Cilj natječaja je preispitati stereotipe o zelenim i plavim površinama u različitim klimatskim područjima te društevnim i kulturnim tradicijama kroz fotografski natječaj. Na temelju pristiglih fotografija će se izgraditi raznovrsna globalna vizualna baza podataka, koja će biti javno dostupna preko besplatnog online repozitorija Wikimedia Commons.

Sudjelovanje u natječaju je besplatno i dostupno svima, a pet će fotografija biti nagrađeno novčanom nagradom od 400 funti (približno 467 eura). Nagradu će dodjeliti žiri koji čine kustosica Lucia Pietroiusti i kustos Herrero Delicado. Pobjedničke fotografije bit će izložene na Bijenalu arhitekture u Rotterdmu i u sklopu RECLAIM konferencije u Londonu.

Pri prijavi potrebno je najprije pohraniti fotografiju na server Wikimedia Commons, a zatim ispuniti formular na stranici RECLAIM mreže s pripadajućim podacima.

Uvjeti za prijavu:

• fotografija mora prikazivati urbanu zelenu ili plavu površinu iz propisanih kategorija
• sve prijave moraju bti vlasništvo autora_ice i pohranjene uz pripadajuće ime
• svaka prijava mora sadržavati informacije upisane u Wiki formular u formatu “SimpleCaption_LocationName (npr. ExploringTheForest_CardiffWales)”
• uz fotografiju treba dodati relevantne kategorije koje uključuju “RECLAIM Network” i “GBI ime” te opisne kategorije koje pobliže opisuju lokaciju
• ne postoji ograničenje broja prijavljenih fotografija po osobi

Više informacija o natječaju možete pronaći ovdje, a o detaljnom postupku prijave ovdje.

Prijave se vrše do 26. travnja.

We met again in the summer of 2022 when we, as students of ruangrupa, formed an office collective, and our teachers kindly included us last minute in one of documenta fifteen programs. There, I had the privilege to spend two weeks inside Gudkitchen, a project run by the education platform Gudskul founded in Jakarta in 2018 by ruangrupa, Serrum, and Grafis Huru Hara. In Kassel, Gudskul repurposed the rooms of the Friedericianum museum into a collective dormitory and kitchen, creating a favorite place for hanging out and making friends.

In this conversation, farid rakun and Iswanto Hartono spent a long time thoughtfully answering my endless questions, from the problems of artistic mobility, property, financing, and bureaucracy, through the effects working on documenta fifteen left on them, their local ecosystem, and the lumbung network, rest, being rooted into home and local, the importance of using one’s language, to trauma, conflict, and the inevitable collectivism.

Dealing with documenta fifteen included a lot of visa issues inside the lumbung ecosystem which you created gathering art collectives and artists from all over the world. Can you speak a little about the problems of art mobility coming from Indonesia and working with other former colonies?

farid rakun: This is not something that the art world, an art exhibition, or an event can solve, it uses the trade logic. Being Indonesian passport holders, it’s always a challenge and we found through the process that, of course, we are not alone with this, but the most we can do is push these issues about in an institutional way or dealing with institutions. Myself and all of us as a group have to find strategies on how to plan logistics around this fact, because as generous as embassies can be, they’re still tied up. Making this reality transparent is maybe the only thing we can do.

Iswanto Hartono: Some think it’s very easy, but then the mobility doesn’t happen. Like the case of Sourabh Phadke with the UK visa which should not be complicated, the UK is not a conflict area and it’s not a case of islamophobia, but it still has an immigration policy. We tried so hard already, and the fact is we could not push more than the effort that we already put in for months, it wasn’t happening.

farid rakun: I don’t know how strong or useful a Croatian passport is, but it’s really difficult for those who have a strong one to understand. My wife has an American and Australian passport. For example, it’s difficult for her to understand how draining visa applications are for passports such as Indonesian. So, it also happens when dealing with institutions that are based in strong passport countries, their administration is not understanding a lot of the time. Maybe they know it’s going to be difficult, but they underestimate how difficult it’s going to be.

Iswanto Hartono: It’s not happening only with documenta. The performer Agus Nur Amal PMTOH was invited to the UK just a month ago for a tour and had five venues booked, but he didn’t get a visa to enter the UK. It’s not only Schengen but also the UK and the US.

farid rakun: And Australia. On top of it all is COVID-19, and immigration got hit hard by that. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and those who have the sovereignty to issue visas, it’s all bottlenecking. Still today, if you’re an Indonesian passport holder in the appointment line right now, if you want a Schengen visa, you have to wait for two months for an appointment. 

How did doing documenta fifteen change the situation of the artist ecosystem in Jakarta and the way you work today?

Iswanto Hartono: I think not a lot. Maybe not like in Europe. In Indonesia, it’s only a small part of society that noticed that we were going to Kassel. Here, it hasn’t really become a privilege to be in documenta. Of course, it has affected the way we work since our relations across the lumbung network expanded and it’s where we’ve had the privilege to have exposure, to make friendships and networks, and to nurture together. In this way, we get more. When we have more friends, we can have more partners to discuss and develop things. For example, farid will go to Zagreb, the spiral is moving on. But with Indonesia, it hasn’t affected much of what we do, and we haven’t changed a lot inside. It’s completely opposite of the attention and exposure in Europe. 

farid rakun: There are layers and scales to answering this question. First, as Gudskul, we started at the end of 2018. The questions we had remained by the end of 2022 when documenta ended. Challenges came back and we were not in a better shape than we were before.

Second, on the scale of institutions and government, this is funny, but it happens to many Indonesians, if not in other contexts as well. We’ve been doing the same thing for 23 years now, but it’s only recently that the people who are in power have the permission to engage with us more, like in the ministries for example, they find legitimation because we’ve done documenta to work with us structurally. So, this intention was there from before documenta, that lumbung could be used by them by inviting us to try to rethink a better structure.

Those things are happening. Now, how useful it is, we still need time to find out. Those types of things take time to come to fruition. It changes perspectives, but as Iswanto says, on an everyday basis, no one cares. I, who stays in Jakarta, would go into the National Gallery or the National Museum, and people would know me, or know ruangrupa thematically, but not all. It’s actually refreshing, it’s a better way to do it, compared to my experience in Kassel. There, people on the street recognize us. Of course, there are positive sides to that as well, but I like being invisible. I cherish that.

Saying no is not straightforward in Indonesian culture, and you have joked before that the reason you accepted working with Documenta was because in Indonesia it’s impolite to say no. Is it easier to say no nowadays for ruangrupa?

farid rakun: It’s really difficult for us to say no as Indonesians, or as ruangrupa, because it’s just not nice. It’s bad turning down things and saying no. Yes, there are ways to say no. If the Indonesian government asks us to do something, my immediate reaction would be to say no, but luckily, a lot of times other people will talk me out of it. Nowadays we are finding more ways to say no. One example, coming back to visa, it’s easier for us to say yes to those contexts where there is no visa application. Of course, it’s going to be maybe 20%, maybe even less, of all the countries in the world, which shrinks possibilities, but that’s one way to do it. There’s also extractiveness. We have been talking about it with others, internally as well, and making cases where there’s no standard of procedures about it. We have become more aware of extractive practices and how to deal with them. Saying no is maybe a last resort, but then, how to get to that no? We’re getting better at that. Or, how to negotiate with extractiveness and make them realize it and turn it into something less, if not non-extractive, if possible.

What did you learn about rest from working with documenta fifteen?

Iswanto Hartono: There has been no break, and actually, that’s the worst. It’s very hard. My personal experience was actually so intense, the past two years before we started documenta, in the hundred days of it, and after. Now, we are used to it. I don’t know about the rest of the group, but I never really had a real holiday, like one working for a month and then having two weeks. Of course, I had a holiday, but not a planned kind. When I don’t have anything to do, I may decide to go somewhere nearby, or visit family. We try hard to have a break, of course, but we are used to that. In Gudskul as well, the distinction between working and meeting and relaxing is all mixed together. Nongkrong is more relaxed, but sometimes it’s very intense. At times it suddenly becomes a serious discussion, but that’s how we work.

farid rakun: There are many things about this. One is, taking a break, being not productive. The second, it’s about slowness, taking things slowly. As Iswanto said, in practices like ours, it’s a challenge. Also, it’s a challenge in my personal relationships and personal life. We keep on fighting for that. Art, if it is considered to be work, a profession, art and life should not be separated, or less separated, not autonomous. So, as a consequence, it’s kind of all jumbled together. Then it is a challenge not only internally between us but also with our personal lives. 

Different people have different strategies for it. Nongkrong became work. I used to be like that, not taking holidays, we don’t do that because our work is actually life, that’s what we need, a lot of times. Not financially, because financially we have to struggle personally to be able to afford collective work, but then we enjoy it. In the framing of work and rest, it becomes too much enjoyment, so we work all the time. I used to not have holidays, I don’t understand how to take holidays. If I take holidays, my body and brain relax, my body breaks down, and I become sick. 

I think after documenta, I knew that I had to take a break, so I’m taking a break right now, up until today. I’m still a stay-at-home dad, and from an Indonesian point of view, not many people can do that, because our system and structure do not accommodate that, so it’s a privileged position. It’s a privilege also that I work with people who have an understanding of that and accommodate that, and I am not the only, the latest, or the first case to be in this position. 

But then, when it comes to slowness of things: with the experience of documenta fifteen, we know we have to fight for that slowness. When we work collectively, it’s not effective and efficient, it’s not the right way to do things in the philosophy of late capitalism, there are faster, stronger ways, it’s about growth. Our way of working is not like that, unfortunately, or fortunately. Maybe we don’t need to fight for the slowness because we live like that, we just have to make other people understand it and we have to keep through to that root.

Do you already see an appropriation of collectivism in the art world?

Iswanto Hartono: I don’t read the news a lot.

farid rakun: One thing is hope, another thing is reality. Sometimes we live in an echo chamber and we don’t see other realities. Maybe it is a trend, we hope it’s not. We hope that if it gains a certain momentum, if it helps the collective type of working, if documenta fifteen has helped the collective way of working be more visible, then it’s good. And we hope it’s not a mere trend. 

But, having said that, many people have come to us because we’ve been developing the same thing for 23 years, so it’s difficult for us to see that it’s a trend. People have come to remind us of that and to be aware of it and hopefully, we can use it, but not get used by it. It’s a difficult balance to keep. Even before documenta fifteen we realized, that maybe because we’re a collective, maybe because we come from a certain context, background, biographies, country, etc., like many others, of course, we’ve been appropriated. Even before documenta fifteen and that’s why we invited documenta to be part of the lumbung journey, because we’re aware of it. 

Iswanto Hartono: We feel that there is more interest in this. Many come to us with interests in collective practices and working collaborations. I noticed in school in Hamburg, many posters in the city, galleries… repeatedly the words ‘kitchen’ and ‘karaoke’, are on every poster. Also ‘cooking’, and ‘commons’. I noticed this repeatedly.

How is the lumbung network going? What about lumbung gallery and lumbung press? What about lumbung.space?

Iswanto Hartono: lumbung Press has been working so hard these months. Since they moved to Barcelona they came to Hamburg twice, and now they will come to the Miss Read Book Fair in Berlin, and they got two years of funding from Helsinki. lumbung Gallery is still in discussion about resources and sustainability, so it’s not that active. lumbung.space,  of course, is active. lumbung Land is activated in Jatiwangi and Morocco, they plan to do a tour soon in Lebanon and Jatiwangi.

farid rakun: Lumbung Indonesia…

Iswanto Hartono: There was a big majelis last week in West Sumatra.

farid rakun: Because that’s the lifeline we have to keep. Maybe you know that lumbung continues in different places in different ways, it doesn’t necessarily have to do with us directly. Sometimes we know, a lot of times we figure out when there’s a hashtag on social media. It’s not supposed to be centralized on us. We have to be honest that we have limited energy, it’s not a renewable resource, energy, and time. So if it’s small but many, then we have the question of what can happen further with the lumbung inter-lokal, for example. We still don’t know because – not that we don’t know, there are many ideas, it’s hard… We were warned about this before by artists who did previous issues of documenta, their artistic directors, and curators, that things will be different and harder after documenta. 

We asked for a lot from artists as well, because there were many majelises. Took us something to come back again – the need to be aware of people’s levels of energy and I think the energy hasn’t come back. Slowness, we’re taking it. Personally, that’s where I’m coming from. Up until today, maybe after a year in September, I can see exhibitions again, but right now I’m still too tired of contemporary art.

You founded the educational platform Gudskul in 2018 in Jakarta together with the collectives Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara. What is happening in Gudskul now?

farid rakun: Gudskul has held since October maybe around 40 majelises, because there are many things that we need to decide all together, and we use majelises to do it. Not working groups, we have working groups, but it’s majelises where decisions are made. I can imagine it’s a grueling process because I’m not a part of a lot of it. It’s also fun, I think a lot of us enjoy that process because it’s different. It’s something beyond our imagination as individuals. I think we all agree that Gudskul will continue, and from the energy, I feel up until today, we know that we’re sitting on something valuable enough to sustain. So, the question is how to continue. There are many answers to it, but we will see which route we will take together.

What is happening in the conversations about the financial stability of the ecosystem, can you share some realizations and decisions that were made?

farid rakun: We have been experimenting continuously with financial sustainability. We haven’t found the right way. We tried, and that’s why we’re not in a better position than in 2018. For example, we tried to pay monthly wages, at least minimum wages, for everyone in Gudskul up until 2022. It’s impossible to sustain. So, our collective decision right now is that no one is a Gudskul employee anymore. Maybe the security, cleaning, admin, and maintenance, because that’s the backbone and we have to secure the positions for them, but for the rest of us, no. We’re out, we got fired. We fired each other, we fired everyone and each other. 

The diagram that we used before is nice as a diagram, but as practice, it’s much more messy. Right now, we’re learning from doing documenta fifteen and lumbung that good economy and financial stability need to be everywhere. It doesn’t function that the business wing has to look for money in order to finance everyone else, so the structure might work conceptually, but not in the labor division. Not that like Iswanto or I are always looking for money and another person is always creating programs that are spending money. If I want to create a program, then I have to also think about how to sustain it, so it’s fair. So, that triangle can be helped by many of us at once. So, it’s not departments, it’s not compartmentalized.

So, it’s many little businesses?

farid rakun: Or maybe even ways to do things. Maybe it’s not about money. Maybe it’s about being with your neighbors, so there’s no money involved. Because the resources are there. So, it is about scale as well, and then if it is small enough, a lot of times, like running a household back in the days before capitalism it’s possible. Of course, there are exchanges. Of course, there is sharing and all that distribution of resources. Money is not necessarily the only way to do that. I think that’s where we’re pushing to, ideally.

Since 2018, you have owned your space at Gudskul. How is the work on property and ownership going inside the Indonesian lumbung, are there other collectives in the process of owning their spaces?

farid rakun: It’s something we struggle with, ownership, property, and all of that kind of stuff. There is a risk of property being a burden, that we’re not going to be flexible, that we’re not going to be nimble enough, so to change, to shift, to confuse, which we like to do, by owning property or something like that. It’s something we needed to do. This is a particular Jakarta strategy because Jakarta is a free market, and its real estate is maybe one with the highest inflation in real estate in the world. 

When we were renting, we spent such a high percentage of our annual budget on rent, that it makes it unsustainable. We’re not the only ones doing it. In places like Hong Kong where rent is very high, it’s really difficult for initiatives to sustain their existence because of that. A lot of times, this cost affects people besides the internal conflicts within groups that break initiatives apart. 

It is a strategy, we’re not going to say that it should work with everyone else. But for Jatiwangi art Factory for example, who are fighting for their land, and for others in the land working group, it becomes their work. I don’t think it’s always about owning, but it’s about realizing the importance of property, of being there, of being grounded, and how fickle, how precarious that element can make you and your practice and your sustainability. So, it’s kind of sustainability in a bigger sense as well, not only financial, but also even environmental. I think many initiatives in Lumbung Indonesia realize that they’re precarious and the first thing that they can tackle in the way to be more sustainable, is land. I can say that some others also think that way, but it would be so much different if the real estate and property market were not a free market. Then, the struggle would be different, strategy would be different. This is something we’re offered with, we got lemons and we make lemonade. So, if these are our lemons, what can we make of them?

Iswanto Hartono: One issue is the context of the area where there is no investment, and the different issue is land. With Jatiwangi art Factory, it’s morality that drives them, they’re trying to save a piece of land that is located between two big factories. They want to save it so it can be used by all the community there. There have also been ideas with the Perhutana project where they reclaim eight hectares of land for a conservatory forest, it is ethical to work with it. To save it, to keep it that way.

farid rakun:  In Gudskul, we own property, but we have to make sure that it doesn’t go back to the speculative market. So, we had to invent with the notary a way for us to own it together. On paper, the state demands ownership by one person. But, notary-wise, legally we have to come out with our convention, although it’s not only our invention, for many of us to sign the papers. 

We also learned that many places in Indonesia, Columbia, and New Zealand also, have heritage land or traditionally owned land and cannot be sold easily so it’s really difficult to sell it to the speculative market. I think that’s how we have to do it, with the tradition and an instrument to do it legally. I don’t know if Jatiwangi art Factory owns it, but I know in West Sumatra they have something like heritage land ownership status and they should, in my opinion, research it and use it for their good.

How is the status and struggle of art workers in Indonesia with there being little or no state funding? Are there initiatives to change this?

farid rakun: I think it has changed, the state is trying to change as well. Sometimes for better. sometimes for worse, it’s never stable here. It all depends on the parties in power, I guess same as everywhere else. So, we know we cannot rely on it, but when we can use it, we use it. In the last few years, finally, we have in the arts a kind of endowment funds that artists in Indonesia can use. How to use it is another thing, and the competition is another, but they’re trying to change anyway. They’re trying to even have conversations, with the decision-makers. They understand that they’ve been playing the wrong roles and that competing with what’s already there, with the grassroots doesn’t work, so they’re trying to change their role into only supporting. They’re not going to make new events, but are going to support the events that are already there.

