezhdunarodnyi (“International”), the artist is ‘charging’ water with ‘psychic energy’ so it could be consumed for healing or protecting oneself from paying the tax. She introduced a new economic barter system, which aims to criticize the formality of the number of days – 183 a year – that must be worked off for dodging the parasite tax.
Daria Danilovich, A Session of Energy Healing from Parasitism. Charging Water. Video screenshot.
In 2017, with the help of an abstract machine of “transmission” – “an imaginary tool for controlling acceleration, which involves the contact of gears: bodies, objects, stories and affects” – WH!PH! called to pay attention to the processes developing at different speeds and at their collective work, intersections and breakdowns. The term “extractive capitalism”, which a researcher Saskia Sassen explores in her 2014 anthropological poem “Expulsions”, explains how modern capitalism works and brings under a common denominator the various processes of profit from the earth and from the body. The new phase of capitalism, which is no longer exclusively related to the modernist productivity, mass consumption, and the circulation of goods, is rather a gigantic mechanism for extracting value from humanity and nature, with the gradual exhaustion of all possible resources, including mental and cognitive abilities as well as the biosphere.
For instance, Uladzimir Hramovich brought up the case of the Belaruskali corporation and the city of Soligorsk, built for the production of potassium – the basis for the prosperity of the Republic of Belarus: billions tons of potassium were unearthed in 2003. Using it as a rhetorical example, the artist suggests filling these newly formed cavities with art to serve as corporate collections (an example of the latter is the collection of another corporation – Belgazprombank). Furthermore, as part of WH!PH! body was discussed as a different exhausted cavity filled with affect: in conversations on emotional work with Ira Kudrya and emotional burnout with Tanya Setsko.
Lina Medvedeva and Maxim Karpitsky organized a screening of the Belarusian Soviet film of the early 1980s His Vacation, the plot of which revolves around a shock worker Korablev who establishes that the the poor quality of details sourced by the subcontractors is the cause of constant production problems. Korablev takes a vacation, travels to another city to the Krasny Lug factory and gets a job, while hiding the true motive of his arrival. He is going to readjust equipment in the factory workshop where the details for his home factory are produced.
The film genre can be described as “production drama” and beyond the framework of the Soviet genre cinema, it seems to me that this term can describe many of those surfaces that are being deformed under the influence of extractive capitalism. In general, I would suggest considering these artistic reactions to parasitism tax as a kind of production drama which exposes and analyzes not only the industrial labor itself, but also how mental, emotional and cognitive competencies become a part of what was called the extractive machine of capitalism in the conditions of authoritarianism in Belarus.
*This essay was originally published in Hjärnstorm nummer 132: Belarus/Sverige in 2018 and edited for the publication on Status Platform in July 2020.
The base value in Belarus was established in 2002 instead of the minimum wage. It is an indicator of the calculation by the Belarusian government of the size of pensions, benefits, taxes, fees, and penalties. ↩
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice.”
Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through theLooking-Glass
The city […] is: “man’s most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself’.
David Harvey in The Right to the City
14 May 1940, during the invasion that led to the occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, German bombs set the city center of Rotterdam ablaze. This horrific tragedy created a tabula rasa for post-war city-planners and engineers put in charge of rebuilding the city. The construction of the Kleinpolderplein – or ‘Little Marsh Square’ – highway intersection, planned from the early 1950s, finished 1973, became one of the crowning achievements of the reconstruction.
Nowadays, however, the flyovers have become a symbol of how modern urban planning dissected the city, creating withered spaces, social boundaries between neighborhoods and unhealthy urban environments. Traffic lights, narrow sidewalks and the imposition of vehicular high-lines are elements trapped in a passively accepted semantic field asserting the supremacy of the car. Also, when the highway was built, it marked the border of the city, but nowadays it is encrusted in the urban plane of a growing city. An upcoming decommissioning of the flyovers highlights how the modernist and technocratic dream of conquering the empty spaces in the city with the imposition of the car has failed: from their place in the mid 20th century, the planners of the intersection could not conceive of a city that would produce such extensive motor traffic, that the intersection by the year 2025 can no longer bear the weight of the cars and the air pollution it creates is no longer acceptable in the urban environment (and the global atmosphere).
The multi-layered history of the intersection means that it has the distinct ability to take on various forms of heritage. As some sort of concrete cathedral, the highway intersection bears witness to the emptiness in which it took form in the era of reconstruction and thereby it stands not only as a memorial to the destruction of WWII: the modernist assumptions of the car conquering the urban landscape that governed the thinking of mid-twentieth century planners simultaneously convey the heritage of their utopian dreams and their failure to capture the reality of the present-day future. The problem is that Kleinpolderplein was not easily perceived as such a memorial: the noise of traffic, the distance to the city center, the inaccessibility for pedestrians did not invite citizens to gather here and uncover the layers of history in active heritage processes.
To address the importance of spatiality in knowledge production, Thomas F. Gieryn coins the term “truth-spots” – that is to say, truth can have many forms, but it always takes place and each place generates a certain set of criteria that determines one value of truth over the other.1 Stuck in the spatial imagination of the times, the urban planners in times of reconstructing the city wanted to forget the traumatic recent past and projected their spectacular utopian believes on the empty spot Kleinpolderplein was at that moment. Their beliefs, however, have become outdated now that the Kleinpolderplein was condemned to be demolished because of the construction of a new ring road.
Thus, the highway intersection does not any more fulfill the original criteria for the production of truth any longer – and the question is now whether they have not changed altogether. If we are to make sense of the Kleinpolderplein as a carrier of memory and examine it as a cradle of new urban imaginaries, the notion of imagination is where our focus should lie. Paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, the Swedish geographer and multifaceted philosopher Gunnar Olsson defines imagination as the human faculty used to make the absent present. That means that it is both the faculty we use to call forth places that are not ‘here’, but also the faculty used to call forth places that are not ‘now’; to re-member perceptions of the past and expectations for the future, both of which are by definition never present. The artist collective Observatorium, commissioned to make an artwork under the flyovers, approached their project with widely different imaginaries of the past, present, and future than the engineers and city planners in the 1950s, and began to imagine the Kleinpolderplein as a place for culture by placing a museum gallery for sculptures from the city and a water square with pedestrian-oriented flyovers. Their local ad-hoc project initiative became the start of a long-term intent to be involved in the planning process, aimed at trespassing the modernist planning regimes, with a growing group of allies from different fields of knowledge – amongst them Moniek Driesse, one of the authors of this piece. They all started to believe in the dream of transforming the highway intersection into a highway landscape park.
Artist collective Observatorium began to imagine the Kleinpolderplein as a place for culture by placing a museum gallery for sculptures from the city and a water square with pedestrian-oriented flyovers.
Along with Ilse Evers, Duizel in het Park and Werkgemeenschap Kleinpolder, Moniek Driesse organised an expedition along the highway during the festival Duizel in het Park, inviting visitors to participate in the visualisation of dreams and ideas for the Kleinpolderplein.
Under the flyover, writer Elfie Tromp carried out her future dream about this particular piece of Rotterdam’s reconstruction architecture.
At the end of the expedition, all participants had their own dreams and ideas for the future of this forgotten space carried out in a collective and playful protest march.
Leonie Sandercock notes that in order to trespass the modernist planning regime, planning practice needs to go through a transformation and practitioners should develop the ability to “imagine oneself in a different skin, a different story, a different place, and then desire this new self and place that one sees”. Further, she writes that planners and citizens2 need to “suspend [their] habits of being and come out in the open and engage in dialogue with strangers”.3 So when people in Rotterdam were invited to places they had never been before, at least not as pedestrians, it opened up new spaces for remembrance, resistance, and reflection. A one-day festival was organized to show what the flyovers of the Kleinpolderplein can be like when cars are no longer the dominant occupants of this space. The participants explored and observed the unexpected rich biodiversity along the shoulders of the highway, listened to future narrations as science fiction, and toasted to the concrete biotope, distilled skillfully into healing cocktails.
On April 16, 2016 one of the Kleinpolderplein flyovers functioned as a park for a single day – a public space to look out over the city and think about its future.
Expressing a desire to give back the Kleinpolderplein to city life and nature, Moniek Driesse and Yvonne Beelen gave creeping and unwanted weeds a new narration departing from the qualities they present as alchemists and chemists of nature, experts in converting water, soil and sunlight in a broad assortment of special substances that are so complex that we could never imagine, let alone produce them.
Toasting to the diversity of the Kleinpolderpleinpark, the concrete biotope distilled skillfully into healing cocktails by Maidie van den Bos.
Toasting to the diversity of the Kleinpolderpleinpark, the concrete biotope distilled skillfully into healing cocktails by Maidie van den Bos.
Expanding on the project Kleinpolderpleinpark, the Stichting Werkgemeenschap Kleinpolder (Foundation Kleinpolder Community) initiated a dialogue with regional authorities on the past, present and future transitions of river and highway landscapes in Rotterdam. This field guide includes a possible timeline into the future of the Kleinpolderplein, as well as a map of clues for a vital landscape system, taken from the underlying landscape, the marsh.
If the urban space is interpreted as an infrastructure of knowledge, where nodes of connection form spaces where truth is produced, then these structures become the boundaries that frame our imagination. The various creative interventions at the Kleinpolderplein intended to alter those infrastructures in order to allow new agencies to develop. The underlying landscape, the marsh, becomes the incarnation of a natural, dynamic landscape system, in opposition to the oppressive modernist planning regimes that try to conquer nature. Thus, following Gunnar Olsson’s dictum, this allows us to imagine not only a past before the bombing of the city, but also ahead in time in which cities give room to people, plants and animals to thrive for years into the future.
Gieryn, Thomas F. (2018). Truth Spots: how places make people believe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
As a response to today’s economic system of self-exploitation, precarious self-management, and overwork, a system also haunted by guilt and depression, we created a compilation of diverse exercises for practicing the pleasures of laziness, radical idleness, non-work und unproductivity. The manual was composed by the members of the (non)work group and invited experts.
How to become lazy on a long-term basis after durational & exhausting work performance with a series of multiple failures and breakdowns
Get a stipend, which does not depend on a regular production, but guarantees regular payments. According to its conditions you might need to produce something – but in the end. The further and less clear this end is – the better. The vagueness and openness of the timeline, along with the lack or absence of the intermediate deadlines and supervision will allow you to be in charge of your effort and time distribution ! Beware of the temptation to become the secretary, assistant, boss, and policemen of yourself !
There are 2 modes of practicing laziness. Advanced mode implies starting non-working on your ‘project’ as soon as you get the stipend. For extreme workaholics with high levels of responsibility and guilt inclinations, we suggest a soft mode, where one gradually reduces the time spent on their ‘project’. Starting with 8 hours of work a day, 5 days per week, one should work one hour less everyday, so in 1,5 half week you will get only 1 hour of work. Next step is to start working fewer days per week. One should either gradually reduce the number of working days per week or skip every second working day, gradually skipping more and more days. Finally, after extended days-off and continuous idleness, it would be harder and harder to get to the working routine. When you feel that you have completely internalised the laziness, you can get into practicing laziness independently, without a timeframe.
! Beware of getting overexcited by the amount of free time and falling into the trap of other production-oriented projects. Decline all other invitations and skip all the open-calls where you would need to work.
