Following the multifaceted, ‘descriptive’ research project “On the State of the Nation,” academic sculptress Andreja Kulunčić organised the long-term activist project “Creative Strategies,” the focus of which lies exactly in the detection and archiving, but also in the stimulation and inclusion into engaged social practices. Analogously with the winds blowing from the international art scene, the representational framework of art had long been abandoned, while art itself had definitely ceased to be perceived – suggesting a certain touch of radicalism – as an autonomous spiritual activity, thus becoming merely one of the fields of the comprehensively perceived visual culture.

 

Bearing in mind these phenomena, through “Creative Strategies” Andreja Kulunčić committed herself to searching for and connecting with smaller social communities – from both Croatia and abroad – that managed to creatively and encouragingly generate in their closer environment the kind of cultural activity that inherently resists implicitly or explicitly the established social norms and structures, thus creating cultural products that simultaneously collude with tradition and history, and the avant-garde and futurity.

The heretofore course of the project has proceeded through three different, albeit inherently related modules, the third of which has also proceeded into 2015 as the project team will soon begin a small educational tour across Croatia. Said third module, titled “Toolkit for a Joint Action,” was presented last year with the exhibition “To Begin as Best as We Can” at the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, which also offered a systematic retrospective of the first two modules of Creative Strategies.

 

The first module took place in 2010 and 2011, and was dedicated to the research of the self-organisation of the residents of the so-called Mamutica (Mammoth) building in the New Zagreb district of Travno, one of the largest residential blocks in Europe. Andreja Kulunčić and her team were interested in learning as to how the neighbours have been gathering – spontaneously at first, and increasingly deliberately over time – throughout decades starting from the late 1970s, simply because they wanted to spend their everyday lives as productively as possible with the aim to educate one another, develop various skills and make the most of their leisure time, but also to grow food using resources that were at their disposal i.e. green surfaces, which there was plenty of in Travno at the time.

The deterioration of quality of social life in Travno was not as much caused by the outdated spatial infrastructure, as by the inertia of the then-residents induced by the discouraging social circumstances persistently presented by the media as something that could soon pass, but does not have to and probably will not. The project participants and the audience were able to grasp that it is exactly they who could once again become a political force, albeit an initially small one.

This thesis continues chronologically and geographically into the second module that brought us to the distant Mexico City, to local neighbourhood communities ruled by great misery and poverty, but also by great willingness to help fellow humans. The humanitarian activism of the residents stems from the tradition of left-wing revolutionary tendencies inherent to the Latin American countries, but also from the spiritual doctrine of the Catholic Theology of Liberation that presents a contemporary fusion of the Christian teaching and the Socialist philosophy. These two geographically very distant modules have been presented in clear continuity – which is a great achievement of the project – thus highlighting the refreshing parallels between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that can serve as encouragement and inspiration to the regional activists.

Similarly to the “Everyday Divergences,” exhibition originating from the research of the social phenomenology of the Travno District, the Mexican exhibition “Conquering and Constructing the Common” consisted of the extremely successful fusion of video-documentation and two-dimensional infographics. It is also interesting to note the parallels between the moral determinants of ancient beliefs of the indigenous people of Mexico, and the activist and missionary passion equally shared by the practitioners of the Theology of Liberation and the young people engaged in the local critique platforms. These links serve to show that, in the era of predominant relativisation of humanist values and human rights – both of which used to be part of the commonsensical reality – the viewpoints that regard these values as indisputable, and as the only chance for the healthier future of humanity, continue to survive.

   

The third and current module of Creative Strategies – “Toolkit for a Joint Action” – specifies the current social position of local activist practices with its unpretentious, but nevertheless resolute title. It seeks to finally reach the end-interlocutor, to abandon the established discursive form of internal get-togethers that lose their viridity and inventiveness once they start to take place in unwidening circles.