One example and time will tell whether it’s a good thing or not. They find that lumbung as a concept can also be useful, so they’ve been engaging with us on how to use our experience and how to learn from us, how to invite us, and how to have us more involved with decision-making. It’s all negotiation though, it’s not flowery. It has been changing, especially compared to the year 2000 when we first started, and also because Indonesia has been changing. The economic power, and the governance of Indonesia, are in a shifting moment. To say that there’s no state funding anymore is not correct. It held truth in 2000, but right now it has become different. It’s not enough of course, but what is enough? No one has enough, not even Norway.

In your work, you use common pot as a vessel for sharing resources. Are the institutions considering the common pot as a funding model?

farid rakun: No, they’re not going that route. Even we have to fight a long, long way ourselves. We are learning. Our current state of collective pot in Gudskul is the result of working on it since 2016, so it’s not a flick of a hand. With government, bureaucracy, and all that, it’s much more about how to see each other as resources and then how to think of each other not competitively. And then, how to realize one’s possible role in an ecosystem instead of understanding everyone as a fish, and it all depends on the pond,. You know this analogy of a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big one. But they’re all fish, no one wants to be a frog, no one wants to be a parasite. It’s about realizing that locally a lot of people are doing something, and we should not invent things further for the sake of newness or genius. 

Is there accessible support from your government for art mobility, if our local organizations want to invite Indonesian artists?

farid rakun: There are ways with our Ministry. If you invite us, the question is whether we want to take that route. 

You approach funding applications and contracts with institutions as a work of fiction or an artwork, how does that approach work in different countries?

farid rakun: An old friend of ours and member of the documenta fifteen artistic team, Gertrude Flentge, said: “Bureaucracy is a form of distrust”.

Iswanto Hartono: There are two fundamental things for this kind of process. One is to change the basic idea of commissioned work and to give more benefit to the artist. We encourage a lot of artists, especially in collective form, to avoid making new works and rather continue what they already do. In terms of production, we negotiate a lot. Even with the upcycled materials in documenta, which has been a practice in documenta already, but not as massive as this, we made it become a part of the structure of the production. We build the networks to support us, and they can use this. Last month, El Warcha came from a festival in Frankfurt and was supporting the production of another collective, so they used their upcycled materials. In documenta, we changed production costs with this, and the structure of bureaucracy, and architecture and design were not made with any outside designer. Also the website, normally they had one, and now we have three, and it took us more than a year to convince them to change it. With the publication as well, the negotiation took quite a while. 

Your practice is strongly related to the setting of home, how does that relate to art as an everyday practice and the idea that everyone can be an artist?

Iswanto Hartono: The terms ‘locally’ and ‘anchor’ are very important to us, and that’s where our practice comes from, it’s following us for the past 23 years, it’s where our energy and thoughts are developed. Nongkrong comes from this context, the context of space, and in the case of Jakarta, a very contested space in terms of economy, and politics, during the New Order. Economically, the home was the most affordable space where we could be hosted. In Europe, you have a different context.

farid rakun: Gudskul part of Fridericianum that was converted into a dormitory and a kitchen during documenta fifteen was the latest manifestation of it. In lumbung there is public space, living space, and storage. On the scale of domestic and intimate, this is where we find our sensibilities coming from, so we have to be honest about it. For us, that’s one of the sources of energy that we’re trying to convey, it’s where we’re coming from. That’s also why we call it ruruHaus, why Iswanto and Reza made a lot of living rooms. Right now, we’re planning to do another public living room in Jakarta in October, and funnily enough, ‘living room’ cannot be directly translated into Bahasa Indonesia. We use ‘ruang tamu’, but that’s almost like a guest room. But the concept of the living room shows how important that background is for us because we’re coming from that and it keeps working for us. The idea that everyone can be an artist, that’s too Joseph Beuys for us. I think it doesn’t matter whether you’re an artist or not.

You use a lot of terms in bahasa Indonesia such as nongkrong, lumbung, and majelis. Can you tell me about the importance of using your language in your work?

farid rakun: It’s much more honest. We use language as shortcuts in Indonesian, the shorter we can convey what we mean, the better. If we can make it into one word, then we use it. I think lumbung functions that way, because in Indonesia everyone knows what lumbung is, so when we say lumbung, we kind of know what we’re talking about. The translation might be the point of discussion, but what we’re trying to do, we make a shortcut. That’s where it’s coming from. It was not intended to be taken to another context. But just being honest, we just don’t know better shortcuts for lumbung. Commons doesn’t work that well for us, if we use commons, then we’re just confused about what we’re talking about. 

A lot of things are untranslatable because they were functioning for us before. At one point, we knew that we had to fight for it because we had been colonized in language as well. We’ve been taken out of context and we’ve been forced to do so, e.g. by learning all those theories and genres in the art world, impressionists, what does it mean, expressionism, the list goes on, that’s not a thing we grew up with, but we have to learn about it, and then we’re like, maybe we can turn the table around for once.

ruangrupa has existed since 2000. How are things going with the archiving process?

Iswanto Hartono: We are good but very bad as well. We archive, but we’re not organized. We recently started discussing the preparation for our 25th anniversary in 2025, and one of the main subjects of this discussion is the archive. Now we have to start working on it, to see and revisit our archive, but we have to organize it simultaneously as well. 

Do you find a connection between trauma, healing, and collectivity?

farid rakun: We talked about this a couple of times: Why did we collectivize? Why do we last this long? Why don’t others last this long? Should we last longer than the longest ones before us? And if we shouldn’t, we should disappear and give it to others. Maybe we shouldn’t last this long, at least as a collection of individuals. Maybe Gudskul itself can last, but not us. The analogy that Jatiwangi art Factory, us, and others have used so far that is useful is the analogy that forming a collective is a life-saving raft. 

We want to go somewhere together and we have to go through certain obstacles, so we find each other and build a raft together. The collectivizing part is the process of building it and then going through the world. Sometimes we meet some other people that need to be saved, or that want to go in the same direction. But then the crisis stops when we reach the destination, a lot of times. If that crisis stops, a lot of times there’s no reason to collectivize anymore.The difference with us until today, for a few of us, we knew when we arrived at that first destination that it was not enough – this was not our destination. So the crises kept on coming, but it’s just different. So we became Gudang Sarinah and then Gudskul, we made it into something else, we changed houses, we changed programs, we created different things. because the crisis never ceased to exist. 

I don’t know whether there’s trauma and healing, because people younger than us who didn’t experience the New Order directly, if we’re talking about New Order as a trauma and we need to be healed from it, they still keep making collectives for reasons that are a riddle for us. So, maybe the crisis is still happening. 

One of the ways to think about the crisis is the support, or the infrastructure and the system. When there’s none or there is a lack of certain things, the crisis is there. Then, there’s a need to make an initiative, whether they want to call it collective or something else. Collaborating with others, when it is systematized, when infrastructure is something that you’ve built together and it works, maybe it’s like the collectivity that we’re talking about ceases to exist, or doesn’t have any use. You need to come up with your type of collectivity, Balkan collectivity, and we would love to learn from it.

Iswanto Hartono: Two weeks ago I was traveling in Aceh, one of the most conflicted areas in Indonesia. Even during colonial times, it had one of the longest wars against the Dutch. They even started a dispute with Sukarno, they tried to be an independent nation. There was another war during the New Order regime, the war was continuous there for a very long time until recently when the separatist movement calmed down and made an agreement with the government. I found that there is a lot of trauma there, even for the younger generation. 

For me, it’s care, and the question of care, but I had a lot of questions when I was there. It’s such an enormous context and I didn’t have an answer for that, a traumatized community suffering from war and violence. Indonesia is also collectively very well known for violence. Even the word ‘amok’ came from Indonesia, it means anger and stems from the riots and violent wars of the tribes, which were done collectively. So there is this paradox, we do collective care, and we have the violent side which is also collectively massive. It’s both sides, the collective good and collective evil is here.

Often, when I mention your work to my friends in the Balkans, they say “But I don’t want to have to work/hang out with everyone”. Does collectivity mean having to work with everyone?

farid rakun: It’s like a neighbourhood or ecosystem, you cannot choose the species that come into your ecosystem. But we have to deal with it, we cannot pretend that it doesn’t exist, it will only explode. So, we try at least. But, we are not state institutions. We start small and then the circle of friends becomes bigger and bigger. Our understanding of the public, which is basically ourselves, grew together with that notion of friends. So, no, you don’t have to work with everyone, but, it’s a test of how open you are. 

Are you going to be a closed hippy commune as a collective or you are going to be like very open, which doesn’t go anywhere either, like, I don’t know, a nation-state? I don’t think the nation-state is working anyway. So, it is realized on particular occurrences as well. How you build your collectivity is of course based on where you’re coming from. So, there’s no magic, it’s not a magic pill, and then there’s no recipe for it. Sometimes we let nature and time do the work. Those who are not supposed to be with us will fall out eventually. 

But, that is a fine balance as well. We also think of ourselves as a band that keeps on playing, and if someone is leaving, then the sound will change. If someone is coming, playing a different instrument, with different skills, then the sound will change, that’s why we’re also confusing, which we like to be. It’s kind of a balance of being open and trying to understand our role in the ecosystem. If there are too many parasites, it’s not good, if it’s too much of good things, it’s also not good. Like, everyone is giving, no one is taking, and that’s also not good. The balance is a matter of luck as well.

How do you deal with conflict? For example, if the three of us had to work together, and farid and I are both friends with Iswanto, but we don’t like each other.

farid rakun: In that case, it’s not healthy anymore, so we should either talk about it or go our separate ways. Maybe Iswanto has different strategies. Everyone has their strategies, and as a group, we found strategies to deal with ourselves. A lot of it is unsaid, and a lot of it is said as well, even the difficult things. It’s actually about the genius of Iswanto to make things work. And we’re lucky that we have these roles a lot of times.

Iswanto Hartono: Sometimes we talk about it in groups, but some things have never been said. But behind all of that, there is the working concept: tolerance. It’s tolerance that can sustain an ecosystem or collective or a friendship, and that’s very hard to find nowadays. In our case, tolerance has a long durability. All the time, there are disputes or whatever.

farid rakun: There are many of us, there have been so many conflicts between us.

Iswanto Hartono: Tolerance is very important.

How do you approach trust as a collective? Especially in collaborations with new contacts, how do you trust someone you don’t know?

farid rakun: There are different strategies. Again, it’s about time. You have to invest the time with each other to trust each other. There’s no shortcut for it, unfortunately. You have to build it, earn it, test it by joking around, and then, after a while, we know how far we can trust someone. That’s how we deal with people, including myself. I just don’t know how people trust me, in ruangrupa or Gudskul. But I believe that people have ways to deal with me, I just don’t know how and I never asked. Different collectives, like Jatiwangi art Factory, have different ways of doing this, even Serrum and ruangrupa have different ways of dealing with this. It is the sensibilities that grew up with the people that were there, to begin with. and you get better at reading signs of who not to trust, who to trust, their agendas, and so on. After a while, you know as a collective, not necessarily as an individual. After a while, giving time, then you know.  

Iswanto Hartono: With a positive mind. If you don’t have it, you won’t have trust, because then you’ll think like – Petra, maybe we shouldn’t talk to her. There is energy as well. A positive mindset is very important in this part of our ecosystem. It’s in our culture as well, many Indonesians if they have an accident, or get robbed, will say it’s still good because one has lost only this. When you fall, it’s okay, because you only broke one hand, but not the other. It’s about cherishing even the worst that will happen.

Trust is also connected to one of the lumbung values – the value of generosity, right?

Iswanto Hartono: It’s that too.

A lot of your work includes playfulness. How do you combat nihilism and cynicism in your approach? How do you keep a balance between playfulness and seriousness?

farid rakun: When it comes to cynicism, I’m guilty. I’m privileged to be surrounded by optimistic people, so I can bask in my nihilism and can be reminded by others that I don’t have to be that way. I think it’s a certain type of intelligence that some people have, like Reza Afisina, Ade Darmawan, or Daniella Praptono, they keep on going. I admire them because I cannot do that, but what they do is contagious. I know my point of view is not the only point of view, that’s why it’s refreshing. We are very serious in our playfulness. We have to fight for it, we have to be very forceful in that. It’s not that we don’t take things seriously, but we have to find joy because it’s too easy to fall into despair and guilt. A lot of cultures in the world came from big guilt. Not only religion, religion is a product of it, but we find it to be surprising how big of a downer the guilt is.

Iswanto Hartono: It’s so tiring to think of cynicism. I never bother with what people say. As a collective, I don’t know how we deal with it. We always make a joke about the problem, it can spiral and go somewhere, even if it’s not related. We always try to keep the positive energy, the jokes are a part of it, and sometimes the joke is very bad. But that’s what keeps balancing the cynicism or the hate or whatever, it’s the most common way of dealing with it.

farid rakun: Yes, it’s about humor.

How do you imagine our collective planetary future?

farid rakun: I have no idea. Imagine realistically, or what I hope for? I’m talking personally now. It changed when I realized I have responsibility for other people’s lives, having a child. That forced me to have hope. Our planetary future is bleak, but I hope that small but many can bring much more generosity and humor and less guilt, that would help us. Also, because you said planetary, it’s not about humanity, I think it will find its balance. It’s an ecosystem, whether it includes us, human beings, or not. I have no idea. There are too many elements that I don’t know with my limited knowledge. Hopefully, it will be joyful, which is very difficult to find these days. The pandemic made it even worse, it’s like we cannot be happy anymore or something.

Iswanto Hartono: With the planetary, I hope the humor carries over because in Germany the humor is very dry. So it will be more joyful. The future will also be more joyful, I believe. I don’t prepare too much thinking of the next year or five or ten, that’s too far.

Ponovno smo se susreli prošlog ljeta 2022. godine kad smo mi kao učenici ruangrupe oformili kolektiv an office, a naši su nas učitelji u zadnji čas ljubazno uvrstili u jedan od programa documente fifteen. Tamo sam imala privilegiju provesti dva tjedna unutar Gudkitchen, projekta edukativne platforme Gudskul koju su 2018. godine u Jakarti uz ruangrupu osnovali umjetnički kolektivi Serrum i Grafis Huru Hara. Gudskul je u Kasselu prenamijenio prostorije muzeja Fridericianum u zajedničku spavaonicu i kuhinju, stvorivši popularno mjesto za druženje i nova prijateljstva. 

U ovom su razgovoru farid rakun i Iswanto Hartono nesebično i dugo odgovarali na moja beskonačna pitanja, od problema umjetničke mobilnosti, vlasništva, financiranja i birokracije, preko utjecaja rada na documenti fifteen na njih, njihov lokalni ekosustav i lumbung mrežu, odmora, ukorijenjenosti u domaće i lokalno, važnosti korištenja vlastitog jezika, do traume, konflikta i nezaobilaznog kolektivizma.

Rad na documenti fifteen uključivao je mnogo problema s vizama unutar lumbung ekosustava koji ste stvorili okupljajući umjetničke kolektive i umjetnike iz cijelog svijeta. Možete li mi reći više o problemima umjetničke mobilnosti iz perspektive Indonezije i suradnje s drugim bivšim kolonijama?

farid rakun: To nije nešto što umjetnički svijet, izložba ili događanje može riješiti, radi se o trgovinskoj logici. Za nas kao nositelje indonezijske putovnice je ovo uvijek izazov i kroz proces smo uvidjeli da, naravno, nismo sami u tom iskustvu, ali najdalje što možemo ići je da radimo pritisak u vezi tih problema u institucionalnom djelovanju ili kroz rad s institucijama. Ja i svi mi kao grupa trebamo pronaći strategije planiranja logistike oko ove činjenice, jer koliko god ambasade bile darežljive, ruke su im svejedno vezane. Možda jedino što možemo je učiniti tu stvarnost vidljivom.

Iswanto Hartono: Neki misle da je to lako, ali onda se mobilnost ne dogodi. Kao u slučaju Sourabh Phadke s vizom za Ujedinjeno Kraljevstvo koja ne bi trebala biti komplicirana, UK nije konfliktno područje i ne radi se o slučaju islamofobije, no svejedno ima imigracijsku politiku. Zaista smo se trudili, i činjenica je da nismo mogli gurati više od truda koji smo već mjesecima ulagali, i nije se uspjelo dogoditi.

farid rakun: Ne znam koliko je snažna ili korisna hrvatska putovnica, ali onima koji imaju jaku putovnicu, zaista je teško to shvatiti. Primjerice, moja supruga ima američku i australsku putovnicu i njoj je teško razumjeti koliko iscrpljujuće mogu biti prijavnice za vizu za nekoga s putovnicom poput indonezijske. Isto se događa s institucijama iz zemalja s jakim putovnicama, u mnogim slučajevima njihova administracija nema razumijevanja. Katkad im je jasno da će biti komplicirano, ali podcjenjuju koliko će težak taj proces zaista biti.

Iswanto Hartono: To nije bio samo slučaj s documentom fifteen. Izvedbeni umjetnik Agus Nur Amal PMTOH je prije mjesec dana bio pozvan u UK na turneju, bilo je rezervirano pet lokacija, ali nije dobio vizu s kojom bi mogao ući u UK. To nije samo Schengen, već i UK i SAD.

farid rakun: I Australija. A tu je još i COVID-19 koji je gadno pogodio imigracijske službe. I Ministarstvo vanjskih poslova i ostali koji imaju dozvolu izdavati vize, sve je zakrčeno. Do danas, za nas s indonezijskim putovnicama red čekanja traje dva mjeseca za Šengensku vizu, i to samo uz najavu.

Na koji je način rad na documenti fifteen promijenio situaciju umjetničkog ekosustava u Jakarti i način na koji danas radite?

Iswanto Hartono: Mislim da nije mnogo. Možda ne kao u Europi, jer je u Indoneziji samo mali dio društva primijetio da smo išli u Kassel. Biti dio documente fifteen ovdje nije postalo privilegijom. Naravno, utjecalo je na naš način rada, naši su se odnosi kroz lumbung mrežu proširili i tu smo privilegirani u tome da se eksponiramo, stvaramo prijateljstva i mreže i zajedno njegujemo. Tako dobivamo više – kad imamo više prijatelja, možemo imati više partnera za raspravu i razvoj ideja. Primjerice, Farid će ići u Zagreb, spirala ide dalje. Ali u Indoneziji to nije utjecalo mnogo na naš rad i iznutra se nismo puno promijenili. Potpuno je obrnut slučaj od pažnje i eksponiranja u Europi.

farid rakun: Odgovor na ovo pitanje ima više stupnjeva i razina. Najprije, kao Gudskul smo počeli krajem 2018. godine, pitanja koja smo tada imali ostala su ista krajem 2022., kada je završila documenta fifteen. Izazovi su se vratili, a mi nismo bili u boljoj formi nego prije. 