! Beware of the feeling of guilt that might haunt you at some point. Remember that ‘laziness’ as a negative phenomenon is a concept imposed by the exploitative capitalist and state systems. There is nothing either natural or normal in work. Constant work is unnecessary. Your body can self-regulate the regimes of activity, so trust it. Finally, think and reply to yourself honestly: has all the time and effort that you put into work over the years been rewarded fairly, if at all? So your idleness is just a belated reimbursement or an extended burnout rehabilitation.
! ! The recovering effects of the long-term laziness might be overruled, when / if the actual really final deadline arrives.
By Olia Sosnovskaya
Digital collage by Olia Sosnovskaya
Building a career in the dying world / Ambition in grief
Search online for ‘climate change’ and read related articles for 1 hour.
Remember the natural cataclysms which happened this year and are happening now. Look outside and think if the weather is normal for this place and time of the year. Since when have you started noticing these anomalies?
Relate the scientists’ predictions of the climate change affects forecast to your age: how old would you be when most of the glaciers melt? When half of the existing species are extinct? When some countries become uninhabited?
Reply to yourself honestly, how would you want to spend the years before the catastrophe?
By Olia Sosnovskaya
Digital collage by Olia Sosnovskaya
To make a black painting during three hours in a public square
Take an empty white canvas, an easel, black paint, and one brush into public space. The best is to choose a place that contains some black elements.
Paint the white canvas black over the course of three hours.
The rules for the performance is to be open to questions from people passing by – but never stop painting, using very slow and controlled movements.
Do not hesitate to transform the performance into a general discussion over the tradition of monochrome painting (Malevich etc), the nature of black color and painting as an activity.
This performance was performed in 2010 at Sergels Torg in Stockholm. More info here.
By Nils Claesson
To make a white painting on a white canvas in a black box
Take an empty white canvas, an easel, white paint and one brush into a black box space.
Paint the white canvas white during 20 minutes.
The rules for the performance is to be open for questions from the audience that will be sitting or standing in a circle around the artist.
Do not hesitate to answer questions about the tradition of monochrome painting and the nature of white. One reference in the discussion could be Malevich’s white paintings, another artist to mention could be Robert Ryman. The nature of the color white and the relation between white as a color and the black box as a space could also be a topic.
By Nils Claesson
Born but yet unnamed
Wait until your birthday has come. Invite all your friends to go for a long walk through the city. For my birthday I wrote a message:
We meet TOMORROW (on Sunday) at 15:30 in KFC near Nagatinskaya metro station. Take food, drinks, friends, and what/whomever you want with you. well… and put on shoes, get ready for everything) see you soon! hugs to everyone!
You can propose your own route or ask for help from your friends.
Screenshot from Dzina Zhuk’s birthday chat with friends, 2019
During your walk, give yourself a treat: bring hooch from your friend’s father & drink it on the most beautiful high spot with a view over the city; do not hesitate to eat local food from kiosk & drink alcohol bought in a corner shop.
After this celebration you will find yourself in an alcoholic intoxication and you can even throw up collectively with your friends. After that, your body will tell you what to do: just lie in bed for 3 days, reschedule all your meetings, eat only healthy and light food, forget about all old ideas and doubts (your body won’t let you do that anyway). This period can be very productive in an unproductive way or unproductive in a very productive way.
By Dzina Zhuk
Comments
wanted to add as another sub-exercise
2) Get sick.
It could be a micro food poisoning or a cold – but be careful with the degree of sickness. Today the deadline-based timeframe and freelance / zero hours employment systems deprive us even of the luxury of getting a proper sick leave. However, as Dzina mentions, your body would not allow you to follow them. Just follow your body desires, un-abilities and aspirations – lie in bed, sleep; don’t look into the screens too much; don’t think, forget about your ambitions and anxieties.
yesss for intoxication! i think it is a really good tool. hangover, выхода. and it shows a complex relation between pleasure & frustration/pain in the work/non-work relations. also serving as a sort of response to the culture of stimulants and vitamins for better productivity
yes, for me it works as a kind of renewal (though it might sounds crazy), i see the things from a new sudden unexpected trajectory
Constraining activity
Please find something which works best for you as a splint. A cutting board, a notebook or an ergonomic part of furniture are all good choices! A bracing material is needed as well. Use something you have on hand. It could be a scarf, belt, a wire from the charger of your laptop or smartphone.
Write down on small pieces of paper those parts of your body that can be constrained. It is better to ask your friends to do the writing to avoid cognitive biases.
Close your eyes and take out one of the papers. Read the name of a chosen body part and constrain it using materials you prepared.
Here are some pictures for inspiration/deprivation:
Digital collage provided by Nicolay Spesivtsev
Do things you planned to accomplish today. Do them for 45 minutes, while staying constrained. Please focus on your feelings. What processes are emphasized? What are suppressed or slowed down? What are you focusing your attention on? What is outside of your range of view? Do you want to prolong? What part of your body do you want to have tightened next time?
Please stop your activity strictly after 45 minutes even though you want to prolong the exercise.
Take some pictures of you being tightened. Send them to us with the list of things you made during the exercise.
Repeat the exercise tomorrow.
It’s better to do the exercise collectively.
By Nicolay Spesivtsev
Comments
do you think the exercise would provoke you to give more effort or less?
I think the most interesting effect is to focus on different mechanisms of acceleration that are installed on psycho-somatic level within our bodies. So the aim of the exercise is not to produce more or less but to make new alliances between different parts of ourselves. Does it make sense?
yes! it makes a lot of sense )
A guided obsession
Think of a person you like or used to like recently. If you are in love with someone at the moment, that’s perfect too.
Think about this person for 5 minutes. How do they look like, what does their voice sound? Recall the times you were together. How did you meet the first time? Where did you go together after? What did you talk about? How have you touched each other? If you didn’t, remember how your bodies were positioned in relation to each other.
Imagine how you meet again and what you will do and say. What this person will do, how you would react. Be creative. You can use your previous meetings as inspiration and a template for your dreams.
Find this person’s social network profile. Stalk it for at least 30 minutes. Look at the pictures, read posts and comments, check the people who liked them. Look at the people from their contact list. Be attentive and detailed.
Optional: Write a message to this person, but do not send it. Wait a minute, then re-read it. Edit it. Write a few other messages. Choose one that you would like to send.
! Beware of obsessive working in case your affection becomes too strong and is not mutual.
By Olia Sosnovskaya
Comments
I’m thinking to myself if we should include this exercise at all. First of all, is it ethical to involve others in this kind of practice, even indirectly? Secondly, maybe it’s too foolish? What do you think?
I like the idea of suspended obsessions, practiced emotional potential which can or cannot expose itself in the future. The idea of preserved emotional labor. Coming back to your question, I think these people would be pleased to be remembered by a person who does this exercise amidst the mayhem of meaningless concerns, or even receive a text from them. We don’t get offended if we greet a happy birthday with a wave of a magic algorithmical wand of social networks, right?
Looking at great successful young artists you will never be
Go to the https://futuregenerationartprize.org/ or any other webpage of young artists’ prize, or check Documenta or Venice Biennale participant lists and look for people under 35 years old. Browse through the participant’s websites, gaze at glossy screenshots and splendid photos of displays. Scroll endless exhibition lists in their CVs. Check what kind of schools they went to. Calculate how much the education and life in that countries would cost you, including visa-related expenses and fees depending on your citizenship. If possible, check how diverse the graduate of those schools are in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, and origin.
If you happen to graduate from the same school, ask yourself why you are still not among those people yet? Look back at your life and analyse what has brought you to your current place. Dream about other options you might have had – would they make any difference? Given the experience of the past years, do you think your status would change drastically in the near future? Ask yourself if you put too much effort and stress in what you are not really in control of?
If you will never become a great successful young artist, just relax and do what you really really want and enjoy.
Create a playlist with the music you can’t resist dancing to. If you have a good or loud enough sound system, the exercise would be more efficient, but using headphones is also possible. Set an alarm clock to any time during your working day. The exercise can be performed anywhere, the only requirement is the proximity to your workspace, so you can switch to the practice right from your work.
Start the exercise: turn on the music from your playlist and dance energetically, devotedly and passionately for at least 10 minutes. Repeat the training everyday, gradually increasing its duration by adding at least a minute each time.
As a result of this exercise your attention and overall bodily condition would be drastically switched from the working routine, with its flow interrupted. The effect of the exercise can last for over an hour after its fulfillment.
By Olia Sosnovskaya
Screenshots from the online search engine, provided by Olia Sosnovskaya
Screenshots from the online search engine, provided by Olia Sosnovskaya
Screenshots from the online search engine, provided by Olia Sosnovskaya
Screenshots from the online search engine, provided by Olia Sosnovskaya
Comments
Is dance non-productive or, on the contrary, does it train stamina and provide rehabilitation in order for the improved body to be useful and able to work again? Substituting overwork with another kind of exhaustion, which seems liberating and transcendent. Does it make your body disobedient to the logic of capitalism or rather train it to sustain long monotonous hours of activity.
For me it’s hard to think about any type of autonomous activity free from the logic that a body should incur value (in a form of creative potential as well). Everything that seemed autonomous and authentic yesterday, tomorrow could be a form of alienating work. So maybe we can talk not about places/time/states-of-our-bodies but about networks we can web/twine. My question is: what type of solidarity/empowerment can we establish through dance?
<3 for your last question !
To play computer games which don’t care if you play them or not
I’m grateful to Alexandra Anikina for inspiring these ideas.
Screenshot from video game Everything, developed by David OReilly, 2017
Mountain. It is a certain world, in which a separate autonomous mountain exists – an agent beyond all human relations. The mountain moves, and you can either approach it or distance yourself from it.
Screenshot from video game Everything, developed by David OReilly, 2017
A human has an observant role: one cannot control the insides of a computer game anymore. Most likely, it is the other way around: the mountain is evolving and living all by itself. For one dollar, you can only get access to the observation of subjectivity which holds a world on its own. Night and day change in a game, as well as conditions of existence, but as a user, you can only perform micro-actions which don’t influence anything. Sometimes you can even see the state of the mountain shown on a screen, or encounter an attempt to engage in dialogue (or just a question?).
Screenshot from video game Everything, developed by David OReilly, 2017
In Everything you can become one of the animals, insects, the Universe particles on a microlevel, or, let’s say, a comet on a macro-level. Along with that, your protagonist is able to time travel. Today I was a mammoth, and I got back into the Ice Age. To gain agency, you can get inside the avatars at different levels and become a ladybug or, if you spend enough time reaching a certain level, a molecule of this ladybug. If you could have ever imagined Universal Procrastination, this is it: you don’t have to do anything. If you give up, your avatar starts its own life walking and travelling around the planet, which is just like the Mountain – an (utopian?) island where various processes occur, and you can co-exist with them, plunge into them (or is plunging just a way of coexistence – a careful one?).
There are games which don’t need a viewer, games which are stripped off a viewer’s gaze, of an outsider’s gaze. Something is happening there while you’re not present, a world changes and evolves; and it is not loaded with ‘God’s’ sight, human’s sight. A human doesn’t rule anymore, doesn’t control an in-game universe. The bodies in the process of creation are being present there, not the bodies which have already been created.
By Dzina Zhuk
Screenshot from video game Everything, developed by David OReilly, 2017
Create a temporary recreation area
Eeefff. Automated Recreation Zone, 2018
Eeefff. Automated Recreation Zone, 2018
Invite guests via a local food delivery aggregator. After the first treats are served by the guests, invite them to join the table. Tell them that this picnic was initiated particularly for food couriers and is built up by their colleagues. That it is a temporary recreation room set to rest from the daily routine. That guests were invited to find some time for a break from their insane work schedules to attend a picnic for a while and to be together.