Following the mapping of individual and group initiatives, largely originating from student blockades that took place throughout the country in 2009, the time has come to resume the results and to consolidate own forces in form of taking new steps to ensure the continuation of life of such activism. Alongside Andreja Kulunčić, the co-authors of the Toolkit are members of the group Direct Democracy in Schools (Dijana Ćurković, Hrvoje Jurić, Bruna Nedoklan, Sanela Planinčević, Zdravko Popović and Izvor Rukavina), New Syndicate (Tomislav Kiš) and BRID – Platform for Workers’ Initiative and Democratisation (Baza za radničku inicijativu i demokratizaciju: Bojan Nonković, Igor Livada, Jovica Lončar), ZMAG – Green Network of Activist Groups (Zelena mreža aktivističkih grupa), Women’s Front, Fem Front, and The Right to the City. The author of the graphic design of the Toolkit is Luka Juras, while Mirna Horvat has authored its spatial design.

The key partner of Andreja Kulunčić in creating and organising the project in the current year remains the group Direct Democracy in Schools with production support of Martina Kontošić. The programme of “Toolkit for a Joint Action” for 2015, presented at the space of the organisation MAPA in Sloboština District in Zagreb on January 30, includes so far guest presentations of the project in several towns in Croatia – in Čakovec (Youth Centre) in March, in Slavonski Brod (Art Gallery) in April and May, in Dubrovnik (Lazareti Art Workshop) in May, in Pula (Praksa Collective) in September, in Sinj (Sikirica Gallery) in October and, finally, the project will return to Zagreb in November as part of the Vox Feminae Festival. The small tour has already started on February 5 with the workshop for students of Lucijan Vranjanin Secondary School in Zagreb.

Several complementing segments are important for the “Toolkit for a Joint Action”. The presentations of the project in various towns do not involve classic exhibition setups or ‘ex-cathedra’ lectures, but rather a kind of small-scale open forums, the focus of which is the materialisation of the form of the Toolkit.

This is a dynamic mobile installation containing the collected and systematised holdings on creative strategies and ‘creative communities’, i.e. on the methodology, theory and practice of resistance to the predominant political ‘status quo’, globally inherent to the post-industrial society still affected by the years-long crisis. Alongside historical and theoretical entries from the fields of syndicalism, feminism, democratic and liberation movements, practical theology and socially engaged art, it also contains video-documentation, while all data are structured and narrated in an extremely receptive language meant for the broadest possible audience.

  

Furthermore, the installation of the Toolkit is basically a tool for the collective intellectual game through which the research of the social phenomena and the practicing of democracy is interpreted as a creative process that does not require mere factual knowledge, but also social sensibility, empathy and intuition, which primarily reflects the inclusive character of the overall project. The programmes organised as part of the Toolkit by Andreja Kulunčić, Martina Kontošić and members of DirDem are nothing other than a genuine field course in democracy, the return of the vivid political thought to the very basics of its practice, and the attempt at interactive education on important questions and problems of contemporary social communities. Moreover, this is also an appeal for the residents’ self-organisation that reaffirms the necessity of solidarity and active building of inclusive communities, which would lead to the solving of these problems at an initially micro level, while constantly bearing in mind the context that also fatefully politicises everyday life. In brief, the essence of the “Toolkit for a Joint Action” is to rediscover the exact meaning of being a ‘zoon politicon’ and to implement this determinant in practice.  

 

The overall project is a valuable example of the functionality of the critique research practices in art while constantly bearing in mind the important inclusive moment of the overall feature, which prevents the narrative from being leisurely enlightening, but also from slipping into populist banality. Also, the project fulfils the important aim of the affirmation of a different and much more inspiring perception of art from the one that was present in the media e.g. during the last year’s ‘commotion’ around the Zagreb Youth Salon. The “Toolkit for a Joint Action” has gathered young people who do not have time to engage in such situations and who are active on much more coherent fronts. Enough has been said for the wise.

Bojan Krištofić

 Photographs: Ivan Kuharić (Nova Gallery, 2014) and materials taken from creative-strategies.info
*This text is part of the Vizkultura project “Visual Arts in the Media”