Zatim, na razini institucija i vlade – ovo je smiješno, ali događa se mnogim Indonežanima, kao i u drugim kontekstima. Mi radimo istu stvar već 23 godine, ali tek je odnedavno ljudima na pozicijama moći dozvoljeno da nam se približe. Primjerice, ministarstva legitimaciju za suradnju s nama po pitanjima strukture nalaze u tome što smo radili documentu fifteen. Dakle, njihova namjera da koriste lumbung s nama, da nas pozovu kako bismo pokušali osmisliti bolju strukturu, postoji još ranije od documente. Te se stvari događaju, a sad koliko je to korisno, vidjet ćemo s vremenom. Takve stvari trebaju vremena da bi sazrele. To mijenja perspektivu, no kako Iswanto kaže, u svakodnevnom životu nikog nije briga. Za mene, koji provodim vrijeme u Jakarti, kad odem u Nacionalnu galeriju ili Nacionalni muzej, ljudi me prepoznaju, ili znaju za ruangrupu, ali ne svi. To je zapravo osvježavajuće, puno bolje nego u Kasselu. Tamo nas prepoznaju na ulici. Naravno da i to ima svoje pozitivne strane, ali ja volim biti nevidljiv. Cijenim to.

Odbijanje nije izravno u indonezijskoj kulturi, i u intervjuima ste se šalili da je razlog zbog kojeg ste prihvatili rad s Documentom taj što reći “ne” nije pristojno. Je li ruangrupi danas lakše reći “ne”?

farid rakun: Nama kao Indonežanima ili kao ruangrupi je zaista teško reći “ne”, jer to nije lijepo, ružno je odbijati stvari i govoriti “ne”. Da, postoje načini kako reći “ne”, ili, ako bi nas indonezijska vlada tražila da nešto učinimo, moja prva reakcija bi bila da kažem “ne”, ali na sreću, mnogo bi me puta drugi ljudi razuvjerili. Danas nalazimo više načina za reći “ne”. Primjerice, vratimo se na vize, lakše nam je pristati na suradnju u onim kontekstima u kojima nema prijavnice za vizu. Naravno, to je možda 20% ili manje zemalja na svijetu – što smanjuje mogućnosti, no to je jedan od načina. Tu je i ekstraktivnost, razgovarali smo o tome i s drugima i interno, te imali slučajeve gdje ne postoji standardna procedura. Postali smo svjesniji ekstraktivnih praksi i načina kako se nositi s njima. Reći “ne” je možda zadnje što ćemo učiniti, ali u dolaženju do “ne”, u tome postajemo sve bolji. Ili, kako pregovarati s ekstraktivnošću i učiniti da druga strana to shvati, pretvoriti je u nešto što je manje ekstraktivno, ako ne i neekstraktivno, ako je moguće.

Što vas je rad na documenti fifteen naučio o odmoru?

Iswanto Hartono: Nije bilo pauze, i to je zapravo najgore. Jako je teško. Moje osobno iskustvo je bilo toliko intenzivno, dvije godine do početka documente, zatim sto dana documente, i onda nakon. Sad smo se naviknuli – ne znam za ostatak grupe, ali ja nikad nisam imao pravi odmor, kao, radiš mjesec dana i onda imaš dva tjedna odmora, naravno, imao sam odmor, ali ne planirani odmor. Ako nemam nešto za raditi, možda odlučim otići negdje blizu, ili posjetiti obitelj. Naravno, trudimo se imati pauze, ali navikli smo na to, i u Gudskulu također, razlika između rada i sastanaka te opuštanja nije velika, sve je pomiješano. Nongkrong (praksa druženja) je opušteniji, ali ponekad je veoma intenzivan. Katkad iz njega nastane ozbiljna diskusija, ali to je način na koji radimo.

farid rakun: Ima tu puno toga. Prvo je uzimanje pauze i bivanje neproduktivnima. Drugo je sporost, polagani tempo. Kako kaže Iswanto, u praksama poput naše to je izazov. Također, i u mojim osobnim odnosima i životu je to dosad bio izazov. Mi se borimo za to da umjetnost – ako se smatra radom, profesijom – i život ne bi trebali biti odvojeni, ili bi trebali biti manje odvojeni, ali ne autonomni. Kao posljedica toga, sve je zajedno izmiješano. Onda to postaje izazov – ne samo interno između nas, nego i u našim osobnim životima. Različiti ljudi imaju različite strategije. Nongkrong je postao posao. I ja sam bio takav, nisam uzimao odmor, mi to ne radimo jer je naš rad zapravo život, to je često ono što trebamo. Ne financijski, jer se financijski osobno borimo kako bismo si mogli priuštiti kolektivni rad, ali onda uživamo u tom radu. U okviru rada i odmora, to postane previše ugodno, pa radimo cijelo vrijeme. 

Prije nisam imao odmor, ne razumijem kako se to radi. Kad pokušam, tijelo i mozak mi se opuste, moje tijelo se skrši i razbolim se. Mislim da sam znao da se trebam odmoriti nakon documente fifteen pa sam upravo na godišnjem, odmarao sam se do sad. Još uvijek sam tata koji ostaje kod kuće – iz indonezijske perspektive, to mnogi ne mogu, jer naš sustav i struktura to ne omogućuju, pa sam u privilegiranoj poziciji. Također je privilegija da radim s ljudima koji to razumiju i podržavaju – i što nisam jedini, posljednji ni prvi takav slučaj.

Ali što se tiče sporosti: s iskustvom documente fifteen, znali smo da se trebamo boriti za tu sporost. Kolektivni rad nije efikasan ni učinkovit, u filozofiji kasnog kapitalizma to nije ispravan način rada, postoje brži, jači načini, traži se rast. Naš način rada nije takav – nažalost, ili na sreću. Možda se mi ne moramo boriti za sporost jer mi živimo na taj način, nego samo trebamo učiniti da drugi ljudi to razumiju i držati se tog korijena.

Viđate li već aproprijaciju kolektivizma u umjetničkom svijetu?

Iswanto Hartono: Ja ne čitam puno vijesti.

farid rakun: Nada je jedna stvar, a realnost druga. Ponekad živimo u eho komori i ne vidimo druge realnosti. Možda se radi o trendu, nadamo se da nije tako. Nadamo se da je to dobro ako dovede do određenog zamaha, ako pomogne kolektivnom načinu rada, ako je documenta fifteen pomogla da kolektivni način rada bude vidljiviji. I nadamo se da se ne radi samo o trendu. No, mnogi nam dolaze jer razvijamo istu stvar 23 godine, pa nam je teško vidjeti da se radi o trendu. Ljudi nas upozoravaju da budemo toga svjesni, pa se nadam da nam to može koristiti, a ne nas iskoristiti. Teško je održati tu ravnotežu.

Čak i prije documente fifteen smo shvatili, možda zato što smo kolektiv, možda zbog toga što dolazimo iz određenog konteksta – određene pozadine, biografije, zemlje itd. – u umjetničkom svijetu, kao i u mnogim drugima, naravno, doživjeli smo aproprijaciju. Čak i prije documente fifteen. Zato smo pozvali Documentu da bude dio lumbung putovanja, jer smo toga svjesni.

Iswanto Hartono: Osjećamo da postoji više interesa za kolektivizam. Mnogi nam dolaze s interesom za kolektivne prakse i suradnje. Primjetio sam da se u školi u Hamburgu, na mnogim plakatima u gradu, u galerijama ponavljaju riječi “kuhinja” i “karaoke”, na svakom su plakatu. Također i “kuhanje” i “zajednička dobra”. Primjetio sam to više puta.

U sklopu documente fifteen započeli ste mnoge incijative. Kako ide s lumbung mrežom? Što je s lumbung Gallery, lumbung Pressom i lumbung.space?

Iswanto Hartono: lumbung Press posljednjih mjeseci radi jako puno. Otkad su se preselili u Barcelonu došli su dvaput u Hamburg, a sad će ići na Miss Read Book Fair u Berlinu. Dobili su i dvije godine financiranja od Helsinkija. lumbung Gallery je još uvijek u raspravi o resursima i održivosti, pa nije tako aktivna. lumbung.space je, naravno, aktivan. lumbung Land je aktiviran u Jatiwangiju i u Maroku i planiraju turneju uskoro, ići će u Libanon i u Jatiwangi.

farid rakun: Pa lumbung Indonesia…

Iswanto Hartono: Prošli tjedan je bio veliki majelis (sastanak na kojem se donose odluke) u Zapadnoj Sumatri.

farid rakun: To je pojas za spašavanje koji trebamo sačuvati. Možda znaš da se lumbung nastavlja na različitim mjestima na različite načine, nije nužno da sve direktno uključuje nas. Ponekad za njih znamo, nerijetko pak za njih saznamo kad nas se tagira na društvenim mrežama. Ideja nije da je sve centralizirano oko nas. Moramo biti iskreni oko toga da imamo ograničenu energiju – energija i vrijeme nisu neograničeni resursi.

Stoga, ako se držimo strategije maleni, ali mnogi, onda se pitamo što se može dogoditi dalje sa lumbung-interlokal, na primjer. Još uvijek ne znamo – nije da ne znamo, ima puno ideja, teško je… Upozorili su nas na to umjetnici koji su sudjelovali u prijašnjim izdanjima Documente, njihovi umjetnički direktori i kustosi, da će stvari biti drugačije i teške nakon documente. 

Tražili smo puno i od umjetnika, bilo je puno majelisa. Trebalo nam je da se ponovno dobijemo. Trebamo biti svjesni razine energije kod ljudi, i mislim da se ta energija još nije vratila. Sad je vrijeme da budemo spori, pogotovo ja. Možda ću u rujnu, nakon godinu dana, moći ponovno gledati izložbe, trenutno sam još uvijek preumoran od suvremene umjetnosti.

Obrazovnu platformu Gudskul osnovali ste 2018 .godine u Jakarti zajedno s kolektivima Serrum i Grafis Huru Hara. Što se trenutno događa u Gudskulu?

farid rakun: Gudskul je od listopada održao oko 40 majelisa – ima mnogo stvari koje moramo svi zajedno odlučiti i za to koristimo majelise, a ne radne grupe. Imamo radne grupe, ali odluke donosimo na majelisima. Vjerujem da se radi o napornom procesu jer nisam dio velikog dijela toga. Također je i zabavno. Mislim da mnogi od nas uživaju u tom procesu jer je drugačiji. To je nešto što nadilazi maštu nas kao individua. Mislim da se svi slažemo u tome da se Gudskul nastavlja, i sudeći po energiji koju osjećam do danas, znamo da se radi o nečemu dovoljno vrijednom da bismo to održali. Stoga, pitanje je kako nastaviti. Ima puno odgovora, ali vidjet ćemo kojim ćemo putem zajedno ići.

Što se događa u razgovorima o financijskoj stabilnosti ekosustava, možete li podijeliti s nama neke odluke koje su donesene?

farid rakun: Kontinuirano eksperimentiramo s financijskom stabilnošću. Nismo pronašli odgovarajući model. Pokušali smo i zato nismo u boljem položaju od onog iz 2018. godine. Primjerice, pokušali smo plaćati mjesečne plaće, barem minimalac, za svaku osobu u Gudskulu sve do 2022. godine. To je bilo nemoguće za održati. Stoga, naša je kolektivna odluka da trenutno više nitko nije zaposlenik Gudskula. Možda zaštitari, čistači, administracija i održavanje, jer oni su naša okosnica i moramo im osigurati položaje, ali ne za nas ostale. Dobili smo otkaz. Otpustili smo jedni druge, otpustili smo sve i jedni druge.

Dijagram koji smo ranije koristili je zgodan kao dijagram, ali kao praksa je puno neuredniji. Trenutno učimo od iskustava s documentom fifteen i lumbungom da dobra ekonomija i financijska stabilnost trebaju biti u svakom elementu sustava. Nije moguće funkcionirati tako da poslovno krilo traži novac kako bi financiralo sve ostale – ta struktura može funkcionirati konceptualno, ali ne što se tiče podjele rada. Ne tako da smo Iswanto ili ja uvijek u potrazi za novcem, a da druga osoba uvijek stvara programe koji troše taj novac. Ako želim napraviti program, moram razmišljati i kako ću ga održati da bude pošteno. Stoga, tom trokutu može pomoći puno nas odjednom. Dakle, nismo razdijeljeni, nema odjela. 

Znači, radi se o puno malih biznisa?

farid rakun: Ili možda čak načina rada. Možda se ne radi o novcu. Možda se radi o suradnji sa susjedima, pa novac nije uključen. Jer resursi su tu. Stoga, radi se i o razmjerima – ako je nešto dovoljno malo, poput vođenja kućanstva u danima prije kapitalizma, često je zapravo provedivo. Naravno, tu je razmjena. Naravno, tu je dijeljenje i sva ta distribucija resursa. Novac ne mora biti jedini način da se to ostvari. Mislim da je to ono čemu idealno težimo.

Od 2018. vlasnici ste svog prostora Gudskul. Kako napreduje rad s vlasništvom unutar indonezijskog lumbunga, ima li drugih kolektiva koji su u procesu prema vlasništvu svojih prostora?

farid rakun: Mučimo se s time, vlasništvo, imovina i takve stvari. Postoji rizik da imovina bude teret, da nećemo biti fleksibilni, dovoljno okretni za mijenjanja, micanja, zbunjivanja – sve ono što volimo raditi. To je nešto što smo trebali učiniti, radi se o strategiji specifičnoj za Jakartu, jer Jakarta je slobodno tržište čije nekretnine imaju možda najvišu inflaciju na svijetu. Dok smo iznajmljivali prostor, trošili smo toliki postotak našeg godišnjeg budžeta da je bilo zaista neodrživo. Mi nismo jedini koji to rade. U mjestima poput Hong Konga gdje je najamnina veoma visoka, inicijativama je zaista teško održati svoje postojanje. Često ovaj trošak doprinosi unutarnjim konfliktima, pa se grupe raspadnu. 

Radi se o strategiji, nećemo reći da bi tako trebalo funkcionirati za sve. No, primjerice, za Jatiwangi art Factory, koji se bore za svoje zemljište, i za druge u lumbung Land radnoj grupi, to postaje njihov rad. Ne mislim da se uvijek radi o posjedovanju, nego o shvaćanju važnosti imovine – bivanja tamo, uzemljenosti – i načina na koje taj element vas i vašu praksu i vašu održivost može učiniti krhkom i prekarnom. Dakle, radi se o održivosti na višoj razini, ne samo financijskoj, nego čak i okolišnoj. Mislim da ima mnogo inicijativa u lumbung Indonesia koje znaju da su prekarne,  prva stvar koje se mogu uhvatiti kako bi postale održivijima zapravo je zemljište. Mogu reći i da neki drugi misle na takav način, bilo bi puno drugačije kad tržište nekretnina ne bi bilo slobodno tržište. Onda bi i borba i strategija bile drugačije. Ovo je ono što nam je ponuđeno, dobili smo limune i radimo limunadu. Stoga, ako su ovo naši limuni, što možemo od njih napraviti?

Iswanto Hartono: Jedan problem je kontekst područja u koja se ne ulaže, a drugi problem je zemljište. Kod Jatiwangi art Factory pokretač je moralnost, oni pokušavaju spasiti komad zemlje koji se nalazi između dvije velike tvornice. Žele ga sačuvati kako bi ga mogla koristiti čitava tamošnja zajednica. Također je bilo ideja s projektom Perhutana u kojem se bave povratom osam hektara zemlje za zaštićenu šumu. Etički je raditi da bi se sačuvalo, da bi se očuvalo ono što jest.

farid rakun: U Gudskulu imamo vlasništvo, ali moramo osigurati uvjete da se ono ne vrati na spekulativno tržište. Stoga smo s bilježnikom izmislili način zajedničkog posjedovanja. Država zahtijeva da na papiru jedna osoba ima vlasništvo. Kako bi nas više moglo potpisati papire, bilježnički smo morali izraditi takvu pravnu formu, koja nije samo naš izum.

Također smo saznali da mnoga mjesta u Indoneziji, kao i u Kolumbiji i u Novom Zelandu, imaju baštinsku zemlju ili tradicionalno posjedovanu zemlju koja se ne može lako prodati – vrlo ju je teško prodati na spekulativno tržište. Ne znam je li Jatiwangi art Factory u njihovom vlasništvu, ali znam da u Zapadnoj Sumatri postoji nešto poput statusa vlasništva baštinskog zemljišta i vjerujem da to trebaju istražiti i iskoristiti za svoje dobro. Mislim da zemljišta možemo sačuvati s tom tradicijom i postojećim ranije spomenutim pravnim instrumentom.

Kakav je status i borba kulturnih radnika u Indoneziji, budući da je financiranje slabo ili nepostojeće? Postoje li inicijative da se to stanje promjeni? 

farid rakun: Mislim da se to promijenilo, i da se država pokušava promijeniti. Ponekad na bolje, ponekad na lošije – ovdje nikad nije stabilno. Sve ovisi o strankama koje imaju moć, pretpostavljam kao i svugdje drugdje. Znamo da se na to ne možemo osloniti, ali koristimo to kad možemo. Prije nekoliko godina konačno smo dobili zakladu s fondovima za indonezijske umjetnike. Kako ih koristiti je druga stvar, ali bitno je da se pokušavaju promijeniti.  

Donositelji odluka čak pokušavaju s dijalogom, razumiju da su dosad igrali krive uloge i da nadmetanje s nečim što je već tu, s nezavisnom scenom (grassroots), ne može funkcionirati, pa pokušavaju promijeniti svoju ulogu u podršku. Neće stvarati nova događanja, nego će podržati ona postojeća. Jedan primjer, a vrijeme će reći je li to dobro ili nije: shvatili su da lumbung kao koncept može biti koristan, pa su nam se obratili kako bi iskoristili naše iskustvo i učili od nas. Pozvali su nas kako bi nas uključili u donošenje odluka. Nije to ništa bajno, radi se o pregovaranju.