By eeefff
Comments
All in all, how is time scheduled for food delivery work? As I understand it, in Russia you cannot just take a break, it has to be allowed by a manager. And if you pause while treating it as an incomplete order, it may look like a delay, right? + other orders will be standing in the queue? Well, it will be interesting to think about how it is really possible to trick the system and its scheduling!
As far as I know, it’s quite a monstrous system, at least in Moscow. Yes, you cannot set your work rhythm yourself, it is regulated either by a manager or an algorithm which optimizes human resources. Only a year ago you could encounter Yandex food couriers idling in McDonalds or Burger King. But for now, something had changed in the algorithmical heads of managers and couriers who bum around, banished from the streets and cafes.
Instructions for unproductive daydreaming session
This exercise is to be performed around 2 p.m. in the middle of a working day. It is a dance meditation that interrupts the flow of your daily drag and forces your body to relax and forget about all its daily troubles. In order to perform the exercise, follow the instructions below: Download the audio from soundcloud onto your phone. Step out of your office and find a relaxing meadow in order to fall into a meditative state. A ‘Meadow’ is here to be considered as: “A flat surface where you are capable of laying down. It could be your bedroom floor, a city park or a sunny rooftop. It can be found anywhere where you are alone and feel comfortable and safe in a horizontal position.” Lie down. Relax. Put your headphones on. Press play.
This exercise is inspired by the project Neverendings by the choreographer Sergiu Matis, whom I closely collaborate with. The project is based on the research of Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope. Neverendings premiered in 2017 in Berlin. Soundscape is designed by Carl Perks.
By Mila Pavićević
How to upset a Father (An assault on the powerful through nasty means)
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Courtesy of Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Exercises-stories for survival, on Hardships that conceal themselves and the Indolences of daughters
The Celebration of Disobedience of tactical amenities, the hardships of charms of a naive rebellion: the art of treat and gorge, of selection and offerings; tiny clandestine manipulations and a triple betrayal in the name of Elektra, Eclair, and Thunderbolt!
Car la poudre et la foudre c’est fait pour que les rats envahissent le monde! Because powder and lightning are made for rats to invade the world!
Adaptations:
A father-spoiled truffle paste, who cannot sneak into a splendid entrance hall of Gubin’s mansion — wallowed in luxury, there’s no passage below, he is forced to spy on the dance of plasterwork and marble through a window, to hit it with a sorrowful wing, with eye-hair-snake venom, with all his eight gut-pink fingers. My Venetian father, I bring an offering-feeling to your black vacuum, and a non consumable Italian paste-daughter. There’s no passage to you from below, but I know that here, beneath, the girls live; they cram their mouths with filth and take it out with lips, intuitive trackhounds searching for the complementary culinary ingredients for the Kitchen of Earthy Poison.
A father-strawberry Dirol — subtle scorching gum on, paint coming off in chunks, on husk, on squame (through straws) triggers saliva, foam at the mouth!
A father-blue Elektra. A message-question from a Blue Fire of Imperfection of a favorite Ellinistic heroine, one of the jewels of a Greek drama: How to disappoint a Father?
By Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Гиперактивное упражнение
Hyperactive exercise
Image provided by Aleksei Borisionok
Paradoxically, one way to do nothing is to engage oneself in bureaucracy, its solid, counterproductive power, and its substrate: archives, records, management, and documentation. If for the person on the receiving end, bureaucracy soon turns into a living hell, simulating the feeling that one is walking in a vicious circle, then for an employee within that bureaucracy, work can feel like an exercise in procrastination: the ultimate form of doing nothing – with its small pleasures – and wasting time. This laziness constitutes a specific type of pleasure located within the routine of everyday life, and this laziness interrupts work. Is it possible to use the anti-creative and non-productive power of bureaucracy and filing of papers for one’s own purposes? The following exercise, which combines archeology, psychogeography, and aimless strolling (flâneur), will help answer this question.
To complete the exercise, you will need an organizational system, which we will term an archive, of any kind, digital or physical: file cabinets, vernacular databases, repositories, various collections of information, preferably containing irrelevant data. Before starting the exercise, we follow Sven Speaker’s question: “Is there a part of the archive that escapes from the archivist’s control, a ‘beyond the archive’ that remains inaccessible to its finding tools?”1 There is no need to answer this question. We will look at the archive not as a language of discourse and power, but as a junction of various pieces of information that slip out of registers, cards, hashtags, and indexes.
The purpose of the exercise: aimlessly wandering around data sets
Instruction:
1. Find the archive or database. Since most likely you are behind a computer screen, it is most convenient to use a digital archive. It is possible to work with the material archive: it activates not only your eyes and fingers, but also the muscles of the arms and back. Databases generated with users-data are suitable for this exercise: social networks (vkontakte, odnoklassniki, last.fm, wikipedia, flickr, alibaba, youtube, etc.) Also a personal data set is suitable: for example, an old hard drive disk. Also you can use any psycho-data: bookmarks, contact list in social networks, notes.
2. Come up with a protocol that you will follow. The options are:
2. A) The chaotic way: based on intuition, wink, seduction. Click on any link that seems seductive, strange, interesting, attractive to you. Follow all the links, including the most dumb and containing conspiracies.
2. B) Method-protocol: some users, especially those with a tendency to commit and control, like to follow the protocol. Do not be afraid, come up with the strangest way to go from page to page – anyway, no one will know about it. For example, click on every fifth link, on every material related to a certain topic, a keyword or words that will determine your choice, etc.
N.B.
Often, corporate methods will try to control your choices and give
you the most obvious moves based on the analysis of your data. Do not
be fooled! However, sometimes you should not avoid the logic of the
proposed choice – it can lead you to a strange space of the digital
unconscious.
3. Turn off all the devices of time measurement, do not let the course of time distract you from such an exciting and counterproductive activity. Perhaps you will learn something new, see special samples of web design, and even save something to your computer.
4. Do not stop!
5. Go from page to page, from video to video, from track to track, from profile to profile: make your aimless hyperactive reeling the most useless, strange, and amazing!
N.B.
Psychologists often associate this exercise with attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, which is so characteristic of our time.Do not
be mistaken! Aimless hyperactive reeling can be performed with all
the seriousness of procrastination and a high level of concentration
and attention.
An
example of hyperactive aimless scrolling on the database of sounds of
the social network VKontakte based on the thematic search and related
keywords on the topic of geology:
The
Sound of the Underworld → Conspiracies of Natalya Stepanova, redone
– Multiplication of mineral deposits → Unknown – The sound of the
movement of tectonic plates → Viscous Sharab – Tectonic wedge →
… → Ilgashevsky Textiles – ALH (atmosphere, lithosphere,
hydrogen) → DJ AUTOMAT – TURNS ON MAGMA LEANED BACK 10 METERS BA$$
BOO$T
By Aleksei Borisionok
Anxiety is a place, a place is a destiny
Annotation
The manual for non-work and laziness from n i i c h e g o d e l a t accumulates a variety of approaches on the topic, which were developed by individual employees of n i i. Non-work with anxiety, with visual and poetic images, and with the body are the constituent parts of this manual; sometimes the routes proposed by researchers unexpectedly intersect, forming new nodes on the time/body/space map. Sometimes the routes exist autonomously. We sincerely hope that each of the users will be able to creatively apply our practices to their own lives.
Content
1) Non-action Algorithms
anxiety mapping
wet cleaning vs deadline
translate me into text
slow motion
deadline as a tool for procrastination
2) Possible problems and solutions 3) Frequently Asked Questions and Answers 4) Glossary 5) Subject Index 6) Where else to find information on the subject, contact information
Non-action Algorithms
anxiety mapping
anxiety is a place, a place is a destiny work on destiny, line your anxiety, prepare a map and a plan here are the flashpoints of anxiety, it is a solitaire, travel through it as through a mine field traveler is a possibility for a prosthetic, imagine yourself in a blaze for example (*) this autumn field, the islands of anxiety are smouldering under the yellow leaves, recognizing anxiety is a code, the same code is sewed into your body somewhere encounters, feel your future burns like if they have been always present put on a bandage, put the plan on the map, rub these leaves with ointment
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
trace anxiety places on the body, paint them and decorate you dressed yourself up, let’s work with this how long have you been together how long are you going to be together answer politely and correctly how did I meet you – I recognized you by the scent of leaves, you are my series of explosions, let’s decorate these places and go to a party hyperlinks and exilement, deport me to all the anxiety places, I follow right now oh now I cross your page is on fire I leave it a like it gives me a wink do you already know where to be on fire tonight? would you drop me a link? places want to be round as nests, anxiety is also warping into a nest over-scrolled pages as tiny nests on the fingertips
wet cleaning vs deadline
(*)
I lie and look at the floor. I can do no more in this state – just lie on the floor and look at the floor. I focus on a thin layer of dust with petals from a bouquet brought on the eighth of March. I look and feel how desire to remove it increases. At the moment this is my strongest desire, it is stronger than the desire to live.
Cleaning is what I want right now. Wet cleaning. I would even say full-scale cleaning. It is necessary to sort out the closet, remove the winter clothes, arrange the spices according to the flavor strength. This is very important, much more important than my deadline on a text, and even more than an unedited video.
Quite rarely, or rather quite briefly, we find ourselves in a state of insufficiently chewed affect when we do not know what we feel. Sensory recognition habits work smoothly, thus we quickly pack affects into a narrative. Anxiety is either a means of achievement, or a consequence of an affective broth, of the non-discrimination of emotions.
Anxiety involves the imagination: I want to imagine the contours and clear silhouettes of future errands, reports, projects – instead of this rattling and discrepancies within myself; the fever of emotions produces spoilers of the future, which can be returned to when resonances fade away.
translate me into text
***
verses on the way to a workplace notes in the bathroom how does inner jelly live a jiggly subject a magician of anxiety states, a teacher, a guru dark knowledge from the other side acts of despair soulful practices recognize me then translate me into text this is a deck of cards face down face up I’m lying on the bed ever accelerating deceleration I see the traces of grief on my friends’ faces and the grief itself here are its crinkles and these chinks and this inappropriate pause in a conversation friend, we are seaming ourselves into a one soft cloth we are waiting for ulysses a table there’s an old cup of morality rattling on the table while you are eating up your dinner with no taste of food my dear, I’m ready to sweep open toward
slow motion
Find a quiet, secure place where no one can distract you from doing the practice. Do a little warm-up that will prepare the body for slow movement. Turn on quiet meditative music (Chinese bells suit perfectly). Set the timer for a specific time. It is recommended to start with 15 minutes of deceleration per day, gradually adding several minutes every time you do this exercise. Theoretically, it is possible to extend the practice to 24 hours a day, but for now, as far as we know, no one has been able to achieve this result. Start the slow movement from the fingertips, gradually outspreading it to the entire body. Try to include the entire possible range of body movement, while maintaining the slowest speed that you are capable of. Continue moving until the timer signal goes off. Smoothly exit the slowdown state.
deadline as a tool for procrastination
I exist only six months ahead. One residence confirmed my participation, which means that I won six more months of the future.
Postponed events form the horizon of the future, the future that does not exist in the post-truth world. These are the small horizons of upcoming events, projects, conferences, reports and trips. When they approach, they burst on the tongue like a fizzy candy, creating a spoiler of an event online. This is usually enough for the event to never happen.
