Natasa Ilić
Zagreb, September 2008
Exhibition catalogue: "UrbanFestival2008"
[BLOK], ZAGREB, 2008

Nataša Ilić (NI): How did you start working on the radio intervention project 'I'm sorry, i'm not sorry...'?

Andreja Kulunčić (AK): The theme of the UrbanFestival was regret. I held that, after everything we survived in the past fifteen years in the society where we live, the concept of regret was interesting because it offers a possibility to look back, in order to see whether something of the things we did – on all levels, individually, and as a nation – merits regret, whether we need it, is it good or not? It is a fact that, in an intellectual sense, we were all saving our necks as everything was happening, and now we ought to stop and ask ourselves whether there is anything we should regret.

(NI): You situated the subject in a post-war society?

(AK): Yes, not in wartime, with which we have occupied ourselves a lot, but in the aftermath. What went on after we 'got what was ours', how much did we participate in the processes as individuals with respect to the collective. The other question was whether we have become aware of these processes? I think that in socialism we weren't fully aware of the relation of the individual towards the collective. Are we today capable of understanding that 'I' affects the neighbour, the other, the collective? Does my bribing a policeman partake in the general bribing of policemen, or does it not? We all know that, 'on paper', bribing is not right, but how do my actions bear upon the whole, how much do we generally connect them with what is collective? It seems symptomatic to me that all of us moan constantly about the society we live in, but there lacks an awareness that the individual is the society we live in. I'm not sure how much thought these questions are being given in the wider context.

(NI): How did you conceive a work which would deal with how much we reflect about our actions influencing society, what we do or do not feel sorry about, what we do or don't regret?

(AK): Along with the organizers of the festival, I started thinking about how best to approach people and how to communicate with them without bringing them into an awkward situation. Thinking about the medium, it seemed to us that radio could be the ideal medium. A call to the radio is direct, a person has the opportunity to say something about the subject directly, and yet remain anonymous. The radio also solved for us the question of how people, that is, the public, could hear what we wanted to communicate.

Then another problem turned up – how to bring people into the situation where they will feel like calling in to the radio and stating their opinion. We decided to record jingles on subjects that are well known in society – we all know corruption exists and what goes on with doctors, policemen, we all know how some children get into universities, we talk about it at home, among friends, in the newspapers... We exchange stories, but, in a way, we exclude ourselves, we don't connect these two levels.

(NI): Have you made the jingles yourself or with professionals?

(AK): The radio activists' association Nemesis did the jingles and the complete technical and radio-related part of the work. The jingles have a classic form – distinct music and a recognisable sentence, persons speak what they do or do not regret, with respect to society. We took care to represent different categories of people, old, young, rich, poor. We made up a table concerning age, sex, status, and we got twenty-four categories. Initially, we used our friends and acquaintances' statements for jingles, that seemed more simple than to record people on the street. But this wasn't simple either, it turned out that it was necessary to talk to people about the idea and explain to them that it is about the relation of the individual towards the collective. And so we developed a method: we wrote down the responses we got in these initial conversations, and made them into recordings afterwards. We chose the responses that seemed most clear to us.

(NI): Where, and how often, did you broadcast the jingles?

(AK): On Radio Sljeme, every hour, following the weather forecast, with the announcement that in the evening there would be a telephone line open for people to give their opinion. The listeners were being prepared all day, and in the evening we were in the studio and the host was accepting calls. It was all directly on the air. I found it very exciting – you sit, wait, nothing happens, and then at once the phones start ringing and red lights flashing. The first five minutes there were no calls, but the host was eloquent and capable of inciting people to talk, and so it got going. A lady phoned in, she regretted renting an apartment on the sea and paying taxes for it, while her neighbours didn't. Then another lady called who said she was sorry to hear that someone was sorry to have done the right thing, and so started a discussion about whether it means that, if everybody does it, we shouldn't be any better, and that is precisely what I wanted – to talk and to understand that society is a living organism consisting of us individuals, and that we all have a major role, however minor it seems.

(NI): How long did this last?

(AK): About half an hour. Radio time is very expensive, and in fact we had a lot of time, in terms of radio time. We got time for three days of jingles and thirty minutes for listeners' calls every evening, and the fourth day we made a call-in show that rounded off the project. We called Ankica Lepej on to the show, she used to work in Zagrebačka banka and uncovered Tuđman's account, which got her fired and she is still unemployed today. She replied to the question whether she regretted doing it, saying that she didn't, that she thought it her moral duty. We also had a psychologist on the show, who spoke about how the Croatian society is an infantile socialist society, that we think the society is the big daddy who should take care of us, who can punish us, but must also care, and that we must grow up and accept the society we live in as a reality which we understand and which we know how to shape.