Situacija se mijenja, pogotovo u odnosu na 2000. godinu kad smo počeli, a i zbog toga što se i Indonezija mijenja. Ekonomska moć, upravljanje Indonezijom, sve se trenutno pomiče. Više nije točno reći da nema državnog financiranja. To je bilo točno 2000. godine, ali sad je drugačije. Naravno da nije dovoljno, ali što je dovoljno? Nitko nema dovoljno, čak ni Norveška.

U vašem radu koristite common pot kao sredstvo za dijeljenje resursa. Razmatraju li institucije common pot kao model financiranja?

farid rakun: Ne, ne idu tim smjerom. Čak je i pred nama duga, duga borba. Učimo. Trenutno stanje našeg common pot u Gudskulu rezultat je rada na njemu od 2016. godine, tako da to nije nešto nastalo preko noći. Uz vladu, birokraciju i sve to, puno je bitnije da jedni druge vidimo kao resurse i ne mislimo jedni o drugima kao o konkurenciji. Trebamo misliti o tome kako ostvariti naše moguće uloge u ekosustavu umjesto da svakoga vidimo kao ribu. Sve to ovisi o ribnjaku – znaš tu analogiju o velikoj ribi u malom ribnjaku ili o maloj ribi u velikom. Ali oni su svi ribe, nitko ne bi htio biti žaba, nitko ne želi biti parazit. Treba shvatiti da mnogo ljudi nešto radi lokalno, i da ne moramo izmišljati stvari zbog nekakvih noviteta ili genija.

Postoji li dostupna podrška od vaše vlade za umjetničku mobilnost, u slučaju da naše organizacije žele pozvati indonezijske umjetnike?

farid rakun: Ako nas pozovete, postoje kombinacije s našim Ministarstvom. Pitanje je želimo li ići tim putem. 

Spomenuli ste da pristupate prijavnicama za financiranje i institucionalnim ugovorima kao fikciji ili umjetničkom djelu – kako taj pristup funkcionira u različitim zemljama?

farid rakun: Naša dugogodišnja prijateljica i članica umjetničkog tima documente fifteen, Gertrude Flentge rekla je: “Birokracija je oblik nepovjerenja.”

Iswanto Hartono: Dvije su ključne stvari za ovaj proces. Jedna je promjena osnovne ideje akvizicije umjetničkog rada, a druga je veći dobitak za umjetnike. Ohrabrili smo mnogo umjetnika, pogotovo u kolektivnom obliku, da izbjegnu stvaranje novih djela i da umjesto toga nastave ono što već rade. Što se tiče produkcije, puno smo pregovarali, čak i oko dopravljenih (upcycled) materijala na documenti fifteen. Učinili smo da ta praksa postane dio produkcijske strukture, što je već bila praksa Documente, ali ne na ovom nivou.

Mi gradimo mreže koje nas podržavaju, a one ovo mogu koristiti. Prošlog mjeseca je El Warcha došla s festivala u Frankfurtu gdje su podržavali produkciju drugog kolektiva, pa su koristili svoje reciklirane materijale. Mi smo time u sklopu documente fifteen utjecali na produkcijske troškove i strukturu birokracije, a da njena arhitektura i dizajn nisu rađeni s nekime izvana. Tu je i web stranica, prije su imali jednu, a sad imamo tri, i trebalo nam je dulje od godinu dana da ih uvjerimo da to promijene. I pregovori oko publikacije su trajali dosta dugo.

Vaša praksa je snažno smještena u dom – kako se to odnosi na umjetnost kao svakodnevnu praksu i na ideju da svatko može biti umjetnik?

Iswanto Hartono: Pojmovi “lokalno” i “sidro” su nam vrlo bitni, i otud dolazi naša praksa, to nas prati posljednje 23 godine, tu su se razvile naša energija i naše misli. Nongkrong dolazi iz ovog konteksta, konteksta prostora, a u slučaju Jakarte, vrlo prijepornog prostora u ekonomskom i političkom smislu, tijekom Novog poretka dom je bio najpristupačniji prostor u kojem možemo biti domaćini ili gosti. Vi u Europi imate drugačiji kontekst.

farid rakun: Gudskul dio u muzeju Friedericianum koji je tijekom documente fifteen pretvoren u zajedničku spavaonicu i kuhinju bila je najrecentnija manifestacija toga. Na razini kućnog i intimnog, odavde dolaze naši osjećaji i o tome moramo biti iskreni. Za nas je to jedan od izvora energije koju pokušavamo prenijeti, otuda dolazimo. Zato i nazivamo svoje projekte ruruHaus, zato su Iswanto i Reza Afisina stvorili puno dnevnih boravaka. Trenutno planiramo još jedan javni dnevni boravak u Jakarti za listopad, a zanimljivo je da ustvari izraz “dnevni boravak” nema direktan prijevod na indonezijski jezik. Koristimo “ruang tamu”, ali to je skoro kao gostinjska soba. Ali koncept dnevnog boravka pokazuje koliko nam je bitna naša podloga jer otud dolazimo i to za nas nastavlja funkcionirati.  Ideja da svatko može biti umjetnik – to je za nas previše u stilu Josepha Beuysa. Mislim da nije bitno je li netko umjetnik ili nije.

Koristite mnoge pojmove na indonezijskom jeziku poput nongkrong, lumbung, majelis. Koliko vam je bitno korištenje vašeg jezika u vašem radu?

farid rakun: Puno je iskrenije. U indonezijskom koristimo jezik kao prečicu, što kraće možemo izraziti ono što mislimo, to bolje. Ako možemo značenje sabiti u jednu riječ, koristimo ju. Mislim da lumbung funkcionira na taj način, jer svi u Indoneziji znaju što je to, pa kad kažemo lumbung, svi znaju o čemu se radi. Prijevod može biti povod rasprave, ali pokušavamo napraviti prečicu, o tome se radi. Nismo namjeravali prenijeti ga u drugi kontekst, ali iskreno, ne znamo boljih prečica za lumbung. Izraz zajednička dobra ne funkcionira tako dobro, kad ga koristimo to nas zbunjuje jer nismo sigurni o čemu govorimo. 

Puno stvari nije prevodivo. U nekom smo trenutku shvatili da se trebamo boriti za jezik, jer smo kroz njega kolonizirani. Izuzeti smo iz svojeg konteksta i prisiljeni na učenje svih tih teorija i žanrova u umjetničkom svijetu – impresionizam, što to uopće znači? Ekspresionizam, i tako dalje, to nije nešto s čime smo odrasli, a prisiljeni smo o tome učiti, pa možda možemo jednom mi zaokrenuti priču.

ruangrupa postoji od 2000. godine. Kako napreduje vaš proces arhiviranja?

Iswanto Hartono: Dobri smo, ali i jako loši u tome. Arhiviramo, ali nismo organizirani. Nedavno smo počeli razgovarati o pripremama za našu 25. godišnjicu u 2025. godini i jedna od glavnih tema te diskusije je arhiv. Sad trebamo početi raditi na njemu, sagledati i posjetiti našu arhivu, ali je u isto vrijeme trebamo i organizirati.

Nalazite li poveznice između traume, zacjeljivanja i kolektivnosti?

farid rakun: Nekoliko puta smo se upitali: Zašto smo se kolektivizirali? Zašto trajemo ovoliko dugo? Zašto drugi ne traju toliko dugo? Bismo li trebali trajati dulje od onih najduljih prije nas? Ako ne, trebamo li nestati i predati štafetu drugima. Možda ne trebamo trajati ovoliko dugo, bar ne kao skup individua. Možda Gudskul može potrajati, ali ne mi. Analogija koju koristimo kaže da je stvaranje kolektiva kao splav za spašavanje. Želimo ići negdje zajedno i moramo proći određene zapreke, pa se onda nalazimo i gradimo splav zajedno. Proces kolektiviziranja je proces u kojem je gradimo i u kojem se krećemo kroz svijet. Ponekad susrećemo druge ljude koji trebaju spašavanje, ili koji žele ići u istom smjeru. No, kriza često završava kad dođemo do cilja. Ako je kriza gotova, često nema više razloga za kolektiviziranjem.

Mi se razlikujemo po tome što nas je nekolicina znala, kad smo došli do cilja, da nam to nije dovoljno – to zapravo nije bilo naše odredište. Tako da su krize nastavile dolaziti, ali na drugačiji način. Pa smo postali Gudang Sarinah, pa Gudskul. Promijenili smo oblik, promijenili smo kuće, programe, stvarali smo drugačije stvari, jer kriza nikad nije prestala. Ne znam ima li tu traume i zacjeljivanja, jer ljudi koji su mlađi oko nas i nisu direktno iskusili Novi poredak – ako govorimo o Novom poretku kao traumi koju trebamo zacijeliti – još uvijek stvaraju kolektive iz razloga koje ne možemo shvatiti. Stoga, možda kriza još uvijek traje. 

Jedan od načina za razmišljanje o krizi je podrška – to jest, infrastruktura i sustav. Kad toga nema ili kad se radi o manjku određenih stvari, to znači da je kriza tu. Tada dolazi do potrebe za stvaranjem inicijativa, neovisno o tome žele li se nazvati kolektivom ili nečim drugim. Suradnja s drugima, kad je sistematizirana, kad je infrastruktura nešto što smo izgradili zajedno i funkcionira, tada možda kolektivnost o kojoj govorimo nestaje ili nije više potrebna. Vi trebate stvoriti vlastiti oblik kolektivnosti i mi se veselimo naučiti iz toga, iz balkanske kolektivnosti.

Iswanto Hartono: Prije dva tjedna sam putovao u Aceh, jedno od konfliktnih područja u Indoneziji, tamo su i tijekom kolonijalnih dana najdulje ratovali s Nizozemcima. Sukobili su se čak i sa Sukarnom, htjeli su nezavisnost. Rat je bio i tijekom režima Novog poretka, rat je tamo bio jako dugo do nedavno, kad se separatistički pokret primirio i sklopio sporazum s vladom. Primijetio sam da tamo ima mnogo traume, čak i kod mlađe generacije. Za mene se radi o skrbi, o pitanju brige, ali tamo su mi se otvorila mnoga pitanja. Kontekst je enorman i nisam imao odgovora za to, za traumatiziranu zajednicu oštećenu ratom i nasiljem. Indonezija je kolektivno vrlo poznata i po nasilju. Čak i riječ amok dolazi iz Indonezije i označava ljutnju, korijen joj dolazi iz pobuna i nasilnih ratova između plemena, a sve su to bile kolektivne akcije. Tako da imamo paradoks, prakticiramo kolektivnu skrb, ali i imamo i nasilnu stranu koja je isto kolektivna. Obje strane su tu, i kolektivno dobro i kolektivno zlo.

Često kad spominjem vaš rad prijateljima na Balkanu, dobivam odgovor “Ali ja ne želim morati raditi ili družiti se sa svima”. Znači li za vas kolektivnost obavezu suradnje sa svima?

farid rakun: Možemo to shvatiti kao susjedstvo ili kao ekosustav, ne biramo vrste koje dolaze u naš ekosustav. Ali trebamo se time baviti, ne možemo se praviti da ne postoji, jer će onda cijeli sustav eksplodirati. Tako da barem pokušavamo. Ali, mi nismo državne institucije. Što se tiče ljudi, počinjemo s malim, a onda krug prijatelja raste i raste. Naše shvaćanje javnosti – koju ustvari činimo mi – raslo je s idejom prijateljstva. Stoga, ne morate surađivati sa svima, ali to je test vaše otvorenosti. Hoćete li biti zatvorena hipijevska komuna kao kolektiv, ili ćete biti vrlo otvoreni, što isto ne vodi nikamo, poput, ne znam, države-nacije? Vjerujem da država-nacija ionako ne funkcionira. 

Stoga, kolektiv se ostvaruje temeljem pojedinačnih pojava. Način na koji se gradi kolektivnost zasniva se na vašim motivima. Tako da nema magije, kolektivnost nije čarobna pilula, i ne postoji recept za nju. Mi ponekad volimo pustiti da vrijeme i priroda odrade svoje. Oni koji ne trebaju biti s nama će s vremenom otpasti. Ali radi se o finoj ravnoteži. Također možemo sebe zamisliti kao bend koji nastavlja svirati, a kad netko ode, zvuk se mijenja. Ako netko dođe s drugačijim instrumentima, drugačijim vještinama, zvuk će se promijeniti, i zato znamo zbunjivati ljude, i u tome uživamo. Radi se o ravnoteži između bivanja otvorenim i pokušaja razumijevanja naše uloge u ekosustavu. Ako ima previše parazita, nije dobro, ako je previše dobrih stvari, ni to nije dobro. Ako svi daju, a nitko ne uzima, to isto ne valja. Ravnoteža je i pitanje sreće.

Kako se nosite s konfliktom? Na primjer, ako nas troje moramo surađivati, i farid i ja smo oboje prijatelji s Iswantom, ali ne sviđamo se jedno drugom.

farid rakun: U tom slučaju situacija nije zdrava i o njoj bismo trebali razgovarati ili se razdvojiti. Možda Iswanto ima drugačije strategije. Svi imaju različite strategije, mi smo kao grupa našli načine da se nosimo sami sa sobom. Puno toga je neizgovoreno, ali puno toga je i izgovoreno, čak i teške stvari. Zapravo je pitanje Iswantova genija kako ta situacija može funkcionirati, i mi često imamo sreće u tome da ljudi preuzmu takve uloge.

Iswanto Hartono: Ponekad razgovaramo o tome unutar grupe, ali postoje stvari koje nikad nisu izrečene. No, ispod svega toga leži koncept tolerancije. Tolerancija može održati ekosustav ili kolektiv ili prijateljstvo, i to se danas teško nalazi. U našem slučaju tolerancija traje jako dugo. Cijelo vrijeme ima prepirki ili čega već.

farid rakun: Nas ima mnogo, imali smo toliko konflikata između sebe.

Iswanto Hartono: Tolerancija je vrlo važna.

Kako pristupate povjerenju kao kolektiv? Pogotovo me to zanima kod suradnji s novim kontaktima – kako vjerujete nekom koga ne poznajete?

farid rakun: Postoje različite strategije. Opet, radi se o vremenu. Treba uložiti vrijeme u odnos kako bi se razvilo povjerenje. Nažalost, ne postoji prečica. Treba ga izgraditi, zaslužiti, testirati kroz šalu, i onda, nakon nekog vremena, znamo koliko možemo nekom vjerovati. Na taj se način nosimo s ljudima, uključujući i mene. Ne znam odakle dolazi povjerenje u mene u ruangrupi i Gudskulu. Ali vjerujem da ljudi imaju načine da se nose sa mnom, samo ne znam kako, i nisam nikad pitao. Različiti kolektivi, poput Jatiwangi art Factory imaju različite načine nošenja s ovim, i Serrum i ruangrupa imaju svoje načine. Radi se o osjetljivosti koja raste zajedno s ljudima koji su okupljeni od početka, i postajemo bolji u čitanju znakova kome vjerovati, kome ne, njihovim agendama itd. Nakon nekog vremena počnemo to razaznavati kao kolektiv, ne nužno kao individue. Nakon nekog vremena, nakon davanja vremena, znamo.

Iswanto Hartono: S pozitivnim stavom. Ako ga nemate, neće biti povjerenja, jer ćete onda razmišljati u stilu – možda ne bismo trebali razgovarati s Petrom. Tu je i energija. Pozitivan stav je vrlo bitan u ovom dijelu našeg ekosustava. Bitan je i u našoj kulturi, mnogi Indonežani, kad im se dogodi neka nesreća ili ih netko pokrade, reći će da je svejedno sve u redu jer smo izgubili samo ovo. Kad padnemo, u redu je, jer smo slomili samo jednu ruku, ali ne i drugu. Radi se o tome da cijenimo i ono najgore što nam se dogodi.

Povjerenje je također vezano uz jednu od lumbung vrijednosti – vrijednost velikodušnosti, zar ne?

Iswanto Hartono: Tako je.

Zaigranost se nalazi u velikom dijelu vašeg rada. Kako se nosite s nihilizmom i ciničnošću u vašem pristupu? Kako održavate ravnotežu između zaigranosti i ozbiljnosti?

farid rakun: Što se tiče ciničnosti, kriv sam. Imam sreće što sam okružen optimističnim ljudima pa mogu uživati u svom nihilizmu dok me drugi podsjećaju da ne moram biti takav. Mislim da se radi o određenom tipu inteligencije koju neki ljudi kao što su Reza Afisina ili Ade Darmawan ili Daniella Praptono imaju. Oni uvijek idu dalje, divim im se jer ja to ne mogu, ali to što oni rade je zarazno. Znam da moja perspektiva nije jedina, i zato je to osvježavajuće. Vrlo smo ozbiljni u svojoj zaigranosti. Moramo se za nju boriti i biti čvrsti u tome – nije da ne shvaćamo stvari ozbiljno, ali moramo naći radost jer je prelako prepustiti se očajavanju i pogotovo krivnji, mnoge svjetske kulture zasnivaju se na ogromnoj krivnji. Ne samo religija, religija je rezultat toga, ali iznenađuje nas koliko krivnja deprimira.

Iswanto Hartono: Naporno je razmišljati o ciničnosti. Nikad se ne mučim s onim što ljudi govore. Kao kolektiv, zapravo ne znam kako se bavimo time. Uvijek se šalimo na račun problema, onda priča naraste i može ići nekud, čak i u nepovezanom smjeru. Pokušavamo održati pozitivnu energiju, šala je dio toga, i ponekad su šale grozne. Ali trebaju nam da uravnotežimo ciničnost ili mržnju ili što već, tako to najčešće rješavamo.

farid rakun: Da, radi se o humoru.