Deadline, as the most accessible tool for procrastination, will allow you to postpone an event for as long as possible. When you have a deadline, you see this point on the map (also many see the line which is often called deadly), so you can start moving in different directions, leaving behind unnoticed bookmarks, ruins of chats and links that lead nowhere. This is a digital nomad strategy without a rigid structure and given rules for rambling on the Internet.
Try to reasonably approach the deadline and use it repeatedly, endlessly prolonging and postponing. As such an environmentally friendly example, the Biennale The World Without Work, which consisted of numerous open-call parties “before” and endlessly postponed events “after”, can be cited.
2) Possible problems and solutions
The main problem of procrastination is its usefulness. If I do not write the text I do the dishes; if I do not do the cleaning, I watch the movie; if I do not watch a movie, I wander on the Internet and learn something new. This paradox leads us to the fact that procrastination is the most productive, socially approved action. The vice of the 21st century is encrypted labor. Using simple actions, remove the stigma from procrastination, regain the right for laziness.
3) Frequently Asked Questions and Answers
What is the difference between laziness and procrastination?
Answer options:
– Laziness is sweet, procrastination is bitter.
– Procrastination is an intact and explicit process, it is uninterrupted even if discretely divided into parts by a different charge, but it is a single act, and it is positively charged; while laziness implies a stillbirth of the action, before its formation as an impulse, denying it beforehand and keeping the negative charge all over.
– In procrastination, there is a certain potential, a charge. It is like the rune Isa, the rune of freezing. It seems that nothing is supposedly happening on the external level, but juices accumulate inside, they circulate, prepare for Spring. And laziness is just a waste of time.
– Laziness as the saving of strength, the unwillingness to invest in something worthless, kinda good laziness, laziness of care, like: I am tired, I want to lie down – well, lie down; laziness as bliss, lazy noon, let’s go swimming after lunch – no, let’s lie down for a while in the shade, I’m lazy to go; laziness as the ability to relax, to contemplate, the ability to be at rest.
Laziness as an unwillingness to overcome difficulties because the meaning of this overcoming is not very clear, i.e. laziness is something (in a positive sense) healthy: why should I slave away and sweat for this? for what? Thus, laziness is also associated with motivation: something does not provoke laziness in me (personal examples) –even if this is a very tedious task, exhausting. Thus, it is either pleasure from the process, dedication, or strong motivation.
When I say: I’m lazy, – I confess that there is not much pleasure here, and I am not very passionate, and I have no particular motivation.
There is a big difference from procrastination – because it is unconscious, procrastination is precisely like inhibition, postponement, this is when the unconscious beats you, goes around from the rear, leads you somewhere, although you seem to be doing something.
And laziness, if you say: I am lazy, is an open position, an open non-recognition of all your “bonuses” for enduring the alleged difficulties. And that is why laziness is scourged as the mother of vices, because it is a scandal – you confess that there is no pleasure in what you are invited to do, you are not carried away with this, and this motivation does not work for you. And this is a reason to be excluded, because you kind of question some kind of a common game. When you say that you are too lazy to do something, you devalue this action, and thereby terribly offense those who value this business.
4) Glossary
n i i c h e g o d e l a t – liquid / fluid institution that explores and promotes topics and ideas related to post-labor society
a world without labor – a society which is free from the need to engage in alienated labor; possible on the condition of overcoming capitalism
basic income – the regular payment of a certain amount of money, providing a decent standard of living, to each member of society, regardless of their income level and without their need to perform any work
anti-praxis – a strategy aimed at breaking the cyclical nature of the development of capitalism; proposed by representatives of unconditional acceleration (U/ACC). “To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpolitics and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations.” (Edmund Berger)
44 futures – a practical phase of n i i c h e g o d e l a t readings.
Bodily-vocal-graphic performance based on the books of Nick Srnicek / Alex Williams and Peter Frase, in which the authors describe possible types of future in automation
Nomadism – a movement characterized by the rejection of the idea of rigid structures based on binary oppositions and the idea of strict determinism. Nomadism means slipping through conceptual landscapes and a geographic matrix without setting any structural goal; not sharing and not attaching; hacking central control code and stable movement score. It is autonomy and independence from determined conditions.
5) Subject Index
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
6) Where else to find information on the subject, contact information:
https://vk.com/nii4egodelat
https://www.facebook.com/niichegodelat/
By n i i c h e g o d e l a t
Relaxation / relaxed tongue
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
Relaxation is at the heart of labor. Let’s try to find and preserve it.
To achieve a state of relaxation, detach will from an organ.
ENVISIONING THE VIRTUAL
BRIAN MASSUMI
The word “virtual” came into everyday use in the 1900’s, as a rider on “reality.” The rider overrode: the connotation was unreality. In the phrase “virtual reality,” the adjective virtual stood as a synonym for artificial. Artificial, in this context, meant illusionary. The context, of course, was the dramatic registering in the popular imaginary that enormous changes were on the horizon with the dawning of the digital age. The first tentative steps toward the construction of interactive immersive environments had triggered hyperbolic worries – or hopes – that the fabled “cyberspace” of 1980s futurist fiction was on its way to supplanting “actual” reality. The world would be swallowed in its own artifice. Synthetic imagery, animated with simulated events, would morph into an all-encompassing virtual habitat, somnambulist Matrix of the illusion of life.
2. But an organ can dry out! // quote
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
Relaxed (Mt.4:24, Mt.9:2) – a disease that deprives a person of free movement, and thus the connection between the will and the body part affected by relaxation breaks. When the word is used in the New Testament, it can mean apoplexy or paralysis of the whole organism, paralysis of one side of the body, paralysis of muscle contraction, so that the body parts can neither be raised nor stretched, and then the affected parts of the body are soon made wither. This disease is still prevalent in the East. The parts of the body remain motionless in the very position in which they experienced a sudden seizure, and the suffering is sometimes so intense that soon after the seizure death occurs (Mt.8:6).
3. What do you replace the will with in order to protect an organ from drying out so it stays flexible and soft? You can moisten it with a vagina or, alike the creeping types of plants, cling to watered species, sing songs. You can also do a pleasant massage!
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
DON’T perform any movements with the tongue. Relaxed, wide, flat. These are the main three points. Your head will perform all the movements needed. When your head moves upwards, your tongue wouldn’t go anywhere: it will just follow your head.
Here it’s demonstrated of how to finish the upward movement of a tongue
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
Exercises to relax the muscles of organs of articulation. Self-massage of the tongue
We will make a useful massage to the tongue – so that our tongue becomes obedient, calm, relaxed, and it would easily pronounce various sounds. Your lips and teeth will help with that. They will stroke, pat, tap the tongue. And now carefully look at the pictures and try to remember them.
tongue-spatula
doing lip movements
doing teeth movements
stroking
clapping (tapping)
First you need to make your tongue in a shape of a spatula, and then do this:
We stroke our tongue with our lips affectionately
Algorithm: desire provokes relaxation; toss in some curiosity/attention/interest/dedication to detail, and the new 👅 of philosophy is ready!
Image provided by n i i c h e g o d e l a t
THE END
By n i i c h e g o d e l a t
Sven Spieker. The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2008. P.3.↩
In Belarus the relations in the field of culture are regulated by a large number of normative legal acts, which differ in their legal force. The main document is the Culture Code that came into action in 2017. It is symbolic that the Code was signed a year earlier, in 2016, which was announced as the Year of Culture.
The Culture Code is considered to be a unique document which is unprecedented across the Post-Soviet states. 150 legal acts, regulating the cultural sector, were redrafted and united under one document. As stated by the representatives of government entities, the 200 page document is a product of culture legislation codification. According to Boris Svetlov, former Minister of Culture of the Republic of Belarus: “This, undoubtedly, is not some kind of mechanical unification of existing documents. All of them were adapted and systematized. And, of course, this document has been edited in accordance with today’s standards.” Thus, the purpose of the adoption of the Code was not only to put in good order a pile of cultural legislation documents and form a single document, but also to revise them, taking into account today’s standards.
Despite the positive aspects, the Code contains a number of ambiguous provisions that actually introduce censorship to the quality of cultural products. For instance, the Code contains a number of grounds for the prohibition of cultural activities in general. The state will intervene if the artist’s activity promotes war, violence, and cruelty, insults the president or other officials and may harm the morality of others. The grounds for the prohibition of cultural activities are formulated as broadly and vaguely as possible to ensure there are basically no restrictions on their use.
Apart from the restrictions on the content of creativity, the Code also directly establishes the bureaucratic control over issuing the title of creative worker. For example, a state commission may refuse a freelance artist, who is not a member of the Union of Artists, to issue him or her a special certificate of a creative worker, if it does not recognize the artistic value of the works.
The concept of cultural and creative workers
The legislation in Belarus separates such concepts as ‘cultural worker’ and ‘creative worker’.
Cultural workers are the citizens who create, restore, preserve and protect, study, spread and popularize cultural values and aesthetically educate citizens (organize cultural activities). At the same time, the position they take must be named according to the manual of professional positions in the cultural sector. In this manual you can find job responsibilities and qualifications for cultural workers. Cultural workers in Belarus are considered to be workers of museums, libraries, club institutions, zoos, theaters, circuses, film industry, etc.
A creative worker is as a citizen who executes creative activity independently, on the basis of an employment contract or a civil law contract or as a member of a creative union. A creative worker may work on a professional or amateur basis, individually or as part of a collective. The outcome of creative activity is the emergence of a new, previously non-existent outcome of the intellectual activity in the field of culture.
According to the General Classifier of Economic Activities, activities in the field of artistic creation include organization and holding of exhibitions. Moreover, the Code of Culture itself contains contradictions. According to the code, the activities of the above specialists are considered to be cultural activity, which is not the same as creative activity. At the same time, the correlation of cultural and creative activities, except for the inclusion of the latter into the cultural activity, is not clear. Based on this, there is an obvious need to regulate the status of many professional activities (curators, art managers, and others), which so far remain outside the code and its definition of ‘creative activity’.
Cultural worker status
Cultural workers in Belarus must comply with the qualification requirements specified by law, as well as be officially certified at least once every five years.
A cultural worker can upgrade his or her qualification category in order to receive a supplemental payment, have longer holidays or receive other bonuses provided by law or a collective agreement. To do this an artist needs to undergo special training in an educational institution.
The Culture Code separately establishes a possibility for cultural workers to go on training and internships outside of Belarus. However, such internships are strictly regulated by law. For example, a cultural worker can undergo an internship only in foreign organizations, approved by the Ministry of Culture of Belarus. A training cannot last more than three months per year, and an internship – no more than five months. The leaders of cultural organizations are personally responsible for sending cultural workers outside of Belarus reasonably. Moreover, if by any chance a cultural worker does not return by the end of the internship period or does not fulfill the plan, then he or she will have to fully refund the money spent by the state on that trip.
Creative worker status
In Belarus creative workers can join a creative union or work independently. In the first instance, the status of a creative worker is approved by the creative union itself. If a creative worker is independent, he or she will have to apply to the expert commission under the Ministry of Culture to receive a professional certificate.
Experts can be representatives of creative unions, higher education institutions or the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. The members of the expert commission remain unchanged throughout the years of its existence. Replacement of a member of the commission is accompanied by an order on behalf of the Ministry of Culture of Belarus. The frequency of the expert commission meetings depends on the number of applications. For example, from July 23, 2015 to March 31, 2016 ten meetings on confirming the status of a creative worker were held. The expert commission examined 47 applications and a professional certificate was issued to 26 applicants, who have confirmed the status of a creative worker. On the website of the Ministry of Culture there is neither open data on the current board of the commission nor statistics of incoming applications or decisions made about them. The up-to-date data is available only by a written request sent to the Ministry.