(NI): The question how direct interventions in social spaces function in an art system, and how to adapt this experience into something suitable to the medium of an exhibition and to the expectations people have, is a permanent component of your work. It is not a matter of the modernistic notion of the artist's function, where the artist is inspired by an individual vision that he brings out in some artistic medium, but a specific intervention in real social space. How do you view the function of the artist and its changes in the wider sense?

(AK): I'll try to explain it using an example, the political artistic intervention project 1 franc=1 vote, on which I worked in Zürich for a longer period, in the independent art institution Schedhalle. In such longterm projects, the idea is not only to provide people with a space to rethink problems, but to give them a tool for some kind of resistance to capitalism, outside the structures of classical political organisation or any classical political tools. I'm oriented towards the people who may have two hours a week to do something against what they think is wrong. It seems to me that these little islands of intellectual resistance make sense. A problem can arise if my expectations become too big, if I push the art-as-tool thing too far, if I push a gallery or an institution too far into the 'real world', then it can be a total failure, a thought left hanging in the air, never completed.
When I work abroad, I regularly cooperate with marginalised groups, and I did the same in Zürich. I did interviews with prostitutes, with people working illegally, with drug-addicts, with asylees, refugees, various marginalised groups. It was a difficult experience. In Switzerland, a country where you can't move a pebble without reporting somewhere, there are people who have lived there for fifty, sixty years, or were even born there, and were never registered anywhere, who officially don't exist. To the Swiss, illegal people don't exist, they don't want them to exist, yet at the same time it is they who perform the worst jobs.
I proposed a project dealing with people without documents, who are afraid of going public and prefer to make peace with their situation. This project deals with the fact that the Swiss abuse others' historic and geographic injustice, and that this is considered normal. I have suggested that the people without documents, who officially don't exist, send one franc each through organizations engaged with their rights, for the renovation of the building of the Parliament in Bern; the means gathered would be used to buy a window, a table or something like that, and to put up a plaque, marking that it is a gift from people who do not officially exist. These people have no political voice, but I wanted them to have physical visibility in the parliament – this gift would return their dignity. They aren't people needing help, they need dignity.

(NI): How much money did you collect?

(AK): Around 2.000 francs, which means 2.000 votes. On the one hand, it was necessary to work with people, to help them understand that it is a gesture of acquiring dignity, to work with organisations and human rights activists, whose notion of art is often very conservative and inimical towards contemporary art, and on the other hand it was necessary to work with the gallery and with the art system. But we managed to do a lot. On the main station in Zürich we put up a call on the large main display, with the appeal to all illegal people to give one franc for the project, which had a great effect: the passers-by were wondering how many illegal persons there must be if they are being addressed on the station display, and in such a busy and expensive place, while the illegal people themselves don't expect anyone to approach them – the very fact that someone officially approached them is a sort of recognition of their existence. We published the call in newspapers, on trams, we went out a lot and everybody knows about the project. But if the project were to grow for another three years, only then would we manage to collect a more significant sum of money.

(NI): Do you think it would have turned out differently had you worked in Croatia, where the whole infrastructure is more under your control?

(AK):  Yes, I would have had to move to Switzerland, and Switzerland is expensive. And as much as I did go to Zürich in the two years, it was very expensive. It is an expensive and demanding project.

(NI): How does the artistic practice that you're engaged in function in the wider artworld? What is its relation toward the mainstream like, what is its economic stability like?

(AK): I think that it used to be mainstream for a while, and now it isn't anymore, aesthetic and visual considerations are central again. There were so many bad and pompous social awareness works at the Venice Biennial that I was embarrassed. If someone makes a bad work on himself and his mother, it is an individual artist's thing, but if someone makes a bad work on asylees, there the ethical boundary is much more sensitive. It is wonderful that this art practice is no longer mainstream.

(NI): But that doesn't mean that this practice no longer has its place.

(AK): I think it always had it, that it didn't arise from nowhere, or that it will disappear tomorrow. It is an issue of a kind of education, a special element of sensitivity. The woman whose husband beats her must realize that it is not her fault, and this takes a lot of work; it is the same case with people working illegally, or whose rights are abused at their workplaces, etc. It's struggle and exhaustion.

(NI): How does your practice function in the economic system? Is there still institutional support from individual institutions?

(AK): I think that this is not only a matter of the functioning of the art system, but of a personal, internal feeling that what we are doing is necessary, and it's then that the curator will find the means. Whenever I think that it's over, that it no longer interests anyone, I receive a mail inviting us to continue working.

Nataša Ilić