Za kraj, kako zamišljate našu kolektivnu planetarnu budućnost?

farid rakun: Nemam pojma. Misliš realistično, ili čemu se nadamo? Sad govorim osobno, stvari su se promijenile kad sam dobio dijete i shvatio da imam odgovornost za tuđe živote. To me prisililo da se počnem nadati. Naša planetarna budućnost je turobna, ali nadam se da mali, ali mnogi mogu donijeti puno više velikodušnosti i humora i manje krivnje, to bi nam pomoglo. Također, budući da spominješ planetarno, dakle ne radi se o čovječanstvu, mislim da će doći do ravnoteže. To je ekosustav, hoće li uključivati i nas ljude, to ne znam. Ima previše elemenata koje moje ograničeno znanje ne pokriva. Nadam se da će budućnost biti radosna, a to je teško naći ovih dana. S pandemijom je postalo još gore, kao da više ne možemo biti sretni.

Iswanto Hartono: Što se tiče planetarnog, nadam se da će se humor proširiti, jer je humor u Njemačkoj vrlo suh. Tako da će biti veselije, a vjerujem da će i budućnost biti radosnija. Ne spremam se previše za budućnost razmišljajući o idućoj godini, ili pet ili deset godina, to mi je predaleko.

Ovaj članak objavljen je u sklopu projekta Ekosustavima uključive kulture koji je sufinanciran sredstvima Fonda za poticanje pluralizma i raznovrsnosti elektroničkih medija.

Iako postoje razne alternativne formi znanstvenog članka, u suvremenom sustavu znanosti ona predstavlja središnji način distribucije novog znanja. Znanost nije rad individualnih istraživača_ica, već je riječ o kolektivnom procesu sastavljenom od niza malih doprinosa. Posredovanje i komunikacija tih doprinosa su stoga izuzetno važni, što posljedično važnim čini i način funkcioniranja sustava znanstvenog izdavaštva, kao i poticaja koje ono generira. Da bi objavili članak u znanstvenom časopisu, znanstvenici_e ga trebaju napisati, stručni recenzenti iz relevantnog polja trebaju procijeniti vrijednost i pouzdanost istraživanja, urednici_e ga pak trebaju pripremiti za objavu itd. Međutim, zbog sustavnih razloga izdavači znanstvenih časopisa – poput Elseviera, Wileya ili Springera – rad na tom čitavom procesu plaćaju izrazito malo, ako ga uopće plaćaju, što im uz pomoć oligopolne pozicije na tržištu omogućuje goleme profitne marže, kao i nesrazmjeran i štetan utjecaj na znanstvenu proizvodnju.

Znanstvena istraživanja, plaće znanstvenih radnika i radnica i sveučilišne knjižnice uglavnom su financirane javnim sredstvima. Akademske radnice_i već godinama ukazuju da izdavači parazitiraju na javno financiranim istraživanjima, pritom naplaćujući sveučilištima i knjižnicama pretjerane naknade za pristup znanstvenim člancima koji su ionako rezultat njihova kolektivnog rada. Te naknade nerijetko pak onemogućuju pristup znanstvenim informacijama pojedincima_kama i institucijama s ograničenim proračunima, stvarajući informacijsku hijerarhiju u kojoj je pristup znanju određen ekonomskom moći. Za podsjetnik, o načinima na koje piratski arhivi poput Sci-huba omogućuju otvoreni pristup znanju na Kulturpunktu smo pisali u više navrata.

Zbog velikog pritiska za otvaranje pristupa znanju u posljednje vrijeme raste broj takozvanih open access časopisa, čiji model podrazumijeva dostupnost članaka svima, ubrzo nakon ili odmah po objavi. No umjesto da smanje vlastite profitne marže, izdavači u tom modelu troškove prebacuju na autore i autorice članaka, od kojih se očekuje da plaćaju troškove obrade vlastitih članaka. Ukratko, sve većem broju dionika postaje jasno da je sustav neodrživ.

Primjerice, u lipnju 2022. godine, urednici_e NeuroImagea, časopisa za snimanje mozga, službeno su zatražili da Elsevier smanji pristojbu za objavu članka ispod dvije tisuće dolara (tada je iznosila otprilike tri i pol tisuće). “Kako smanjenje nije ponuđeno, ponovno smo pisali u ožujku 2023. objašnjavajući da ćemo svi dati ostavke i pokrenuti novi časopis ako se pristojba ne smanji. U travnju je Elsevier svim urednicima odgovorio da pristojba za obradu članka neće biti smanjena jer vjeruju da tržišne snage podržavaju trenutnu cijenu”, navode urednici_e NeuroImagea u nedavnoj objavi za javnost povodom podnijetih ostavki.

Neuroimage je tako izgubio cijelo uredništvo nakon što je više od 40 znanstvenika i znanstvenica dalo otkaz u znak prosvjeda protiv pohlepe Elseviera. Urednice_i napomenuli su kako smatraju da su naknade neetične i nepravedne u usporedbi s troškovima uključenim u recenziju i uređivanje. Optužili su Elsevier da vrijeđa akademsku zajednicu i da znanosti malo toga doprinosi. Prema pisanju The Guardiana, Elsevier je prošle godine izvijestio o povećanju prihoda od 10 posto, na 2,9 milijardi funti. Razmjeru parazitiranja posebno svjedoči Elsevierova profitna marža od gotovo 40 posto, prema podacima  iz 2019. godine. 

Osim ekstrakcije golemih profita iz javnih sredstava, izdavačke kompanije nanose štetu funkcioniranju samog sustava znanosti. Uvođenjem profitnog motiva u sustav stvara se čitav niz štetnih poticaja. Primjerice, zbog prekarizacije akademskog rada zaposlenje mnogih radnika i radnica ovisi o proizvodnji i objavi znanstvenih članaka. No u pokušaju da budu relevantni, časopisi su skloni objavi tekstova koji se bave popularnim temama, što povratno diktira koja će znanstvena područja dobiti veću pozornost i financije. Dakle, umjesto da se o znanstvenim istraživanjima odlučuje na temelju javne potrebe, stvara se neefikasan sustav povratnih poticaja. Iako je ovo samo jedan od brojnih primjera koje je moguće navesti, dovoljno je za zaključiti kako profit nema mjesto u znanstvenom radu.

Ovaj članak objavljen je u sklopu projekta Ekosustavima uključive kulture koji je sufinanciran sredstvima Fonda za poticanje pluralizma i raznovrsnosti elektroničkih medija.

In the first text, we addressed the theoretical and practical possibilities of the idea of commons which originated in economics and spread into critical social theory and various activist movements across the globe. We looked at whether the commons are the future of social organizing, but didn’t take into account that they might already be the present. That may sound bombastic, but it needn’t be – the commons are a form of collective resource management, independent of the state or the market, so there is no reason for them not to coexist alongside the state and the market. They are often about practices that slide into areas which the state and the market don’t even deal with, as seen in examples on which economist Elinor Ostrom built her theory of the commons. But when people want to self-organize and manage resources without external control, it is rather likely that an external authority – say, a centralized state – will, to put it mildly, disagree with the idea.

It may therefore seem that the right to such freedom can only be won by small groups in exceptional situations, which would entail that the commons can only be found in smaller, exotic, perhaps theoretically interesting, but on a larger scale irrelevant cases. Yet in today’s virtual age, the commons have significantly greater power and reach. Not only has the software and Internet space largely been built by developers who worked on the principles of commons, but the Internet has provided the technical framework for the exchange of goods beyond any market logic, and often beyond the law. Through some examples of such practices we will look at how the commons are not a theoretical alternative to the current system, but a real phenomenon that takes the initiative without question or excuse in situations where neither political nor economic regimes meet the public need.

Open access to a “new continent”

As is the case with many other innovations, computer technology emerged as a result of the great freedom, enthusiasm and open collaboration of the scientists who worked on it. The initial development of computers and the Internet owes much to American public funding (during the Cold War when technological supremacy over the Soviet Union was a political priority), as well as to broad university cooperation. The Agency for Advanced Research (ARPA) was established as part of the US Department of Defense in 1958. ARPA was formally supposed to develop military technology, but the Ministry of Defense entrusted the agency with great autonomy in technological research in various fields. With great resources and project freedom, ARPA has made a number of technological advances, including the ARPANET computer network from which the Internet later emerged. University professors and doctoral students worked on ARPA’s projects, and they all had open access to each other’s research results so they could build on these and develop technology together. Such a way of collaborating led to significant technological breakthroughs, while at the same time it forged communities of programmers who would later go on to work together developing software, regardless of their day jobs and professional affiliations.

As the technology was evolving and spreading (first with the advent of affordable PCs in the mid-1970s and later through the rise of the Internet), access was opening up to a “new continent”, a vast virtual space with all its potential resources. Soon, two opposing views crystallized on how these goods should be managed. On the one hand, a significant number of developers tried to keep the space fully open to allow for further collaboration and development of technology, and on the other hand, the corporate lobby tried to occupy, parcel out and privatize resources so they could charge for their use. Both sides, despite their indirect conflict, managed to achieve their intentions. Corporations lobbied for neoliberal changes to US laws in the 1980s and 1990s, enabling the patenting and commercialization of software (which spread around the world with the help of the World Trade Organization). Many developers found work in the very same corporations, but those programming communities also managed to survive and continued to work on software outside of the market. They went on to create quality software autonomously, and by establishing copyleft licenses, they legally ensured that their programs remained non-commercial and freely available. So everyone took their portion of the territory, but with ongoing tensions and conflicts: “free” developers still felt that software commercialization undermined the quality and advance of technology, and the for-profit sector didn’t want low-cost or free competition in the market. In addition to the two entrenched camps, which functioned within the law, there are also “pirate” developers who, thanks to the media, could ignore copyright altogether and distribute protected materials illegally, at the risk of draconian legal penalties, to be sure.

Reformist efforts and their limitations

In terms of creating an open and legal alternative to commercial content, the programming communities created a movement that may not be particularly innovative in a broader sense, but has strongly influenced both the software field and other initiatives to combat the commercialization of access to culture. We are talking about the Free Software Movement (later also known as Open Software) which was launched in 1985 by Richard Stallman, an American hacker who was frustrated by the fact that commercial programs became trade secrets. Aiming to re-encourage open work on software that would be available to all, Stallman’s initiative soon brought together a great number of developers who began volunteering to create quality programs that could compete with professional software. Freeware was the foundation of the Internet infrastructure in the 1990s (which may partly explain why the Internet allows for such openness and ease of sharing), and the movement exists to this day, gathering over 12,000 communities working on a particular software (the best-known one is the Linux operating system). In addition to the movement, Stallman also created GNU – General Public License – a legal copyleft license that obliges program creators to share their projects. In addition, programs based on GNU GPL licensed software must in turn have the same open license.

This is how foundations were laid for developing programs that couldn’t be placed under copyright. Stallman’s projects inspired many other initiatives, including GNU GPL which was a model for the Creative Commons license, and the entire Free/Open Software movement was inspired by the academic publishing project Open Access. By a similar logic, Open Access aims to provide general access to academic content to allow further academic development so that all researchers have the same opportunities. It stands against treating research publications as “intellectual property”, a practice which has given rise to a troubling oligopoly in the academic field: while a small number of publishing houses make billions of dollars selling subscriptions to academic publications, many researchers and research institutions around the world cannot afford access to this knowledge. Open Access resists this practice through legal channels: it licenses and collects open research publications and lobbies for laws to be changed so as to make publicly funded academic research publicly available. Similar to Free/Open Software, this initiative has managed to create an oasis of publicly available quality content, but has failed at allowing free access to all other publications or at removing market logic from the academic distribution of knowledge. It also comes across some predictable problems: rich publishers have far more resources and invest these to preserve the status quo. They offer researchers much better conditions for publishing their content and they invest more in legal lobbying, thus keeping systematic progress at a slow pace. 

Organizing against the established forms of power

As a consequence, a more significant impact comes from those initiatives that are modelled on pirate practices, operating in the grey zone or completely at odds with the law. This type of “rebellion” is characteristic of the hacker community. Ethnologist Gabriella Coleman (a very reliable researcher of hacker cultures) argues that hackers form strong and tight-knit communities but are rebellious towards outside authority and sceptical of formal institutions and other established forms of power. Because their “home turf”, the Internet, allows them considerable technical freedom and relative safety, hacker communities tend to break the rules as a sign of civil disobedience or simply in order to circumvent unwanted restrictions. 

Piracy has affected cultural distribution by the sheer power of numbers – mass and uncontrolled online content sharing has shaken all established forms of distribution – but it also left its mark on activists in other fields, who took on both the method and the political audacity of their hacker colleagues. In their essay Against Innovation, activists and researchers Tomislav Medak and Marcell Mars state that having had the experience with reformist initiatives they came to the conclusion that piracy is much more effective: “In a day and age when market forces rule uncontested and everything can be enclosed and commodified, piracy has demonstrated that politicization can happen not by alternative approaches to creating the new, but rather by organizing straightforward ways of breaking the old”.

In the field of culture, in 2011 the duo launched the Memory of the World, a “shadow library” where a digital catalogue of various non-copyrighted publications is available free of charge. This is in line with the logic of shadow libraries which, according to Medak, are “disobedient toward copyright restrictions, helping readers in an extremely unevenly developed world of education and academic research to gain equal access”.

Similar general libraries Aaaaarg.fail and Library Genesis, as well as art archives UbuWeb and Monoskop operate on much the same principle. They all deliberately circumvent copyright to allow easy access to publications that are otherwise restricted. In this way, they manage to pluck cultural content away from the market and encourage distributors to adapt, but because of that, all these projects and their operators regularly face legal charges and logistical problems.

In the case of major shadow libraries, we can indeed speak of a substantial impact on the publishing field. Sci-Hub is a science shadow library created out of the same motives as Open Access – with the aim of allowing everyone equal access to academic knowledge. However, it functions not within the system, but rather publishes illegally all scientific articles it can get hold of. Sci-Hub currently provides open access to over 80 million scientific papers from around the world. Yet it is a very small organization which started in a simple way: the library is run by Aleksandra Elbakyan from Kazakhstan, who launched the database in 2011 as a 23-year-old student. Sci-Hub owes its survival to legal discrepancies on the global scale; more precisely, to the fact that Elbakyan lives in Russia and that access to the library can be gained through domains from countries with more lenient legal regulations. So even though a US court ruled that Elbakyan must pay the publishers Elsevier and ACS a total of 19.8 million dollars, the fine is ineffective as Russia will not extradite the activist to the US. Nevertheless, her status and the work of Sci-Hub depend on political circumstances and laws in Russia and elsewhere, as evidenced by a recent decision by Twitter to block Sci-Hub’s account (about which Lujo Parežanin wrote here in more detail). 

While Sci-Hub’s has no qualms about violating laws on intellectual property, what surprises is the widespread academic support for the work of the library, which has to do with the displeasure about the publishing oligopoly. Annual subscriptions to academic journals can mount up to 2 million dollars, leading even Harvard to announce back in 2012 that it couldn’t afford a further rise in expenses. Subscription fees have continued to rise over the past eight years despite numerous reactions from American and European universities. Sci-Hub thus reflects the academic community’s outrage, but also, it often serves simply as the one free source of relevant literature. A last year’s survey indicated that most Sci-Hub users do indeed come from poorer countries such as Iran, India, Russia or Tunisia. Argentine historian Paula Seiguer’s comment is compelling: “(…) in Argentina (…) where our public universities and libraries don’t usually have the resources to pay the phenomenally expensive rates that major publishers would like to extort from them, my colleagues and I have long developed a lively pirate approach. No one pays for an article. We aren’t paid enough to justify the expense. If it can’t be hacked, we ask colleagues doing a residency in some first world university to get it for us. If that can’t be done, we simply ignore the article. (…) My country’s budget has paid for my education, my salary and my research projects, while ineffectually attempting to take care of the 30 percent of its population which falls under the poverty line. In those circumstances, privatising the results should be considered criminal”.

From the “grey zone” to practices of solidarity

While reformist initiatives are relatively unsuccessful in trying to implement a long-term solution, pirate practices are relatively efficient in introducing short-term solutions. In the long run these could affect a change of consciousness and mount pressure to change the system (which we saw happen to some extent in the music industry), but their long-term perspective is certainly questionable for practical reasons. Aside from the academic question of whether such practices are acceptable in principle, the pressing matter is the survival of each of these sites, as well as the fate of their operators who face draconian penalties. Elbakyan is safe (for now), but many other hackers have ended up in prison. The most tragic case is that of Aaron Swartz, the American hacker who, faced with a maximum 35-year prison sentence for the massive download of academic articles from JSTOR, committed suicide just before the trial began.

Yet pirate practices do manage to raise the question of attitudes toward the distribution of culture, as the more powerful political and economic regimes have to adapt to their practice (rather than the other way around). In addition, they function just like the commons from which we sprang: they find a public function that the state and the market fail to fulfil and they perform it directly, quickly, at their own initiative and in a self-organized manner. So it’s hardly surprising that “piracy” has moved from the virtual sphere to the physical space where there is need for the same type of organizing. Last year, Medak and Mars, together with researcher Valeria Graziano, launched Pirate Care, a transnational research project and network for practices from the “grey zone” that encourage solidarity and common care. In the context of dominant neoliberal policy which has dismantled public forms of common care (healthcare, education, housing, asylum, social aid etc.), Pirate Care brings together informal practices that carry out these functions. The network connects people who offer or organize such care, and through #syllabuses and other educational materials offers various examples and models for similar practices.

Therefore, the ideas of open access and self-regulation, which came to the digital world from earlier academic principles of work, are now returning from the virtual to the physical part of social activism. Most recently, as it became apparent that dominant political and economic institutions are failing to give appropriate responses to the consequences of the pandemic on the healthcare and economic systems, “pirate care” has come into focus, primarily in situations where vulnerable individuals or groups that depend on the care of others need immediate and direct assistance. We don’t know whether Pirate Care offers a long-term, systematic and “revolutionary” answer to issues of the political system, but perhaps it is through acts of momentary and informal solidarity in our everyday life that the foundations of connected and functional communities are being laid, such which liberal political programs have long sought to dismantle.