To get a certificate of a creative worker one must contact the expert commission and provide it with a statement drawn up in a special form and materials, approving the results of creative activity. Such materials may include works of literature and art, publications, reviews, etc. If a worker has been awarded with prizes or titles in the field of culture, he or she must provide the information about them. While examining the creative activity of a worker, the expert commission checks whether the works are new, previously non-existent and reach a high artistic level. It takes one month for a commision to make a decision. In case of a positive decision, you will receive a certificate free of charge valid for five years.
After receiving a certificate or joining a creative union, creative workers have a right to use a pseudonym, use the results of their practice and receive income from their activities. With the adoption of the decree “On the Prevention of Social Parasitism”, a creative worker, who has been admitted into a creative union or has received a certificate, cannot be considered a social parasite and is free from paying a parasitism tax.
Art collectives
Creative workers can unite not only into creative unions, but also into art collectives. Such groups can be professional, amateur (unprofessional) or authentic folklore. In the Culture Code you can find forms and genres according to which artists can create collectives. The following genres are accepted: theatre, decorative arts, applied art, design, visual arts and some others. The form can be: theater, orchestra, ensemble, studio or others. The legislation does not limit creative workers in their choice of genres and forms. Collectives themselves can be created in the form of a legal entity (its units) or club formations.
If a creative worker is a member of a professional art collective, he or she has to sign an employment or civil law contract. If a collective is amateur, a creative worker executes his or her activities on the basis of membership or admission.
Creative unions
Creative unions are public associations of creative workers and other citizens. The list of unions is set by the Ministry of Culture and can be found on the website of the Ministry of Culture. At the moment there are 16 creative unions. The field of fine arts in Belarus is represented by the Union of Artists. It organizes and holds exhibitions, plein-airs and other creative events.
A particular feature of creative unions is state participation. For example, state bodies provide certain benefits for unions and their members; place social and creative orders; purchase works of fiction and art by members of the creative unions; provide buildings, spaces, equipment and other property and services; spread information on the activity through state media and provide sponsorship assistance. The creative unions can submit proposals to state bodies concerning not only the cultural issues, but also the social protection of the creative workers.
For example, members of the Belarusian Union of Artists, among other things, have a right to exhibit their works at all exhibitions, including auctions and salons (without a selection process);1 use all types of creative material and legal assistance of the Union; work on the basis of an agreement and hand over the work to the customer without expert and artistic committee report; have a right for the artist studio.
Another advantage for an artist of participating in a creative union (Belarusian Union of Artists) can be an exemption from parasitism tax: artists who are members of unions and artists with certificates are considered employed in the economy.
The process of joining a creative union is governed by the statute of the union itself. For example, in order to enter the Belarusian Union of Artists, it is necessary to meet the following requirements: to reach the age of 18, have a higher professional art education, be an artist or art critic, create works of art or art history that have independent creative value. An artist without a degree who has proved professional significance and was recognized by the art community in exceptional cases can be accepted into the Belarusian Union of Artists.
To become a member of the Union, an artist must provide a chairman of the section or regional organization of the Union with the following documents:
1. written application
2. a copy of education certificate
2. CV
4. statement of residence
5. two color photos 3×4
6. a documented list of exhibitions (not less than 10), objects, publications, photographs of works with catalog data, a list of main works
7. recommendations given by at least three members of the Union with at least 5 years of membership
8. performance report and proof of employment (if an artist works)
The procedure does not finish with the submission of documents. If a section or regional organization of the Union recommends an artist for the membership, he or she will have to bring all the documents personally for consideration by a commission consisting of the Secretariat of the Union and members of the Revision Commission. After that the documents are reviewed by the Presidium and the Rada (Council) of the Union. An artist receives a membership card only after this multi-stage examination and only in case of a positive decision. By June 2019 the Belarusian Union of Artists had only 1019 members.
Registration and taxation of the activities of creative workers (artists)
If a creative worker acts independently without making a labor or civil law contract with an art collective, cultural organization or other entity, then he or she must register his or her activities and pay taxes independently as a craftsman or individual entrepreneur.
If an artist wants to work as a craftsman, then he or she:
1. must be registered in the tax office at the place of residence
2. must pay tax once a year (1 base value. By April 2019 – 25.5 rubles. Moreover, if the annual income is more than tax x100, a worker needs to pay 10% of the excess)
3. must use only personal labor (it is forbidden to hire other people)
4. can actualize the manufactured art objects only in order to satisfy the household needs of citizens in special places: markets, fairs, workshops, online or by mail / via courier delivery, as well as by concluding agreements with other legal entities or individual entrepreneurs
5. can teach other people for free (max. 3 people at a time) for 2 years on the basis of craft training agreements
If an artist prefers to register as an individual entrepreneur, he or she must go through state registration in a local government administration, which can be a city or district executive committee. To be registered as a private entrepreneur, an artist must bring his or her passport to the registration authority, an application, a 3×4 photo, a receipt of state fee payment, and a file for the documents. The next day after submitting the documents to the registration authority, an artist receives a certificate of state registration of an individual entrepreneur with a photo, address, and state number. After that, an artist should register in the tax office at the place of residence. As an artist in this case pays a single tax, he or she does not have to open a bank account or go through other formalities. A single tax is paid once a month, and it is necessary to submit reports to the tax office.
Registration of an individual entrepreneur can be beneficial if an artist is going to attract other people to his work on a contract basis, as well as if his annual income is substantial. While registering as an individual entrepreneur, there are no checks whether the activity is art or not, hence the main point is to comply with formalities and pay taxes in a timely manner.
The regulations for certain exhibitions, auctions, etc. may indicate that artists are admitted to them by decision of the jury. Thus, the work of members of the Union can participate without additional procedural delays. ↩
At the beginning of 2019 I received a short letter which started with the following lines:
“The Minsk Employment Service proposes assistance with the search for work at the department of public services No2.
For inclusion (exclusion, exemption from payment of services with reimbursement of expenses as a result of finding yourself in a difficult life situation) in the database of able-bodied citizens who are not employed in the economy, you must contact the permanent commission in charge of coordinating work to promote employment of the administration of … district of Minsk”.
I was aware that I fall under the law of ‘not employed in the economy.’
On the one hand, I have the opportunity to prove that I am a “cultural worker”: after graduating from the Academy of Arts I have been exhibiting periodically for the last four years. On the other hand, I think in great detail about what I should demonstrate and to whom: there is such a latent sensation of the futility of action itself and the inability to justify to my state the mere existence of what I am doing.
Step by step, I began to fill in a special portfolio for the Ministry of Culture. When I called the ministry to find out what documents I required, I was informed that the portfolio should include a maximum of ten works completed at a high professional level, which already sounded rather vague. Then I phoned the district administration and wrote a statement asking to grant me a respite for the period of three months in order to have time to collect all the documents.
The list of documents required for the session of the committee:
– Two reviews from artists, preferably from Belarusian Union of Artists. Articles about myself as an artist, catalogues, diplomas, mentions in mass media;
– Art university diploma (if there is one);
– Photos of ten artworks with a description. Original artworks should be brought to the session;
– Artist CV
Everything should be recorded on three DVD disks (it is not possible to send everything by email or bring on a USB stick). When I called the Ministry of Culture to specify what artworks can be demonstrated on photos, I was told that installation is not included in the list of works that can be shown, it is not art and cannot be considered by the committee. Apparently, they were confused by the document issued by the Ministry of Culture stating that curating is not a creative activity.
The process of collecting the documents was disrupted by work and an art residency, as well as by the lack of understanding why it was really needed: on paper it was clear, but the сollecting of documents and the rituality of the process were very frustrating.
This process itself reminds me of the difficulties in articulation of my art practice in Belarus. While the majority of artists in Belarus have problems with self-representation in the field of art, such administration requests – what are you doing exactly and how do you make your living – cause a brain freeze. The borderline state of contemporary art in Belarus turns artists into drifting subjects, avoiding (not always voluntarily) fixation and definition. This intention of the state to capture and pinpoint us, assign us an economical status (because it is initiated in order to figure out how we make our living), makes the procedure even more troubling.
The request to label myself, be assigned a name, be put in a list, and alongside with that to prove that I am useful or that I am actually an artist, although there is no existing governmental institution to support my work (for example a museum of contemporary art), causes deep controversies and raises numerous questions.
Since I am not the only one living in the apartment, I have to take into account the opinion of my family: according to the law, if I fail to provide the proof that I am involved in the economy, I will have to pay increased community charges.
I submitted documents on June 19. The law guarantees that the answer will be provided within a month, and during that time I will be invited to bring my artworks to a committee meeting.
The committee
On June 19, exactly one month later, I received a call. I was invited to the Ministry of Culture on June 21 at 12:00.
At 12:00 I was in the meeting room. I was the only one, although usually they gather several candidates for a cultural worker status. The committee consisted of 11 people. Only 8 came to my session while 9 votes are needed for a quorum. Luckily, one of the committee members who didn’t come to the session, got acquainted with my documents in absentia and rated them positively.
The secretary read out my brief biography, after which they gave the floor to me and asked to tell them about my art. Images of my ten artworks, which I recorded on a disk for my application, were projected on the screen. I think that my presentation lasted 8-10 minutes. I was asked only one question: where did I have solo shows. After my reply they said thank you and allowed me to leave.
The procedure seemed to be both official and nonsensical: it seemed that nobody really needed it. Despite the fact that the meeting went well, I still had a certain doubt: they seem to have ‘identified’ me, but at the same time there was a feeling that the committee itself did not fully understand the necessity of the entire procedure but everyone tried to function properly. Or rather that I was not the one whom the state was looking for to assign a role of a parasite.
Letter 2
On July 29 I found in my mailbox a letter stating that I am granted the status of a cultural worker for a period of five years.
“Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus
On sending a certificate of a creative worker
Dear Uladzimir Uladzimiravich! In accordance with the decision of the expert commission on confirming the status of a creative worker, the protocol of the meeting of the expert commission on confirming the status of a creative worker dated July 22, 2019 No. 1, the Ministry of Culture sends you a certificate of a creative worker. Supplement: on 1 sheet in 1 copy
The head of the main department of state specialized and cultural events and professional art I.V.Driga”
“Professional certificate of a creative worker No. 1-2019
Date of issue: 07/22/2019 This certificate confirms that Uladzimir Uladzimiravich Hramovich, born on 05/29/1989, passport […] dated 03/12/2014, is a creative worker.
The head of the main department of state special and cultural events and professional art I.V.Driga
The term is valid from 07/22/2019 to 07/21/2024″
***
There are two optics, or ways of seeing this procedure, which I often used during that time. The first one is a blind following of the ritual and state protocols. By using this optics one can think less and perceive everything as an inevitable fact of life: exactly how the state would like us to think about it. Another optics is a constantly drifting gaze; a state of being when you don’t know where to look and why is it even necessary. Such neuroticism doesn’t boost self-confidence or provide tranquility but illustrates well the state in which the government apparatus puts you and, even more, wants to fit this process into the explanatory framework. Instead of the description which assigns a status of a cultural worker, it rather becomes a caption to the situation in which an artist or a person is put in this country.
Somehow it resembles a caption one can find at art exhibitions, which is there to direct a viewer or explain an artwork. Often these are meaningless words and phrases which lead nowhere and signify nothing. Therefore, I find that the right thing to do in this situation is to use my own gaze, appropriate this setting and self-mobilize.
Parasite tax took to the streets people who have not been previously seen by the state and by each other. Guest workers, who work outside of the country, artists, unemployed or self-employed stand shoulder to shoulder, appear in front of each other, become alive for each other.
For Arendt, according to Judith Bulter, political action becomes possible with the existence of a body: “I appear to others, and the others appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear”. We don’t just see each other and don’t just talk to hear each other. Who we are bodily, is a way of being for the other. When we appear this way “we are made available, bodily, for another whose perspective we can neither fully anticipate nor control”.1
Thus, a kind of de-virtualization took place between me and other citizens who fell under the law and it is worth continuing the process of appearing in front of each other, and in front of myself. The description may become a starting point, and that is what I attempted here: articulating and giving voice to situations and issues across this territory is now one of the most important tasks for me. What has no voice must acquire it; what was not named should be named – and not delegated to a state which historically has not represented us for a long time.
Upon receiving the status of a cultural worker, in general, nothing has changed. There is only peace of mind that the maintenance bills will not be increased in the next five years – for the period the status is given. However, it’s worth noting that such documents and laws are an occasion to review how we exist in society and within the state and remember that everything can be reviewed, reassembled or even canceled, since the law does not perform any function but only discredits cultural workers, as well as many others.
Butler, Judith, 2018. Notes toward a performative theory of assembly (pp. 76-77). Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. ↩
Sometimes, small-scale and artist-run initiatives are described as being the base of an ecosystem of the art world that enables artists and curators in the early stages of their careers to grow into professional and successful artists. However, this statement limits the value of those initiatives and organizations and sidelines them from the larger field of art that values individual, artistic success. To understand the political potential of small-scale art organizations and networks, we have to focus on other values than the ones that affirm the traditional hierarchy of the art world that celebrates individualism. At the same time, it might be true that small-scale, self-organized organizations and networks are important for artists when starting off their careers, it is also a field that is, or has the potential to be a field that offers other realities and roles than within the established cultural and economic capital systems. Many artist-run initiatives want to be radical places, well connected to local and global communities and discourse while at the same time creating alternative relationships and communal realities. The groups of engaged artists, curators, and cultural practitioners that run these initiatives work from a point of view and conviction that art is necessary, and these spaces support what they feel is urgent. Things are done simply because they are important. These spaces make it possible for art to exist outside of art market centers and to function within local communities, for change. These practitioners try and work hard, often without or with insufficient funds, dodging and warding off the limits and requirements that come along with the funding – with impressive creativity! Even if these practitioners sometimes fail to meet their radical intentions, at least this field is filled with people that really try creating other circumstances. And that is a valuable action.
Over the course of the art project Sauna for the unemployed (2014-ongoing) where I hire unemployed people to have a sauna bath together while sharing the knowledge and experiences one gets by being unemployed, I have collaborated with several small-scale, self-organized initiatives and artist-run spaces in Sweden and abroad. I was highly dependent on these local, self-organized Contemporary Art platforms in rural and urban places around the country, such as Extensions Hagen, Art Lab Gnesta, Galleri Syster, Not Quite, and Gylleboverket in Sweden, District in Berlin, Germany, and Studio 17 in Stavanger, Norway.
Gnesta, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Smedjebacken, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Gylleboverket. Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Saunabad, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Gylleboverket, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
All of these organizations adapted to the nature of the project, supporting it with time, energy, connections, their position, and publics. I often came to them, sometimes with very short notice, and asked them to collaborate – not being invited as usual within the art field. The first and most intense year of the project I had my own funding through a public art project fund. After this first year, Sauna for the unemployed then became dependent on invitations from organizations that could cover costs for its production. Realising the project in this way proved to be harder than one could believe since funding often comes with the expectations of an exhibition, event, or other public invitation. Sauna for the unemployed is a social and process-based project that doesn’t necessarily fit into these forms (even though it can transform itself to work within these by exhibiting its own history). Being a project with its own funds, organized in collaboration with these self-organized organizations in a non-formal structure at the side of their planned production, the project was made possible without compromising its own logic. After completing the project with its designed framework for a year, I can now run the project or present parts of it within established norms of the ways art is shown and produced, while keeping the integrity of the project. I cannot emphasize enough all the engagement and time the practitioners of those self-organized institutions and organizations put into the project – these organizations were the link between the project and local communities, making almost anything possible, with very small economic resources, just because they felt the project was important even though it didn’t always fit into their financial forms and planning.
Background
Sauna for the unemployed is an art project that investigates the knowledge that is found in the gaps of a CV and the political potential of being outside while at the same time in the midst of the discussion on waged labor. It encourages unemployed people – a group that is not well organized and lacks a common voice in the debate regarding their rights and social position in society – to start a conversation about their philosophical, political, and social situation. Sauna for the unemployed asks for another reality, where the unemployed situation is not experienced as a personal failure, but seen as a structural consequence of a system that does not take responsibility for everyone.
Malmö, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Gnesta, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Stavanger, Norway. Photo: Frida Klingberg
Dala-Floda, Sweden. Photo: Frida Klingberg
The towel with the embroidery that says Sauna for the Unemployed. Photo: Frida Klingberg
The architecture of the project is modeled off of the structure of the labor system, which organizes labor through jobs. This structure is constructed yet creates a real situation in order to enact the structures of the workforce: the employer, the employee, and the unemployed. The job is to have a sauna bath together with a small group of other employed ‘unemployed’ people, talking about whatever concerns the group regarding their position and experiences of being unemployed. The conversation is recorded, the sweat is collected and their time, emotions, knowledge is bought for an hourly wage. The job ad that precedes the sauna bath is published in established job centers, and the content of this ad implies that there are specific experiences and knowledge gained through unemployment and that it is important for society as a whole to understand this situated knowledge. The project has also been presented in forms of publications, texts, installations with towels and sound, music and public talks.
How many artists do you know who are making a living from their art? I can hardly recall even the handful of prominent photographers who made their careers in the pre-digital era. This is not a coincidence: the project Artist Income calculated that, for example, 82.1% of artists in England make less than the official living wage. You find similar figures in Berlin, where half of the respondents generally earn less than 5,000 euros a year with their art.1
These numbers are humbling. Especially because the earning opportunities for artists and the number of art institutions in these cities and countries simply cannot be compared to the situation in Eastern Europe. The numbers show that those who are engaged in art are either the rich who do not need to earn a living or those who struggle for survival. In this article, I reflect on economics and exploitation in art and photojournalism, areas of my professional interest, which share many commonalities.
Perhaps it is worth indicating my professional attitude on the topics that will be discussed. In fact, I am in the state of an inner emigration within the local and Russian-speaking media market. Being a freelancer in photojournalism is basically a volunteer job, as it is in many other poorer countries. The inability to make a living only with photography led me to an economic scheme consisting of occasionally working for foreign media, working on my own art projects, and a stable job in the field of programming. With this balance, I am able to be inside the field of contemporary photography, but outside of the poor economy of the post-Soviet region.
Work for food
It turns out that 57% of engaged workers in the field of photojournalism/documentary photography earn less than 20,000 euros per year, according to World Press Photo. This is not much at all, given the more applied specifics of photojournalism (shooting for the mass media) compared to art. It is also not difficult to guess that geographically these photographers are located in countries with no rich media market and/or countries which do not attract regular attention from the global media outlets.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
When I tell my colleagues from Germany or Denmark about the fees for shooting for the most read Belarusian media—$ 25 at TUT.BY portal, $ 35 at Onliner.BY, and even less in other periodicals as of the end of 2019—they refuse to believe me. Yes, I myself do not understand how (and why?) to survive with this money. Doing 2-3 shoots a day in order to get $ 1,000 per month of work? This may be acceptable when I’m 20, but what should I do at 40 when my body begins to crumble because of this rapid pace and the dead weight of photographic equipment? Kasia Wolińska, a Polish dancer and choreographer based in Berlin, says2 that our generation works “till death,” meaning that none of us will receive a pension, and right now we often don’t even have enough money for regular medical care.
As long as we agree to work for humiliating fees that barely cover our costs of living, such exploitation will occur continuously. Why should editorial offices increase their expenses and reduce their profits, if there are already those ready to work for food? No one will pay us more if we do not declare our disagreement with such conditions.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
By accepting such job offers, I give an unambiguous signal that “everything is fine, it suits me.” But what kind of damage am I doing to the field by agreeing to work almost for free? We all need to learn to talk comfortably about money, to begin valuing our work, time, and ourselves. If someone is not ready to pay me adequately, then they do not appreciate my work and me as a professional. Is it really worth it to collaborate with such people, institutions, or mass media? And will anything change next time?
Learning to say no
I am told that the budget is limited and a periodical cannot pay more. But if we all refuse collectively, then with whom will they work? They will be forced to either distinctly downgrade the quality of their product — exhibition, publication, project — or to shut down because no one wants to work with them. But the field is constantly being revived: these institutions and publications will be replaced by those who can adapt to the new demands of the environment and the market, those who will be able to re-adjust and offer adequate compensation to their employees, creating the most important thing: the product.
We all understand the importance of the work that journalists do in bringing to light social problems, supporting the values of a free society, and human rights. But can this justify low wages?
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
For some reason, the conversation about exhibition fees in the post-Soviet region almost never takes place, be it the state or private institutions and festivals. I am excited to see the work of the American initiative WAGE, which gives institutions suggestions on how to pay royalties to artists depending on the annual cash flow and funding. Being a self-organized union and the voice of a cultural worker, WAGE also calls for a boycott of certain organizations which often turns out to be effective.
In Sweden, in 2009, the state entered into an MU agreement with unions of artists, artisans, designers, illustrators, and photographers, and set fixed fees for participation in exhibitions and an hourly fee for show preparations. The established fees should be paid by those institutions which receive funding from the state. In the Netherlands, there is a fee calculator, which since 2017, has been applied in practice by more than 100 institutions across the country. The logic is simple: institutions will not receive public money if they do not share it with the artists exhibited. In these and many other countries, the state intervenes in the uneven distribution of funds in the field of art and supports artists, understanding their economic vulnerability on the market.
Artist as free fuel
Being an emerging/mid-career artist, I also agree to free exhibitions and publications if I realize the immaterial benefits: for example, in the form of access to a closed professional audience or the importance of the institution’s presence in my portfolio. It happens that I see complete transparency in the work of a like-minded periodical or initiative, and I understand that everyone there works for free. But, more often than not, I can’t find an explanation for why the exhibition technician receives a salary, and the artist with a solo exhibition in the same space does not, as it happened once with the artist Simon Menner in one famous museum in Berlin.
Artists and cultural workers are in an endless cycle of filing applications (often even requiring entry fees) for numerous open-calls for projects, residences, competitions, and grants. Applications and correspondence are part of a large invisible communicative and emotional work, which is also not paid in any way.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
Do you include in your project budget the time required to think and create a concept, the maintenance of your equipment, the endless correspondence, the paid annual vacations, a nanny for your child, or a psychotherapist when dealing with a complex topic?
You cannot answer.
And if, at some point, you get tired of playing this strange, always vague, game of survival in the field of culture—you head to where the rules (even if these are simply the rules of survival) exist: working in a cafe, restaurant, or office. The Swedish artist Eric Krikortz notes3 that a decent payment could attract young people from less privileged or financially insecure social groups to the field of art, which would make art more diverse and democratic.