The article was published as part of the project MediActivism – Courageous young citizens test new ways to reclaim their cities, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The information and views set out in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

Početkom svibnja osnivačica Sci-Huba Aleksandra Elbakjan primila je email obavijest od Applea da je FBI 2019. godine zatražio i dobio pristup njezinom korisničkom računu. Detalji o tome kakvu je istragu FBI provodio ili još provodi nisu poznati. Elbakjan je navikla biti predmetom istraga – otkako je 2011. godine kao studentica u Kazahstanu pokrenula popularni “Pirate Bay za znanstvene članke”, konstantna je meta raznih napada, blaćenja i tužbi. Ipak, zahvaljujući kompleksnom spletu međunarodnih okolnosti i razlika u pravnim sustavima, uspijeva svoj projekt održati na životu, a sebe na slobodi. Nove informacije o sumnjivom njuškanju američkog pravosuđa imaju i svijetlu stranu: potaknule su još jednu manifestaciju online aktivizma u njegovom najboljem izdanju.

Nije novost kako je Sci-Hub pod ogromnim pritiscima velikih izdavača – Elseviera, Wileyja, Springera i drugih – koji čine sve kako bi ga ugasili i zadržali svoju oligopolnu poziciju. To pokazuju događanja samo iz zadnjih nekoliko mjeseci: britanska je policija studentima poručila da ne pristupaju Sci-Hubu zbog opasnosti od krađe osobnih podataka, u nizu su zemalja internet provajderi filtrirali pristup stranici, a u Indiji se trenutno vodi tužba kojom izdavači žele blokirati pristup korisnicima. Ranije ove godine smo o Sci-Hubu pisali i na Kulturpunktu – Lujo Parežanin je komentirao neutemeljenu odluku Twittera da suspendira Sci-Hubov račun, a Luka Ostojić je besplatnu bazu znanstvenih radova analizirao u kontekstu teorije o zajedničkim dobrima. 

Najnoviji pritisak na Elbakjan od strane američkog pravosuđa bio je kap koja je prelila čašu. Zbog konstantne nesigurnosti opstanka Sci-Huba članovi Redditovog podforuma r/datahoarder organizirali su se radi arhiviranja cjelokupnog objavljenog sadržaja. Kontekstualizacije radi – na stranici je trenutno dostupno 86 milijuna znanstvenih članaka ili 77 terabajta podataka. 

Eventualni gubitak članaka bio bi veliki udarac globalnoj znanstvenoj zajednici. Poslovni model velikih izdavača temelji se na ograđivanju pristupa znanju – čija je proizvodnja većinom javno financirana – da bi potom taj pristup skupo naplaćivali sveučilištima koja to mogu priuštiti. Troškovi izdavača su pritom minimalni – ne plaćaju niti autore radova niti recenzente. Ako neka institucija ne može priuštiti pristup znanstvenim radovima, njezini su radnici efektivno isključeni iz akademske zajednice.

A kada čak i bogato sveučilište poput Harvarda tvrdi kako teško može priuštiti plaćanje pretplate, onda postaje očito kako se visoke rente odražavaju na siromašne dijelove svijeta. Sci-hub drži na životu ideal otvorene znanosti. Bez te potpore, iz akademske bi zajednice mnogi ostali isključeni – i to samo radi profita nekoliko parazitirajućih izdavača. Sci-Hub prema tome nije tek neka “piratska” stranica, već igra važnu strukturnu ulogu u omogućavanju uvjeta znanstvenog rada.

Upravo kako bi spriječili daljnju kolonizaciju znanja i očuvali naslijeđe Aleksandre Elbakjan, aktivisti s r/datahoardera odlučili su arhivirati i decentralizirati čitav sadržaj Sci-Huba. Okupljeni pod motom seed til you bleed, trenutno su u procesu prebacivanja Sci-Huba na p2p mrežu, na torrent protokol. Umjesto da su pohranjeni na nekolicini servera koji bi se mogli relativno lako ugasiti, znanstveni radovi će biti smješteni na mnogo većem broju računala, na hard diskovima aktivista s r/datahoardera i onih koji im se odluče pridružiti. Tako bi podaci, u slučaju da se Sci-Hub ugasi, trebali biti spašeni. 

Riječ je o krugu hacktivista koji su već izvodili slične projekte. Tijekom pandemije izradili su direktorij s besplatnim radovima o koronavirusu, također su napravili arhivu znanstvenih radova dostupnih na Libgenu – stranici sličnoj Sci-Hubu koja sadržava i besplatne knjige. Motivirani su željom da pomognu siromašnim znanstvenicama/ima širom svijeta. Pritom se ugledaju na aktivistkinje/te poput Elbakjan ili Aarona Swartza – aktivista koji je počinio samoubojstvo nakon što je bio osuđen na 35 godina zatvora zbog krađe znanstvenih članaka.

Kako ističu u objavi na Redditu, “ljudi poput Aleksandre Elbakjan odrekli bi se osobne slobode zbog tog jedinog cilja: oslobađanja znanja. Zbog toga je Elsevier Corp (RELX, tržišna kapitalizacija: 50 milijardi) želi ušutkati, želi je vidjeti u zatvoru i želi ugasiti Sci-Hub. Vrijeme je da Elsevieru i američkom pravosuđu pošaljemo jasniju poruku o sudbini Sci-Hub-a i otvorene znanosti: mi smo knjižnica, ne može nas se utišati, ne gasimo računala i mnogo nas je”.

Ovaj članak objavljen je u sklopu projekta Kultura solidarnosti koji je sufinanciran sredstvima Fonda za poticanje pluralizma i raznovrsnosti elektroničkih medija.

Whenever we start to reflect or revel over changes in the political system, some conservative character comes up and tries to stuff us back into our four walls. Clean your room!, shouts Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and intellectual celebrity of the right, who apparently takes both his adherents and opponents for adolescents. You’re not my real dad!, we may reply, this time around reluctantly stopping to examine the topic that Peterson proposed (albeit inadvertently). The spaces in which we live, work, socialize and learn are also conditioned and determined by politics, of both the formal and the informal sort, such as we have dealt with in the previous parts of the feature on the commons. In the first essay, we tackled the broader question of whether the commons can be an alternative to capitalism, in the next one we looked at how the commons work in the digital context, and now we will consider whether physical spaces – primarily those for culture and youth – can be managed on the principle of commons.

A brief reminder of the previous “instalments”: the notion of commons was championed by economist Elinor Ostrom who wrote about the small communities that manage a particular good independently, without state or market intervention. What matters for such communities are self-regulation, as it is community members themselves who adopt and implement management rules without external intervention, and the principle of reciprocity, as the goods are fully accessible to all community members who “repay their debt” by working in the community. These examples served as inspiration to various theorists and activists who tried with more or less success to translate these principles to other levels. This way of managing resources proved particularly advantageous in the digital context – first because the basic software and internet architecture emerged in a kind of “hacker” commons, and later because pirates managed to disrupt the unfair capitalist exchange through the principle of free distribution of academic and cultural works.

Indeed, the idea of commons works more easily in the digital field, where goods are easily multiplied, and an internet connection is enough to establish a contact. In the physical space, however, we come across particular physical obstacles. Here, the community is much more exposed to outside intervention and limited by the actual spatial facilities, thus being more dependent on the internal group dynamics of its users. But, as we have learned during the pandemic, life without shared physical spaces for culture and socializing is pretty poor. It is therefore worth to examine the initiatives that create and maintain such spaces while attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the market logic and political manoeuvring. 

Within and/or without institutions

Space management policies are increasingly coming into focus. On the one hand, decades of deindustrialization and economic liberalization in Europe have considerably altered and endangered the status of many non-commercial spaces, while current economic and political regimes fail to protect citizens from losing their common and very own spaces. On the other hand, there are a number of mostly informal initiatives that battle for the use of space, focusing on solidarity and sustainable development. There is a lack of space (pun intended) in this text to cover all these topics, but the dramatic situation can be evidenced by the fact that we are in the midst of a global housing crisis, which indicates how much the real estate market is at odds with the needs of citizens. During the 2010s, due to rising rental prices, the number of homeless people, evictions but also vacant apartments that no one uses, has drastically increased. Former UN rapporteur Leilani Farha stated last year that 1.8 billion people worldwide live in unsuitable housing conditions or on the street, as the current housing crisis “is not caused by a decline in resources or an economic downturn but rather by economic growth and expansion”. “The right to housing must be implemented in a manner that shifts the way housing is currently conceived, valued, produced and regulated”, she added. Her appeal was also addressed at EU countries that continue to ignore the problem, exacerbated by the wave of refugees seeking shelter in Europe. Not only have countries failed to protect vulnerable people on time or prevent the dizzying rise in rental prices, but during the 2010s they also began closing down squats that represented informal efforts at resolving these same crises.

In the area of common spaces for culture and youth, things do seem more favourable on the formal level. The EU systematically revitalizes abandoned military and industrial spaces by subsidizing their transformation into social and cultural centres and by letting them be used by NGOs. In Croatia, this model is developing somewhat more slowly: Sitni vez društvene promjene (Kurziv, 2019) is a publication that maps and describes attempts of this type, with Zagreb’s Pogon standing out as the first realized case of civil-public partnership, in addition to the Karlo Rojc Social Centre in Pula, a former military school in which over a hundred associations work and implement their programmes. In terms of self-regulation, we might be tempted to distinguish between such examples – those that function within the public system’s framework and those initiatives which, in search of autonomy, elude the legal and public systems (e.g. squats). However, all those that have managed to survive a bit longer (in Croatia and elsewhere) prove this relationship to be a dynamic and complex one. On the one hand, in the field of culture, there are no “proper” squats that work in the long run. Some form of agreement with local authorities is necessary for collectives to be able to make plans about using the space without fear of being thrown out into the street by the police. On the other hand, an agreement between such initiatives and local authorities can rarely be considered an equal partnership, as their relations are almost as a rule strained, ambivalent and unstable. Spatial commons therefore cannot function entirely outside of public institutions, nor can they fully fit within these frameworks, and this tension can be both productive and destructive, as we can clearly observe from two similar but fundamentally different examples: Naples’s l’Asilo and Zagreb’s Medika.

From civic action to political implementation

In the spring of 2012, a group of cultural workers occupied Ex Asilo Filangieri, a 16th-century three-story building located in the centre of Naples. The building was at once a pride of the Italian government – having just been renovated to host the Universal Forum of Cultures – and a subject of controversy – as the municipal right-wing government managed the renovation (and the building in general) in a non-transparent and suspicious way. To occupy the building, however, was no mere symbolic gesture, as the group opened up the space for everyone who needed it for cultural activities. The informal institution took on the new name of l’Asilo and has continued to operate as an autonomous space to this day.

To understand how l’Asilo originated and survived, one needs to consider the wider context which is, admittedly, quite complicated, contradictory and intense. Italy has been hit hard by the financial crisis and austerity measures introduced by the Berlusconi government. In the early 2010s, Italian publicists Roberto Ciccarelli and Giusepe Allegri developed the concept of the “fifth state” (quinto stato) to denote a wide range of workers without permanent jobs, social rights or existential stability – an estimated at least eight million Italian citizens, in addition to five million stateless foreigners. Members of the “fifth state”, the authors claim, began to occupy different spaces and experiment with various forms of self-management and the economy of exchange, primarily out of sheer necessity, and this is how occupied autonomous zones began to emerge.

As early as the 1990s, various “occupied centres” were operating in Naples, later to be referenced as a kind of tradition of rebellion for the next generation of activists. The most spectacular occupation was the one by the Italian branch of the global Occupy movement, who took over Rome’s Teatro Valle in 2011 and began to talk explicitly about the commons. This example also encouraged Naples’s cultural workers to occupy l’Asilo a year later and – in the absence of open spaces and safe working conditions – organize it according to the principles of commons. They quickly adopted and began to implement their own rules of operation. A fully open council decides transparently on how the space is managed, the work is voluntary, and the right to use the space is awarded not according to aesthetic or commercial criteria, but is given to everyone as long as they don’t discriminate against others. Other, legit, organisations were initially frustrated by the fact that l’Asilo operated in their field without any legal obligations, but their anger blew off when they realized that they themselves were free to use these resources. In five years, l’Asilo was used by 2,400 subjects for 7,800 programs, and the total number of users exceeded 260,000. Despite the heterogeneous structure of its users and an excessive number of requests for a limited space, l’Asilo has managed to thrive and become relevant thanks to its principled openness and a clear set of rules.

Surprisingly, the political context was to the advantage of these activists. Although Berlusconi’s government was in power at both the regional and state level, since 2011 the mayor of Naples has been Luigi de Magistris, a former justice who based his campaign on increasing civic participation and promoting the commons. Such a policy sounds progressive but also pragmatic, at a time when citizens have extremely low trust in the institutions and seek greater opportunities to participate in public life. This generated a favourable framework for l’Asilo activists to strike a cooperation with the local authorities (who agreed to pay for the maintenance of space), and also an opportunity for a formal recognition of the commons. In 2012, a wider circle of activists issued the Constitution of the Commons (Costituennte dei beni comuni) which served as a starting point in their struggle for legal recognition. It also allowed l’Asilo to work continuously, even acquire membership in EU networks despite their lack of formal status.

Can legal recognition protect the commons from a potential change of government, liberal policies or further economic crises? Does legislation hamper the commons by placing them in the grips of legally prescribed frameworks? Will their initial initiative be institutionalized over time and become identical to NGOs? There are no final answers, but the formalization of l’Asilo does seem inevitable (and not necessarily a negative thing). It is also encouraging that by 2016 l’Asilo had become a direct model for seven other occupied spaces in Naples. Although we cannot tell the outcome of such initiatives and what the future of l’Asilo will be, taking over the space from below and making it available to the public seems like a good start for a different kind of policy, especially at a time when Naples and all of Italy are facing a further economic crisis and potential collapse of public services.

Space is (not) necessary

The l’Asilo collective managed to secure premises and institutional recognition despite its informal status. Conversely, Attack, a Zagreb association which has been implementing youth culture projects for more than 15 years, has failed to secure a stable position even with its NGO status. Their book, Our Story: 15 Years of ATTACK!, can be read as a picaresque tale about a group which has spent its whole existence seeking a suitable space and some recognition, but was never met with goodwill or trust from the local government. Attack was established in 1997 as an organisation for alternative culture, and they got their first permanent space in November 1999, following their “March for Unity” action. This is how they describe these events: “After months of tensions with the City of Zagreb, Attackers decided to seize i.e. squat the Jedinstvo [unity] factory. Some months later, Attack was officially allotted premises in the basement. Some premises in the factory that were designated for cultural purposes had already been awarded to Močvara, i.e. URK – Association for the Development of Culture – but Attack was overlooked. As it later turned out, what was Attack’s initial success – the conquest of space – proved to be a major problem”.

Once again we can see that squatting was in fact a precondition to get the attention of city authorities. Finally allocating the basement of the Jedinstvo factory seemed to be a sign of recognition and good will. But as it would turn out, it was a cynical gesture by the city authorities: the space was in poor condition, without water or sanitation and exposed to frequent flooding. To renovate the space required an investment that the organisation couldn’t afford and the City wouldn’t pay. Eventually, the sanitary inspectorate closed down the club in 2003 and Attack was left without a permanent space, revealing a cynical paradox of the local politics: the city authorities allocate inappropriate premises to an organisation only to later evict it at any time, as the space is inadequate.

Attack operated without permanent premises for the next five years, but eventually decided to use the old method to secure a new space. By the end of 2007, they first occupied the Lapidarij night club, which they failed to hold permanently due to unsettled property relations, and then, together with other collectives and individuals, they entered the former Medika pharmaceutical factory and got to work. “It all happened casually and spontaneously, without mutual agreements and long-term plans”, recalls Attack’s Sanja Burlović in the book, adding: “The tacit decision was not to go for legalization at all, as the faction that believed in the possibility of long-term illegal survival in Medika prevailed”.

Nevertheless, the city authorities decided to evict the users, and the latter responded with a press conference and an attempt to legalize their stay in Medika. On the one hand, they were aided by the fact that on the eve of local elections, mayor Milan Bandić wanted to avoid negative publicity and decided to sign a contract with Attack. But negotiations with the City were not well conducted. The campaign was very chaotic, with no unity of opinion among Medika users and poor communication, and the mayor knew how to use this to his advantage. “Our mistake was that at the time we didn’t have defined requirements we would insist on in the negotiations. The only thing that mattered to us was to get the contract for the space, at all cost”, admits Burlović, adding: “It all unfolded very quickly and Bandić was hurrying us with the contract. Our mistake was again that we didn’t consult lawyers, but accepted the contract as it was handed to us. In such a situation, on December 28, 2008, Attack regained a legit space after five years of homelessness”.

Unsurprisingly, the contract terms were disastrous: Attack has to pay rent to the City, cover utility costs, maintain the (again inadequate) space, and pay music royalties. The City in fact gave Attack only the permission to use Medika until 2011 or before the building is demolished for the Zagreb Congress Centre to be constructed. Ever since the contract expired in 2011, the City has ignored the possibility of extending it, and can evict users from the premises at almost any time. Medika’s status has basically not changed since. Neither after the earthquake nor during the pandemic; the City didn’t help repair the damaged building or abolish the payment of rent (which it did for other affected subjects).

Consistency of principles and flexibility of form

Attack’s example shows how much more adverse the context is in Zagreb than in Naples: the local authorities had no intention of cooperating with the “squatters” and the political climate was far less favourable for greater civil participation and non-institutional political entities. The coexistence in Medika further revealed the complexity of collective self-management. Jere Kuzmanić, an urban planner and a former member of Attack, argues in Naša priča that it is difficult to distinguish when the conflict between different users is part of the necessary negotiation about the principles and interests of Medika, and when it is a battleground in the fight for dominance. “If you wish to remain in a space, you must be willing to negotiate. At the same time, if you wish to retain autonomy within the space, you have to locate your interests in that space as a concrete means to an end. This sets the will to negotiate against the interest of space. It is here that we can pinpoint the potential source of many conflicts in and around the space.” Kuzmanić identifies this basic tension in the discrepancy between the informal DIY approach and the more formal NGO principle in managing the space.

In this case it is difficult to draw a simple conclusion to the dilemma – some kind of formalization does seem inevitable if the collective wants to use the space permanently. To own a space and have financial support increases the freedom of action but imposes frameworks and reduces autonomy, all the more so as negotiations between that organisation and the public donor often involve a struggle for dominance. But internal dynamics prove to be an equally important and underestimated component. The desire to create an open common space is an important prerequisite, but the self-regulation of space and an organized opening up to the community also call for unity, in terms of having some joint principles, as well as the willingness to negotiate and have discipline in the managing of space (let’s leave it at that and not end up cleaning the room again).