“The artist is at the bottom of the food chain,” Ekaterina Anokhina, a photographer from Moscow, tells me.4 And it’s hard to argue with that when looking at endless contests, prizes, specialized festivals, and magazines with submission fees.
If you win, they promise visibility in the professional field, international recognition, publications. The problem is that neither exhibitions nor publications in photographic periodicals today will pay rent for an apartment or will cover the money spent on creating a project. The very few authors in Europe make sales at exhibitions or, at the least, have a paid project publication after it has been shown at a festival.
In most of the cases, we deal with a recursive exploitation cycle under the guise of good goals. In this cycle, we, artists, and cultural workers, find that we are free fuel. Menner, in his frustrated post, calculated that he received a fee only in 10% of the 160 exhibitions he participated in around the world. But how much exposure!5 The accumulated symbolic capital does not work: a long CV composed of exhibitions and publications does not guarantee financial stability, but rather causes emotional burnout.
It seems there are too many of us. Excessive amounts of free visual noise increased the competition and greatly simplified the work of intermediaries who are willing to make money on our desire to reach the viewer and/or gain recognition.
Why should GUP, FOAM, UNSEEN, LensCulture,6 and a hundred less well-known photo magazines pay photographers? Those who want to give their work for free line up for them. The editors will not even notify you if they refuse to publish your project. There are too many of us to even spend time on this.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
The FOAM award, initiated in Amsterdam, is one of the most important awards in contemporary photography and charges 30 Euros for the submission of the project. To the question of the Belarusian artist, Alexander Mikhalkovich, in their Q&A video— “Why is it so much?”—the slightly surprised editors are saying that “It’s just a little bit” (the video was made for the 2017 contest and was later deleted). By establishing the entry fee, FOAM, as most of the actors in the Western European field of photography, perform economic censorship of artists from entire regions and countries: Eastern Europe, Africa, India, South America.
Unlike the photo industry, film festivals have long had the practice of free entry (a fee waiver) or reduced entry costs for economically developing countries from the DAC List.
What can be done?
The right way may be to look for other, less obvious ways to operate and finance your work. For example, working directly with people and periodicals which understand the importance of photography and the photographer as an author: mutual respect is easy to see through monetary relations (e.g. the photo editor will always be on the side of a photographer in matters of fees), in communication (you will never have unanswered emails), and certainly it doesn’t have any entry fees.
In financing an exhibition or a book, it always makes sense to look for partners among those who may be potentially interested, taking into account the profile of their activities. It was the case for me in 2017, when the production of my exhibition project Stolen Days, dedicated to several cases of political imprisonment, was supported by the former KGB building in Vilnius. And in 2018, with the support of the Civic Society Belarus, my project Blind Spot on state violence was shown in Prague in an abandoned pool of the former military barracks.
Crowdfunding can also work if your project has significant social or historical value: as a book by Sergey Brushko about the turning point in the history of Belarus, a book by Arthur Bondar with found photographs of a military photographer Valery Faminsky, and a book by Maxim Dondyuk about the events of Maidan in Ukraine.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
It makes sense to search for money for the production of new projects in international cultural NGOs amongst small thematic local grants: on ecology, human rights, gender equality; preferably already in collaboration with a specialized NPO or a mass media organization. Usually, the competition among artists/photographers/videographers is dozens, if not hundreds, times less than for international photographic grants. But it is important to understand the specifics of the grant and the expectations from the results of your project. Probably just shooting a project will not be enough: you need to immediately think about the appropriate way to distribute it, be it an exhibition, book/magazine, online project, publication in the mass media.
Networking should become one of the main tools for a photographer, as Andrei Polikanov, the photo editor of a periodical Takie Dela, explains at his workshops. Networking implies building your own circle of people and friends who are interested in what, how, and why you are working. These are the people with whom you will share not only your passion but who will be also close to you ideologically and emotionally. They can become your supporters in crowdfunding campaigns, guides within photo festivals; or maybe they will even protest by the embassy of your country if suddenly you (I hope not) are detained on trumped-up charges.
Maxim Sarychau, graphic version of the project Undercover Artists, 2019. Text on the image is a quote from a video-interview with participating artists
Self-organization and union (and beyond just the union) solidarity are extremely important in the conditions of our fragmentation, extreme individualism, and political and economic oppression. The mentioned above WAGE, the table of magazine fees transparency Who Pays Photographers? and Who pays writers?, Art Leaks project on censorship and exploitation, an open letter to the leadership of the VIII Moscow Biennale; the solidarity of journalists in Russia during the arrest of Ivan Golunov in 2019, the petition against the arrest of cultural workers and artists during the mass protests in Belarus in 2017; the PAIN public campaign for solving the opioid crisis in the United States, launched by photographer Nan Goldin—these, and many others were examples of voicing our disagreement and anger with what was happening in the political, social, and institutional environments.
Let’s
Let’s create transparency tables for fees and salaries in the media and art—it is beneficial for all of us: artists, journalists, photographers, managers, curators, teachers, assistants.
Let’s be interested in the domestic economy, mechanics, and ethics of projects in which we participate, and let’s talk about their problematic aspects. Today we are not competitors, we are part of a cultural community, of vulnerable and unprotected, precarious class.
Let’s talk loudly about censorship, sexism, ageism, homophobia, violence, discrimination, rudeness, and other savagery in our fields.
Let’s build up initiatives, unions, support groups, open letters and petitions, acts of solidarity, communities and any other collaborations that show our voice and make it heard so that it can change something in the current situation of opacity, exploitation, and oppression.
It seems that no state union or existing independent organization can defend our rights today. We all found ourselves in a crystal clear situation: self-organize or die.
It was not possible to find relevant statistics related to the post-Soviet region, which once again indirectly indicates that the necessary attention is not paid to this problem. [ed.]
In an interview for the video work by Maxim Sarychau Undercover Artists, 2019↩
E. Krikortz, A. Triisberg, & M. Henriksson, 2015. Art workers: material conditions and labor struggles in contemporary art practice, p.19. Berlin: Minna Henriksson, Erik Krikortz & Airi Triisberg.↩
In an interview for the video work by Maxim Sarychau Undercover Artists, 2019↩
Exposure is an “imaginary currency” in which freelancers are paid, especially in the field of art. It appeared because of the employer’s faith that the promise to become famous due to participation in a project can replace the fee. Used when employers try to save money on other people’s work and/or believe that such a practice is socially acceptable. [ed.]↩
According to photographers published in these magazines
This text responds to the results of the workshop of the STATUS project, Designing the Parallel Society, which was led by two Swedish artists John Huntington and Lars Noväng. The workshop took place in Minsk on 6th and 7th of June, 2019. The workshop used the artistic strategy of creating an imaginary, alternative institution. The coaches, Huntington and Noväng, used a game method called ‘reverse engineering’. This method is based on the idea that new, imaginary institutions exist even before they function as such. A team of two tutors and four participants spent two days developing various strategies for the alternative institutions in Belarus and discussing their political and artistic potential.
The following text is structured according to the flow of the workshop. We invite you to follow all the stages of designing a parallel society just as the participants did. In the first part of this text, we will elaborate on the idea of designing a parallel society and Huntington Noväng’s experience with the alternative institution they created several years ago in Sweden – Frihetsförmedlingen (Swedish Public Freedom Service). The next step would be to share with the reader the results of the brainstorming that was a part of the workshop. The aim of this brainstorming was to recognize the problematic aspects of public institutions in Belarus and to find a way to ‘mirror’ them by creating an imaginary institution. Our team focused on the Ministry of Culture and the KGB. We used these institutions as a framework to define a wider problem within Belarusian society – a society that is defined by President Lukashenka’s campaigning and ruling slogan of stability.1 Thus, the third part of the essay describes the concept of an alternative institution as developed within the workshop – the Ministry of Uncertainty. The Ministry of Uncertainty is a prototype for an imaginary institution, an institution that would balance the dichotomy of stability and uncertainty in Belarusian society.
Firstly, we have to elaborate on our inspiration. John Huntington and Lars Noväng are Swedish artists who were invited to make the workshop in Minsk within the STATUS program, as they run a project called Frihetsförmedlingen (Swedish Public Freedom Service). Frihetsförmedlingen is an alternative institution. This means that while it mirrors the functions of real state-authorities it aims to criticize the current order of things. This is how Noväng explains the idea behind their project:
We wanted to address a general obsession with work as the meaning of life, as well as a civic obligation. Because of this belief system, countless unnecessary jobs are being created today, while unemployed people are put in “correctional” programs, designed to both discipline and stigmatize them. This is both violent and unsustainable, and a fundamental cause for today’s sky-rocketing frequency of stress-related illnesses in the population. Frihetsförmedlingen is a critique of the society of labor. When we started the project we decided to fill a societal gap by initiating an institution that takes the notion of freedom just as seriously as the Swedish Public Employment Service takes the notion of work. Make freedom obligatory, so to speak.
An alternative institution, as well as the process of designing the parallel society, could be classified as an artistic practice or artistic activism. It works well, as it plays with the rigid mindsets of people. Huntington says:
Setting up something very different from everyday life, where the form is highly familiar but the content is replaced. A participant or an observer of such an alternative institution might become both confused and amused, but this is a starting point to reevaluate the existing institutions. When you experience an alternative institution, you are able to rethink the norm.
This approach perhaps is not the best, but it is a way to initiate social transformations. It’s beneficial, as it invites co-creation. It is not a mere discontent with one’s environment, it is an attempt to provoke critical thinking. “Tweaking mainstream reality enables us to detect hidden myths and ideologies that are embedded in our everyday behaviour,” says Noväng. “This is why I think this strategy makes room for more profound change, compared to if we criticize something and propose solutions, because then we also silently accept the prevailing paradigm.”
Swedish Public Freedom Service (Frihetsförmedlingen) at Varbergs konsthall / Photo: Frihetsförmedlingen
Swedish Public Freedom Service (Frihetsförmedlingen) / Photo: Per-Arne Sträng
Swedish Public Freedom Service (Frihetsförmedlingen) / Photo: Frihetsförmedlingen
Swedish Public Freedom Service (Frihetsförmedlingen) outside Gekås in Ullared / Photo: Anna Lo Huntington
The Freedom Inspection / Photo: Frihetsförmedlingen
These ideas and experience of Frihetsförmedlingen have become a starting point for considering how we can apply the Swedish experience to the Belarusian reality. Our workshop team of John Huntington and Lars Noväng, Christin Wahlström Eriksson, Alina Dzeravianka, Elisabeth Kovtiak, and Sophia Sadovskaya came up with a concept of an alternative institution called the Ministry of Uncertainty. The subsequent parts of the text would unbox the idea.
The road to uncertainty: brainstorming to define problematic aspects
We started by brainstorming to detect faulty and problematic institutions. As in our working group, there were mostly artists and cultural managers; we placed our focus on public institutions that work in cultural and social domains. It’s very important to describe in the beginning of the text all the ideas that emerged from our discussion, as our final concept was the culmination of all of these ideas rather than a project that departed from them. Thus, it’s crucial to know all the problematic points we marked in order to understand properly the very idea of the Ministry of Uncertainty – the concept of an alternative institution we designed during the workshop.