Yet there does seem to be room for improvement in the domestic context. Local organisations have gathered experience in their struggles for spaces and the self-management of those spaces. In Zagreb especially there is hope in sight, as the administration that ran the city for 20 years is coming to an end and there is a new political option that would be more open to cooperating with civil initiatives on equal terms. Optimists will recall Naples in the early 2010s. On the other hand, the economic crisis, existential insecurity, the growing presence of conservative groups and the enmity of the right towards civil society make the future of Zagreb and Naples equally uncertain.

In such circumstances, both locally and globally, the commons are often proposed as a potential alternative to outdated and inadequate political models. Although the history of commons offers a handful of interesting and useful examples, in the end it appears that their potential lies not in the form but in the principles of openness, solidarity and responsibility to the community that can and should be realized in different political formats. The consistency of principles and flexibility of form seem to be the best pledge in the fight for fairer communities, be it at the level of the planet, the state, digital networks, local communities or clubs where such or similar political debates would be deafened by that darling, awkward microphony of a young punk bend.

The article was published as part of the project MediActivism – Courageous young citizens test new ways to reclaim their cities, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The information and views set out in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

Kratki podsjetnik na prethodne “epizode”: pojam zajedničkih dobara proslavila je ekonomistica Elinor Ostrom pišući o malim zajednicama koje samostalno, bez intervencije države ili tržišta, upravljaju određenim dobrom. Za takve zajednice važni su samoregulacija, jer sami članovi zajednice donose i provode pravila upravljanja bez vanjske intervencije, i načelo recipročnosti, jer su dobra potpuno otvorena svim članovima zajednice koji “vraćaju dug” svojim radom u zajednici. Ovi primjeri poslužili su kao inspiracija raznim teoretičarima i aktivistima koji su s više ili manje uspjeha pokušali prenijeti ista načela na druge razine. U digitalnom kontekstu takav način upravljanja resursima pokazao se naročito sretnim – prvo jer su temeljni softver i internetska arhitektura nastali u svojevrsnim hakerskim commonsima, a kasnije jer su pirati kroz princip slobodne distribucije akademskih i kulturnih radova uspjeli poremetiti nepravednu kapitalističku razmjenu.

Doduše, ideja commonsa lakše funkcionira u digitalnom polju gdje se dobra mogu jednostavno umnažati, a za kontakt je dovoljna tek internetska veza. U fizičkom prostoru, pak, nailazimo na specifične fizičke prepreke. Tu je zajednica mnogo izloženija vanjskoj intervenciji i ograničena je uvjetima prostora u kojem se nalazi, a samim time i ovisnija o internoj grupnoj dinamici njegovih korisnika. No, kako smo osvijestili tijekom pandemije, život bez zajedničkih fizičkih prostora za kulturu i socijalizaciju dosta je siromašan, i zbog toga vrijedi popratiti inicijative koje takve prostore kreiraju i održavaju pokušavajući umaknuti ograničenjima kakva postavljaju tržišna logika i političke procedure.

Unutar i(li) mimo institucija

Politika upravljanja prostorom sve nam je češće u prvom planu. S jedne strane dugotrajni procesi deindustrijalizacije i ekonomske liberalizacije u Europi bitno su promijenili i ugrozili status brojnih nekomercijalnih prostora, a aktualni ekonomski i politički režimi ne uspijevaju zaštititi građane koji gube zajedničke i vlastite prostore. S druge strane postoji niz uglavnom neformalnih inicijativa koje se bore za korištenje prostora s fokusom na solidarnost i održivi razvoj. U ovom tekstu nećemo imati prostora (pardon) pokriti sve te teme, no o dramatičnosti situacije govori činjenica da se nalazimo u globalnoj stambenoj krizi koja ukazuje koliko je tržište nekretninama u disonanci s potrebama građana. Tijekom 2010-ih zbog rasta cijeni najma drastično je porastao broj beskućnika, deložacija, ali i ispražnjenih stanova koje nitko ne koristi. Bivša UN-ova izvjestiteljica Leilani Farha lani je navela da 1,8 milijarda ljudi u svijetu živi u neprihvatljivim stambenim uvjetima ili na ulici, te je dodala: “Trenutnu stambenu krizu ne uzrokuju nestašica resursa ili ekonomski pad, nego ekonomski rast i ekspanzija. Pravo na stanovanje mora se implementirati na način koji mijenja kako se stanovanje trenutno zamišlja, procjenjuje, proizvodi i regulira.” Njen apel usmjeren je i državama Europske unije koje uporno zanemaruju ovaj problem, potenciran valom izbjeglica koje u Europi traže zaklon. Ne samo što države nisu zaštitile ugrožene ljude ni pravovremeno spriječile vrtoglavi rast cijena najma, nego su tijekom 2010-ih počele pojačano zatvarati skvotove koji su bili neformalni pokušaji rješenja tih istih kriza.

U području zajedničkih prostora za kulturu i mlade čini se da su stvari na formalnoj razini povoljnije. Europska unija sustavno revitalizira napuštene vojne i industrijske prostore tako što subvencionira njihovo pretvaranje u društveno-kulturne centre i prepuštanje civilnom društvu na korištenje (o raznim europskim primjerima detaljnije je pisala Ana Abramović). I u Hrvatskoj se nešto sporije razvija isti model: publikacija Sitni vez društvene promjene (Kurziv, 2019.) mapira i opisuje pokušaje tog tipa, a izdvajaju se zagrebački Pogon, kao prvi ostvareni slučaj civilno-javnog partnerstva, i pulski Društveni centar Karlo Rojc, bivša vojna škola u kojoj preko sto udruga radi i provodi svoje programe. Ako govorimo o samoregulaciji, postoji iskušenje da razlikujemo takve primjere, koji funkcioniraju unutar okvira javnog sustava, i one inicijative koje u potrazi za autonomijom izmiču pravnim i javnim sustavima (npr. skvotove). No u svim iole dugovječnijim primjerima (u Hrvatskoj, ali i šire) očito je da je taj odnos dinamičan i kompleksan. S jedne strane u području kulture ne postoje “čisti” skvotovi koji dugoročno funkcioniraju, nego je neki oblik dogovora s lokalnim vlastima nužan da bi kolektivi uopće mogli planirati korištenje prostora bez straha da će ih policija sutradan izbaciti na ulicu. S druge strane dogovor između takve inicijative i lokalne vlasti rijetko se može smatrati ravnopravnim partnerstvom, jer su im odnosi skoro redovito zategnuti, ambivalentni i nestabilni. Prostorna zajednička dobra stoga ne mogu funkcionirati posve mimo javnih institucija, ali ni sasvim unutar tih okvira, a ta tenzija može biti produktivna i destruktivna, što možemo jasno vidjeti kroz dva slična, a bitno različita primjera: napuljski l’Asilo i zagrebačku Mediku.

Od građanske akcije do političke forme

Grupa kulturnih radnika je na proljeće 2012. okupirala Ex Asilo Filangieri, trokatnicu iz 16. stoljeća smještenu u centru Napulja.^[1] Zgrada je istovremeno bila ponos talijanske vlade – upravo je renovirana kako bi ugostila Universal Forum of Cultures – no i predmet kontroverze jer je općinska desna vlada obnovu (i zgradu općenito) vodila netransparentno i sumnjivo. Okupacija zgrade ipak nije bila tek simbolična gesta, nego je grupa otvorila prostor svima kojima je trebao za kulturne djelatnosti. Neformalna institucija ponijela je novi naziv l’Asilo i nastavila djelovati kao autonomni prostor sve do danas.

Da bismo shvatili kako je l’Asilo nastao i opstao, treba uzeti u obzir širi kontekst koji je, valja priznati, prilično zamršen, proturječan i intenzivan. Italija je bila snažno pogođena financijskom krizom i mjerama štednje koje je uvela Berlusconijeva vlada. Talijanski publicisti Roberto Ciccarelli i Giusepe Allegri su početkom 2010-ih razvili koncept “pete države” (quinto stato) kojom su označili široki krug radnika koji nemaju stalan posao, socijalna prava ni egzistencijalnu stabilnost – procijenili su da se tu radi o barem osam milijuna talijanskih građana, uz pet milijuna stranaca bez državljanstva. Pripadnici “pete države” su, kako navode, počeli okupirati prostore i iskušavati razne oblike samoupravljanja i ekonomije razmjene, primarno iz gole potrebe, a tako su počele nastajati okupirane autonomne zone.

Već su 1990-ih u Napulju djelovali razni “okupirani centri”, što je poslužilo kao svojevrsna tradicija bunta za iduću generaciju aktivista. Najefektnija okupacija veže se uz talijanski ogranak globalnog pokreta Occupy koji je 2011. zauzeo rimski Teatro Valle i eksplicitno počeo govoriti o zajedničkim dobrima. Taj primjer ohrabrio je i napuljske kulturnjake da, u nedostatku otvorenih prostora i sigurnih radnih uvjeta, godinu kasnije zauzmu l’Asilo i ustroje ga po principu zajedničkih dobara. Vrlo brzo su donijeli i počeli provoditi vlastita pravila rada, o upravljanju prostorom transparentno odlučuje potpuno otvoreno vijeće, radi se volonterski, a o pravu na korištenje prostora ne odlučuju estetski ni komercijalni kriteriji, nego pravo ima svatko pod uvjetom da ne diskriminira druge. Ostale legalne organizacije u početku su bile frustrirane činjenicom da l’Asilo djeluje u njihovom polju bez ikakvih legalnih obveza, no bijes je ispario kad su shvatile da i same mogu slobodno koristiti resurse. U pet godina l’Asilo je iskoristilo 2.400 aktera za 7.800 programa, a ukupan broj svih korisnika prostora premašio je 260.000. Unatoč heterogenoj strukturi korisnika i prevelikom broju zahtjeva za ograničeni prostor, l’Asilo je zahvaljujući otvorenim principima i jasnim pravilima uspio zaživjeti i dobiti relevantnost.

Politički kontekst je, začudo, ovim aktivistima išao na ruku. Iako je na regionalnoj i državnoj razini vladala Berlusconijeva vlada, od 2011. gradonačelnik Napulja bio je bivši sudac Luigi de Magistris koji je svoju kampanju temeljio na povećanju građanske participacije i na promociji zajedničkih dobara. Takva politika zvuči progresivno, ali i pragmatično u trenutku kad građani imaju izrazito nisko povjerenje u institucije i traže veću mogućnost sudjelovanja u javnom životu. Tako se stvorio povoljan okvir za aktiviste l’Asila da uspostave suradnju s lokalnom vlasti (koja je pristala plaćati održavanje prostora), ali i prilika za formalno priznanje zajedničkih dobara. Širi krug aktivista je 2012. objavio Ustav zajedničkih dobara (Costituennte dei beni comuni) koji je poslužio kao početna točka za borbu za njihovo pravno priznanje, a ono je l’Asilu omogućilo neometani rad, čak i članstvo u mrežama Europske unije unatoč nedostatku formalnog statusa.

Može li pravno priznanje zaštititi zajednička dobra od potencijalne smjene vlasti, liberalnih politika ili daljnjih ekonomskih kriza? Koče li pravni okviri zajednička dobra, čvrsto ih smještajući u zakonski propisane okvire? Hoće li se početna inicijativa s vremenom institucionalizirati i postati identična nevladinim organizacijama? Konačni odgovori ne postoje, no formalizacija l’Asila čini se neizbježnom (i ne nužno negativnom). Poticajno je i što je do 2016. l’Asilo postao direktan model za sedam drugih okupiranih napuljskih prostora. Mada ne znamo kakav će biti ishod takvih inicijativa i budućnost l’Asila, preuzimanje prostora odozdo i njegovo stavljanje na raspolaganje javnosti čini se kao dobar početak drugačije politike, pogotovo u trenutku kad se Napulj i cijela Italija suočavaju s daljnjom ekonomskom krizom i potencijalnim kolapsom javnih usluga.

Prostor (ni)je nužnost

Za razliku od kolektiva l’Asila koji je unatoč neformalnom statusu uspio izboriti prostor i institucionalno priznanje, zagrebačka udruga Attack, koja 15 godina provodi projekte u području kulture mladih, ni uz status nevladine organizacije ne uspijeva pronaći stabilnu poziciju. Njihova knjiga Naša priča: 15 godina ATTACK!-a može se čitati i kao pikarska priča o grupi koja cijelo svoje postojanje pokušava dobiti adekvatan prostor i priznanje, no u lokalnoj vlasti ne nailazi na dobru volju ni povjerenje. Attack je nastao 1997. kao organizacija za alternativnu kulturu, a do prvog stalnog prostora došli su u studenom 1999. akcijom “Juriš na Jedinstvo”. Kako navode, “nakon mjeseci natezanja s Gradom Zagrebom, atakovci su odlučili osvojiti, odnosno skvotirati tvornicu Jedinstvo. Nekoliko mjeseci nakon te akcije Attacku je i službeno pripao prostor u podrumskoj prostoriji. Neke prostore te tvornice, koja je bila predviđena za kulturnu namjenu, već je bila dobila Močvara, odnosno URK – Udruženje za razvoj kulture, no Attack je pritom ostao zaboravljen. Kako će se kasnije pokazati, ono što je bio prvotni uspjeh Attacka – osvajanje prostora, pretvorit će se i u najveći problem”.

I ovdje vidimo da je skvotiranje bio praktični nužan preduvjet da bi se dobila pozornost gradskih vlasti. Konačno ustupanje podrumskih prostorija tvornice Jedinstvo bio je znak priznanja i dobre volje, no naposljetku se pokazalo kao cinizam gradske vlasti: prostor je bio zapušten, bez vode i sanitarija, izložen čestim poplavama. Obnova prostora zahtijevala je ulaganje koje udruga nije mogla priuštiti, a Grad nije želio platiti. Naposljetku sanitarna inspekcija 2003. zatvara klub i Attack ostaje bez stalnog prostora, čime se razotkriva cinični paradoks gradske politike: javna uprava udruzi dodjeljuje neadekvatan prostor, a potom je u bilo kojem trenutku može izbaciti jer je prostor neadekvatan.

Attack idućih pet godina djeluje bez stalnog prostora, no naposljetku odlučuje istom metodom izboriti novi prostor. Krajem 2007. okupiraju prvo Lapidarij, koji ne uspijevaju trajno zauzeti zbog neriješenih vlasničkih odnosa, a zatim skupa s drugim kolektivima i pojedincima ulaze u bivšu tvornicu lijekova Medika i počinju raditi na prostoru. “Sve se dešavalo neplanski i stihijski, bez međusobnih dogovora i dugoročnog plana”, navodi u knjizi Sanja Burlović iz Attacka i nastavlja: “Prešutna odluka je bila da se ne pokušava uopće ići na legalizaciju, jer je jača bila struja koja je vjerovala u mogućnost ilegalnog djelovanja u Medici na duže vrijeme.”

No Grad ipak odlučuje izbaciti korisnike Medike, a korisnici reagiraju konferencijom za medije i pokušajem da ipak legaliziraju svoj boravak u Medici. S jedne strane na ruku im je išla činjenica da je Milan Bandić uoči lokalnih izbora pokušavao izbjeći negativan publicitet i odlučio je sklopiti ugovor s Attackom. No pregovori s gradom nisu dobro izvedeni – kampanja je bila vođena vrlo kaotično jer među korisnicima Medike nije bilo jedinstva u stavovima ni kvalitetne komunikacije, a gradonačelnik je znao iskoristiti takvu poziciju u svoju korist. “Naša je greška bila da tada nismo imali definirane zahtjeve na kojima bi inzistirali u pregovorima, jedino bitno nam je bilo po svaku cijenu dobiti ugovor za prostor”, priznaje Burlović i dodaje: “Sve je teklo vrlo brzo i Bandić nas je požurivao s ugovorom. Naša greška je opet bila da se nismo se konzultirali/e s odvjetnicima nego smo prihvatili/e ugovor kakav nam je dostavljen. U takvoj situaciji, 28. prosinca 2008. Attack nakon pet godina beskućništva ponovno dobiva svoj legalni prostor.”

Nije iznenađenje što su uvjeti ugovora bili katastrofalni: Attack gradu plaća najam, pokriva režije, održava (opet neadekvatan) prostor i plaća naknadu ZAMP-u. Grad praktički Attacku daje jedino dozvolu za korištenje Medike, i to do 2011. ili do početka rušenja zgrade radi izgradnje Kongresnog centra Zagreb. Od isteka ugovora 2011. Grad ignorira mogućnost produženja ugovora zbog čega praktički u bilo kojem trenutku može izbaciti korisnike iz prostora. Status Medike se od tada nije bitno promijenio: ni nakon potresa ni uslijed pandemije Grad nije pomogao u sanaciji oštećenog prostora niti je ukinuo plaćanje rente (što je učinio drugim pogođenim subjektima).

Dosljednost u principima i fleksibilnost u formi

Primjer Attacka pokazuje koliko je zagrebački kontekst nepovoljniji od napuljskog: lokalna vlast nema namjeru surađivati sa “skvoterima”, a politička klima bila je mnogo slabije naklonjena većoj građanskoj participaciji i vaninstitucionalnim političkim formama. Suživot u Medici nadalje je ukazao na zahtjevnost kolektivnog samoupravljanja. Jere Kuzmanić, urbanist i nekadašnji član Attacka, u Našoj priči navodi kako je teško razlučiti kad je konflikt različitih korisnika Medike dio nužnog pregovaranja o principima i interesima prostora, a kad poligon u borbi za dominaciju. “Ako želiš boraviti u prostoru, moraš biti spreman pregovarati. Istovremeno, ako želiš sačuvati autonomiju unutar prostora, moraš smjestiti svoje interese u prostor kao konkretan alat za postizanje nekog cilja. To postavlja volju za pregovaranjem o prostoru kao protutežu interesu u prostoru. U toj točki nalazimo potencijalno ishodište mnogih konflikata u i oko prostora.” Načelnu tenziju Kuzmanić vidi u neskladu između neformalnog DIY (do-it-yourself) i formalnijeg NVO (nevladine organizacije) principa vođenja prostora.