When the tutors asked us to think about a problematic institution, the first thing that popped up in our heads was the Ministry of Culture. Among the participants were artists, curators, and cultural managers; it’s no wonder that our most traumatic professional experiences were connected to the Ministry of Culture. Oddly, it doesn’t matter whether you work for a state art institution or a private one — the Ministry of Culture is a nuisance for both sides. As the Ministry of Culture puts loads of restrictions on artists and curators, we thought of mirroring their activity by creating the Ministry of Unculture (Ministerstvo Beskulturia) to promote artistic vandalism, disobedience, and freedom of expression.
Furthermore, we drew our attention to a problem which is well-known both inside and outside the country: the KGB and its notorious activities. In Belarus, by the KGB we mean the same thing that existed in the USSR. Nowadays, the KGB has become a source of inspiration to exoticization and create nostalgia for Western popular culture. Whilst in all other post-Soviet countries where the former KGB exists under new names and declares itself more democratic and humane, the Belarusian Committee of State Security has kept the same name, structure, mission, and staff.
We wanted to design a parallel institution opposite to the KGB. How could one mirror an institution that keeps the secret files about basically everyone in the country and that also records conversations of citizens in order to exploit them later?2 Perhaps, by doing the same but to the government rather than its citizens and making the collected data available to the general public. Ironically, the transparency reminds us of a classical democracy, although in today’s Belarus this democracy might be considered a fantastic parallel reality: an art practice rather than a real political system.
Apart from it, we had an idea to work with manifestations of the KGB’s activity in the professional lives of Belarusians. The KGB interferes with both independent and state-owned structures. The first have so-called ‘curators’ that contact the leader of an NGO or a mass medium to influence their activities and prohibit certain forms of activity. State institutions are controlled from within, as each of them has ‘The First Department’3 which is a representative of the KGB in an organization. During the workshop, we discussed ways to support subversive regime activities by having ‘curators’4 that would empower freedom of speech and social change. The idea was to unite these so-called curators in a group called ‘The Last Department’. This may seem irrelevant to our final idea but certainly, from this point of view, the concept of the Ministry of Uncertainty started to define itself.
Defining the Ministry of Uncertainty started from the realization that designing a parallel society in Belarus has to address the idea of stability. The idea of safety and stability is the main point of president Lukashenka’s political agenda. Nevertheless, people are quite aware that the system and their welfare is not as stable as the government wants them to think. Thus, we started to play with the word ‘security’ in the name ‘The Committee of State Security’. So we came up with the Committee of State Insecurity. As much as we were fascinated by this idea, we were worried that the word ‘insecurity’ is ambiguous, as it deals both with vulnerability and exposure to danger. As this idea emerged, we realized that there is a bigger need than undermining the regime. It’s connected to living with a sense of insecurity in a place that emphasizes its security all the time. It started more as a joke when one of us said that this Committee of State Insecurity has to be a part of the Ministry of Uncertainty. And that was it — we came up with the Ministry of Uncertainty.
The Ministry of Uncertainty: its form and objectives
The discussion on the concept started as a joke that any ministry in Belarus could be a Ministry of Uncertainty, as often they avoid taking responsibility and fail to provide straightforward answers on public demand. Creating the Ministry of Uncertainty seemed to be a step towards institutional critique to emphasize the existing problems that exist within the executive power. But as soon it became clear that in this concept there is more than a mere exaggeration of the absurdity level of the existing system to demonstrate its faultiness, we started to explore uncertainty as a key concept for the whole country, as it could be opposed to stability. Moreover, in the pursuit of maintaining stability, these ministries refuse to take certain actions and responsibility.
The logo of the Ministry of Uncertainty with its main element – a tire swan. Designed by Valentine Duduk
The Ministry of Uncertainty is an alternative organization that replicates some technical characteristics of ministries. It will have a website, official agenda and visual identity just as any ministry. Why those? Basically, that is with what citizens can encounter once they are interested in a ministry’s activities. The real activities of ministries in Belarus are quite opaque: hidden behind the bureaucracy. Unlike the ‘real’ ministries, the Ministry of Uncertainty initiates and fosters public discussions that do not aim to come up with a certain solution. This alternative institution is both a criticism of the passivity of a bloated bureaucratic system and the unwillingness of public authorities to take responsibilities. Another function of the Ministry of Uncertainty is to create a meeting place for the citizens where they can discuss the facade stability and an uncertainty and anxiety that exist behind it.
Logos of the actual Belarusian ministries: 1. Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Belarus 2. Ministry of Taxes and Duties of the Republic of Belarus 3. Ministry of Antimonopoly Regulation and Trade of the Republic of Belarus 4. Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Republic of Belarus
There are many goals and complexities such an alternative institution presents.Thus, let’s take a look at its objectives to give a bigger picture. (1) Decreasing self-censorship. The political regime of Belarus is often associated with the authoritarian rule of Lukashenka, but there is the whole system that restricts civil participation. This goes beyond official protocols, as people have ideas of how they are expected to behave while encountering officials. Not smiling to a policeman or a frontier guard could be an example, but these small gestures transform into a high level of self-censorship. Of course, there are authorities that serve this function but there is more to it. Those restrictions are embedded in people’s minds, and they apply self-censorship to their ideas and neglect their plans, as they often feel that it would be banned, prohibited, or lead to unwanted consequences. Thus, sometimes it’s the people that restrict themselves according to a nonexistent code of safe strategies — not the authorities that censor it. It is reasonable to be conscious about the consequences, but in many cases, this self-censorship leads to non-action when actions could be taken. This is how many opportunities for positive social changes are missed.
(2) To create a space for civic engagement in bureaucracy and decision-making. For decades, the Belarusian governing system has only allowed the general public to engage in public decision-making on a low level — time long enough for people to start forgetting that it is their right and obligation to be a part of these processes. Any attempt to interfere with the political (at any level) is associated with protests and opposition. For many, it’s too stressful and they do not want to put themselves in this vulnerable position. Therefore, the project team thought that the Ministry of Uncertainty could be a place (although not a physical one) to invite people in a civic discussion to empower them to be more active when it comes to actions in real-world society. However, the Ministry of Uncertainty is not designed to come up with actual solutions. It’s more of a space to train one’s ability to become an active member of society and to enjoy it. Therefore, the principles of these talks are non-violent Communication, the right not to choose, non-agreement, and non-obligation. The Ministry’s mission is about helping people get in contact with their voice and embrace their fears, rather than to take actions.
The Belarusian political and social system is indeed hyper-controlled. However, dealing with defined standards is a universal thing for those who are living in capitalist societies. One has to fit in the system, be certain about their career and life choices and to live according to a KPI5 and the achievement culture, although the conditions are constantly changing. In Belarus capitalist values merge with the Soviet legacy that leaves no room for any kind of uncertainty: one must choose, decide, and be certain about everything while following the prescribed lifepath (school, almost mandatory higher education, finding a job, getting married, having kids, (divorce and get married again), retire from the same job you found 30 years ago, die). This path seems unrealistic, as there is always an element of uncertainty.
Not embracing the uncertainty may lead to anxiety and blind obedience. Thus, a bit of uncertainty is needed to resist the governmental system and capitalist values. Or at least, to become a bit less serious about life choices. This ‘liberation’ from the rule of certainty changes the relationship between an individual and the system, that may further lead to more fundamental changes in the society. The Belarusian system aims to report to the public that everything is stable, safe and defined, whilst it’s obvious that stability is illusory. This rupture is a source of anxiety for people who are aware of this gap between the declared and reality. People cannot fully rely on the government, as they see these incoherences. However, they neither can take responsibility as they live in a hyper-controlled society. Thus, we need to embrace uncertainty to benefit from it.
What is the role of the Ministry of Uncertainty in this [stable] system? It’s about (3) balancing the declarations of the state about stability and security with real life experience. In cases when the certainty and stability are imposed, the function of the ministry is to reinforce the idea that it’s not healthy to be this sure about something. It is about mirroring and questioning the system and imposition of stability.
Changing authorities via artistic practices is perhaps not the most efficient way to complicate the status quo. However, artistic interventions have the potential in changing people’s opinions, which could result in the last objective of the project — (4) reducing the tension between the general public and authorities.
***
Designing a parallel society is a mental exercise as much as it is an artistic strategy. The paradox of this practice is that the whole idea is about mocking the reality, but before long you start to take that reality dead serious. It could be the spirit of bureaucracy’s influence, as bureaucracy dictates even the atmosphere of a free artistic discussion. Perhaps, this antagonism provides fruitful soil to think outside of the box. It seems that traditional methods of political transformation, such as protests and direct institutional critique, don’t work in Belarus due to low public engagement and fear of its consequences. The idea of designing a parallel society originates in Sweden where the political system is quite different from in Belarus. However, it seems that the approach developed by Huntington and Noväng is capable of empowering social transformation in Belarus. We believe it has a high potential for the empowering due to its seeming unseriousness that sets minds free. Its ‘harmfulness’ and ludic nature helps initiate the discussion and questioning on pressing issues, removing the fear that is always associated with these topics. Designing the parallel society brings together artists, activists, and, most importantly, the general public. Moreover, it could be applied to any society to address a variety of concerns: the dichotomy of stability and uncertainty is just one of them. However, this proves to be a good starting point.
***
We are hiring!
Unlike real ministries, the Ministry of Uncertainty has an unlimited and unregulated number of employees.
We invite everyone who feels inspired by the ideas described in the text to become an alternative employee of the Ministry of Uncertainty. To become one, all you have to do is to fill in your name in the ID’s template and insert a photo of you (or you can just draw a portrait of yourself). It can be your little secret or you can post it online with a hashtag #ministry_of_uncertainty if you feel like doing it.
The free and open source image editor Gimp is available for download here
The idea of stability is central for the official discourse of Lukashenka’s regime, as it declares political continuity and economic stability. The official narrative in Belarusian media is based upon opposing stability of Belarus to chaos in other post-Soviet republics.
The facade of Belarusian stability is a product of the domination of the ruling hierarchy by officials of the old regime, policy stasis on the essential importance of economic viability and the delayed development of Belarusian national identity (Marples 2013).
This seeming stability is a typical trait of authoritarian regimes that ensure their continued endurance and survival not just by occasional responses to current political and social challenges, but by preemptive attacks that defeat threats before they appear (Silitski 2005).
Lysenko, V.V. and Desouza, K.C., 2015. “The Use of Information and Communication Technologies by Protesters and the Authorities in the Attempts at Colour Revolutions in Belarus 2001–2010.” Europe-Asia Studies, 67(4), pp.624-651.↩
The existence of the First Department seems to be an open secret. Many people know about it from the Soviet past or encountering it at their enterprises. However, little information on its activities or mission can be found in open access. Thus, one can find an almost empty page that features only the head of the First Department on the website of the Belarusian State University – the department is mentioned as a structural part but that is a maximum of information a citizen can find. Amusingly, if to google “первый отдел рб” (the First Department in Russian) one of the first links would be to the website of the KGB, although the content of the webpage is totally irrelevant. These days, the First Department could be also named Secrecy Department (Режимно-секретный отдел).↩
Medvetsky, A., 2013. Security Agencies:‘Reformers’ gain a footing in new positions. Belorusskiy Ezhegodnik, (1 (eng)).↩
KPI is a key performance indicator. In this context, the author means that a life in a modern society demands from an individual high level productivity of in all domains of life.↩
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit.
NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using.
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience.
This site uses functional cookies and external scripts to improve your experience. Which cookies and scripts are used and how they impact your visit is specified on the left. You may change your settings at any time. Your choices will not impact your visit.