I u ovom slučaju teško je donijeti jednostavan zaključak te dileme – neki oblik formalizacije čini se neizbježnim ako kolektiv želi koristiti stalni prostor. Posjedovanje prostora i financijska potpora povećavaju slobodu djelovanja, ali zadaju okvire i smanjuju autonomiju, tim više što i pregovori između udruge i javnog donatora također često sadrže borbu za dominaciju. No interna dinamika pokazuje se jednako važnom i podcijenjenom komponentom. Želja za kreiranjem otvorenog zajedničkog prostora je bitan preduvjet, ali samoregulacija prostora i organizirano otvaranje zajednici zahtijevaju i složnost oko zajedničkih principa i volju za pregovaranjem i disciplinu u vođenju prostora (tu stanimo da ne završimo opet na čišćenju sobe).

Čini se da u domaćem kontekstu ipak postoji potencijal za napredak. Lokalne organizacije skupile su iskustvo u borbi za prostor i u samoupravljanju tim prostorima. U Zagrebu se pogotovo nazire nada jer se bliži kraj upravi koja je gradom vladala 20 godina i dolazak opcije koja bi bila otvorenija ravnopravnoj suradnji s građanskim inicijativama. Optimiste će to podsjetiti na Napulj ranih 2010-ih. S druge strane ekonomska kriza, egzistencijalna nesigurnost, sve veća prisutnost konzervativnih opcija i zazor desnice prema civilnom društvu čine zagrebačku i napuljsku budućnost podjednako neizvjesnom.

U takvim lokalnom, ali i globalnim prilikama zajednička dobra često se spominju kao potencijalna alternativa zastarjelim i neadekvatnim političkim modelima. Iako povijest zajedničkih dobara nudi pregršt zanimljivih i korisnih primjera, na koncu se čini da njihov potencijal ipak ne leži u formi, nego u principima otvorenosti, solidarnosti i odgovornosti prema zajednici koji se mogu i trebaju ostvariti u raznim političkim oblicima. Dosljednost u principima i fleksibilnost u formi čine se ipak kao najbolji zalog u borbi za pravednije zajednice, bilo to na razini planete, države, digitalnih mreža, lokalnih zajednica ili klubova u kojima će nam ove i ovakve političke rasprave zagušiti draga, nelagodna mikrofonija mladog pank benda.

[1] O l’Asilu i napuljskom kontekstu informirao sam se putem članaka “When Commons Becomes Official Politics” Giuliane Cancio i “Commons towards New Participatory Institutions” Marije Francesce De Tullio. Oba članka su u knjizi Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real (ur. Nico Dockx i Pascal Gielen, Valiz, 2018.)

Everything was forever until it was no more, reads the title of Alexei Yurchak’s well-known book about the last Soviet generation. Primary school history already teaches us that every major political entity was fragile and finite, but it is hard to translate this knowledge from books to everyday life. Even in this volatile region, a significant portion of the population has only lived in a democratic and capitalist order which, however unsteady it may seem, does appear to be relatively stable. We simply don’t know firsthand how it can be different, and this in turn undermines public pressure to change the structure. The belief that there is no alternative thus makes for a solid ground for any conservative policy, and it is up to the imagination to be progressive, as it alone can combine an unlived history or an envisioned future with the actual experience.

Tensions over the (un)changing reality and (im)possible alternatives are becoming an increasingly relevant political topic, as awareness is growing that current economic and political systems cannot meet the needs of the population; they cannot adequately respond to unpredictable crises and, in fact, many of these crises generate themselves. With the pandemic and the awareness of the far-reaching consequences of environmental crises, the idea that an alternative must become possible is gaining ground. In this context, the concept of commons (common goods), which has over the past decade shifted from an academic theory to a new political model, called for by theorists and social movements alike, is of particular interest. The idea of commons on a theoretical level represents the possibility of an organizational third way (as a way out of the usual “state or market” dilemma), while in practice it is becoming a common denominator that brings together different movements, slowly moving left-wing politics from the margin into the mainstream.

We are not wolves to one another

It’s not hard to get informed about the commons these days – online materials, introductory and advanced, are available aplenty. To name a few editions from the region: Commons in South East Europe  (Institute for Political Ecology, Zagreb, 2018) and Spaces of Commoning: Urban Commons in the Ex-Yu Region (Ministry of Space / Institute of Urban Policy, Belgrade, 2020), including the web platform Zajednicko.org (where a short introduction lecture by Iva Čukić is available). The amount of materials about the commons, easy access to its basic ideas, a number of practical examples, and the links to political activism indicate how much this term, which until recently mattered primarily in the academic community, has shifted to a wider public sphere.

The term originated in 1968 in the work of economist Garrett Hardin who actually associated it with the opposite political stance. Hardin discussed the tragedy of the commons, arguing, in fact, that uncontrolled collective use of limited general resources leads to a disaster for all. Hardin was concerned about the impact of population growth on resource availability, but his ideas were later largely used to corroborate the view that general resources should be regulated by an external instance, not by citizens directly. Hardin was countered by economist Elinor Ostrom in Managing the Commons (1990), an influential book in which she presented the commons as a legitimate form of social organization. Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work, on the grounds of having successfully demonstrated that collective resources can be managed without central regulation or privatisation. With a due lack of enthusiasm for the Nobel Prize, this decision by the Swedish Academy shortly after the onset of the global economic crisis does point to the relevance of alternative models of governance.

In the book (and in her work in general), Ostrom dealt with the practices that are used by community members themselves to organize common resources, without interference from the state or the market. She examined successful examples from Switzerland, Japan, Spain, Turkey, the Philippines, and other countries, where individual communities have for centuries managed irrigation, land and crop distribution, fishing, etc. Ostrom cited some unsuccessful examples as well, from around the world, so as to demonstrate that the commons are not a universal remedy for all problems. Rather, she used these examples to infer eight necessary principles for the commons to function. In short, members of a community should on the one hand be limited (by clear and fair rules and effective supervision), and on the other hand, be free (through the right of access to resources and equality of decision-making in the community). Yet these principles are exercised by members themselves, and they, in turn, are not wolves to one another, but are able to cooperate in the common interest.

Ostrom approached the topic academically, without political ambitions, and was careful to avoid speculation as to whether her insights can be applied on a broader scale. Indeed, as we are reading about the fascinating examples of common grazing in the Swiss Törbel or irrigation in the arid regions of Spain, what remains unclear is whether these principles can be applied in more complex communities or if the commons are at all an alternative to the market or the state (since they exist in parallel with them). Nevertheless, Ostrom developed a theoretical model that treats individuals not as selfish, infantile or passive actors, but rather emphasises the possibility of their direct cooperation. Her work has thus encouraged further development of the model within critical theory, having inspired a wave of political activists who found a concrete model to rely on in their struggles against privatization and state control.

Solid values and an unclear mechanism

As the concept of commons was gaining foothold in theory and practice, it took on an array of different meanings. The earlier mentioned book that deals with this issue in Southeast Europe provides a useful overview of various critical theoretical approaches to the phenomenon. Although this is another “kaleidoscope of perspectives”, one can observe that unlike Ostrom, who used the term to describe existing phenomena, critical theorists (Silke Helfrich, Ugo Mattei, David Harvey, Silvia Federici, etc.) speak more about what the commons might and should be. That is no easy task – Elinor Ostrom’s model is based on settlements of a few hundred inhabitants and it is not easy to elegantly translate it to multi-million cities and states.

In the field of activism, the term functions better because it can serve as a distinctive symbol rather than a precisely designed model. The commons are invoked by many different movements around the world that fight for open public access to certain resources, be it academic work, digital culture, intellectual property in general, cultural spaces, rivers, motorways or a local park. Different movements are brought together by general values and resistance to neoliberal policies, and not necessarily a specific mechanism of governance. On this note, political scientist Danijela Dolenec downplays the radicalism of commons as “there is no doubt that the commons are not inherently opposed to the capitalist relations of production”. But she does point out their current importance: “the new framework for diagnosing the present moment has gained unfaltering momentum: deeply displeased with capitalism and representative democracy, we have rejected the political message of Thatcherism (There is no alternative). This energy fuels the commons movement as a viable alternative to the existing modes of production and governance”.

In the 2010s, the so-called urban commons, a series of practices of resistance to neoliberal tendencies in running the city, increasingly came into focus around the world. On the one hand, city authorities and the market have made cities more and more closed and fenced off: housing prices are on the rise, public spaces are being privatized and public services are abolished, becoming costlier or increasingly under control. The freedom of movement, behaviour or simply being in the city is being undermined. On the other hand, citizens self-organise and launch initiatives that seek to take control of city resources and make them widely available. This includes protest actions against construction projects in parks and squares, but also less visible practices such as the founding of housing cooperatives, the squatting of abandoned city spaces, urban gardens, neighbourhood initiatives, etc. What is behind all these is not a closely connected and concerted political agenda or vision on how to govern the city as a whole, but the needs of various citizens’ groups to directly appropriate a particular portion of their “right to the city” and make city life easier and better.

The aforementioned books citing a number of examples of city commons in the region: protests to preserve public areas (“We won’t give away Varšavska Street” in Zagreb, “Don’t let Belgrade (be suffocated)”, Dubrovnik’s “Srđ is ours”), informally launched cultural centres (Karlo Rojc in Pula, Recreational Zone Banja Luka, New Cultural Settlement in Novi Sad, Belgrade’s Cultural Centre Magacin, etc.), housing rights initiatives (Serbia’s Joint Action Roof over Our Head). We should also mention the overall work of the Right to the City association, the interventions by Saša Šimpraga, an activist and researcher from Zagreb, the rise and fall of the BEK squat, etc. The great number of these initiatives is evidence of the strengthening neoliberal policies in the region, but also to the increasing efforts by citizens to retain the cities and keep them open.

It may seem logical to conclude that these forms of self-organizing are necessarily at odds with city authorities, yet that needn’t be the case. The best-known examples to the contrary are Naples, Bologna, and Belgian Gent which have formally opened up to the commons, encouraging citizens to cooperate and get more directly involved in running the city. This shows that the work of public bodies and direct civil initiatives are not mutually exclusive, i.e. that commons are not necessarily an alternative to the existing ways of governing the city. What is more, it seems at the moment that greater democratization of city governance can be achieved more easily and quickly from within than from outside the system. It is from such local struggles to preserve public spaces that political platforms Zagreb is OURS! and Možemo! have emerged. Through representation in the City Council and the Croatian Parliament, they have gained more media coverage and a greater influence over public policy than before, and through their program and work, the commons are slowly entering the political mainstream.

The commons are more characterized by a programmatic set of values that are sought through traditional political channels than they are a call for an alternative form of organising. In this sense, they represent a genuine attempt to repair and democratize existing political systems from within, through the work of councillors, MPs, and formal political organisations. But the question remains whether these systems – in Croatia and elsewhere – are capable of coping with the upcoming crises and, if not, what is there to replace them. One must add that the commons, as a concept imported from Western theory, facilitate a whitewashed revival of similar ideas of self-government and cooperatives which, due to their clear association with socialism, still have the status of dirty words or obsolete ideas in much of Croatian society. Therefore, the commons open up a space for bringing left-wing ideas back to life, but the potential for learning from Yugoslav theory and practice remains little explored.

The article was published as part of the project MediActivism – Courageous young citizens test new ways to reclaim their cities, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. The information and views set out in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union.

Stoga nam se može učiniti da pravo na takvu slobodu mogu izboriti samo male skupine u iznimnim situacijama, što bi značilo da se zajednička dobra danas mogu naći samo u manjim, egzotičnim, možda teorijski zanimljivim, ali na širem planu irelevantnim slučajevima. No u današnje virtualno doba zajednička dobra imaju značajno veću moć i doseg. Ne samo da su softverski i internetski prostor dobrim dijelom izgradili upravo programeri koji su radili po principima zajedničkih dobara, nego Internet pruža tehničku mogućnost za razmjenu dobara mimo svake tržišne logike, često i mimo zakona. Na primjerima takvih praksi vidjet ćemo da zajednička dobra nisu teorijska alternativa aktualnom sustavu, nego realna pojava koja bez pitanja i pardona preuzima inicijativu u situacijama u kojima ni politički ni ekonomski režimi ne ispunjavaju javnu potrebu.

Otvoreni pristup “novom kontinentu”

Kao što je slučaj s brojnim drugim inovacijama, računalna tehnologija je nastala kao plod velike slobode, entuzijazma i otvorene suradnje znanstvenika koji su na njoj radili. Inicijalni razvoj računala i Interneta mnogo duguje američkoj javnoj financijskoj potpori (tijekom Hladnog rata kad je tehnološka premoć nad Sovjetskim Savezom bila politički prioritet) i širokoj sveučilišnoj suradnji. U sklopu američkog Ministarstva obrane 1958. godine osnovana je Agencija za napredna istraživanja (ARPA). Premda je ARPA formalno trebala razvijati vojnu tehnologiju, Ministarstvo obrane je toj agenciji povjerilo veliku samostalnost u tehnološkim istraživanjima u raznim područjima. Uz velike resurse i projektnu slobodu, ARPA je ostvarila niz tehnoloških iskoraka, među njima i računalnu mrežu ARPANET iz koje je kasnije nastao Internet.  Na ARPA-inim projektima radili su sveučilišni profesori i doktorandi, a svi su imali otvoreni pristup međusobnim ishodima istraživanja kako bi se međusobno nadovezivali i grupno razvijali tehnologiju. Takav način suradnje doveo je do značajnog tehnološkog iskoraka, a ujedno je stvorio zajednice programera koji su kasnije autonomno, mimo institucija i svojih službi, nastavili zajedno raditi na razvoju softvera.

Kako se tehnologija razvijala i širila (prvo kroz pojavu dostupnih osobnih računala sredinom 1970-ih, kasnije razvojem Interneta), otvarao se pristup “novom kontinentu”, golemom virtualnom prostoru i svim njegovim potencijalnim resursima. Ubrzo su se kristalizirale dvije suprotne tendencije upravljanja tim dobrima. S jedne strane značajan broj programera pokušavao je održati taj prostor sasvim otvorenim kako bi se omogućili daljnji zajednički rad i razvoj tehnologije, a s druge strane korporativni lobi pokušao je zauzeti, parcelizirati i privatizirati resurse kako bi se moglo naplaćivati njihovo korištenje. Obje struje su, unatoč indirektnom sukobu, ostvarile svoje namjere. Korporacije su lobiranjem utjecale na neoliberalne promjene zakona u SAD-u 1980-ih i 1990-ih te su omogućile patentiranje i komercijalizaciju softvera (što se uz pomoć Svjetske trgovinske organizacije raširilo diljem svijeta). Mnogi programeri našli su posao u istim korporacijama, no opstale su i spomenute programerske zajednice, koje su se softverom nastavile baviti van tržišnih okvira. One  su nastavile autonomno kreirati kvalitetni softver, a osnivanjem copyleft licenci pravno su osigurale da njihovi programi ostanu nekomercijalni i slobodno dostupni. Tako je svatko zauzeo svoj dio teritorija, no uz uvijek prisutne tenzije i sukobe: “slobodni” programeri su i dalje smatrali da komercijalizacija softvera narušava kvalitetu i napredak tehnologije, a profitni sektor nije želio imati povoljnu ili besplatnu konkurenciju na tržištu. Uz dvije utvrđene strane, koje su funkcionirale unutar pravnog sustava, tu su i “piratski” programeri koji su zahvaljujući mediju mogli potpuno ignorirati copyright i ilegalno distribuirati zaštićene sadržaje, dakako uz rizik drakonskih zakonskih kazni.

Reformistička nastojanja i njihove granice

Ako govorimo o stvaranju otvorene i legalne alternative komercijalnom sadržaju, programerske zajednice stvorile su pokret koji možda nije naročito inovativan u širem smislu, ali koji je izrazito utjecao i na polje softvera i na druge inicijative koje se bore protiv komercijalizacije pristupa kulturi. Riječ je o pokretu Free Software (kasnije poznat i kao Open Software) koji je 1985. pokrenuo američki haker Richard Stallman, frustriran činjenicom da su komercijalni programi postali poslovne tajne. S ciljem da opet potakne otvoreni rad na svima dostupnom softveru, Stallmanova inicijativa ubrzo je okupila veliki broj programera koji su počeli volonterski izrađivati kvalitetne programe, sasvim konkurentne profesionalnom softveru. Slobodni programi tvorili su temelj infrastrukture Interneta 1990-ih (što može dijelom objasniti zašto Internet omogućuje toliku otvorenost i lakoću dijeljenja), a pokret postoji i danas te okuplja preko 12 000 zajednica koje  rade na određenom softveru (najpoznatiji je rad na operativnom sustavu Linux). Osim pokreta, Stallman je kreirao i GNU General Public License, zakonsku copyleft licencu koja obvezuje kreatore programa da omoguće dijeljenje svog projekta. Uz to, programi nastali na temelju GNU GPL licenciranog softvera morali su također imati istu otvorenu licencu. Tako su stvoreni uvjeti za izradu programa koji nisu mogli biti stavljeni pod copyright.

Stallmanovi projekti su inspirirali niz drugih inicijativa, među ostalim GNU GPL bio je uzor za Creative Commons licencu, a cijeli pokret Free / Open Software inspirirao je akademski izdavački projekt Open Access. Po sličnoj logici, Open Access pokušava omogućiti opći pristup akademskim sadržajima kako bi se omogućio daljnji znanstveni razvoj i kako bi svi znanstvenici imali iste mogućnosti. Protivi se tretmanu znanstvenih publikacija kao “intelektualnog vlasništva” što je u akademskom polju dovelo do problematičnog oligopola: dok nekoliko izdavačkih kuća zarađuje milijarde dolara na prodaji pretplata na akademske publikacije, brojni znanstvenici i znanstvene institucije diljem svijeta ne mogu si priuštiti pristup tom znanju. Open Access tome pruža otpor legalnim kanalima: licencira i okuplja otvorene znanstvene publikacije te lobira za zakonske promjene po kojima bi javno financirana znanstvena istraživanja trebala biti javno dostupna. Slično kao Free / Open Software, i ova inicijativa uspijeva stvoriti oazu javno dostupnog i vrijednog sadržaja, no ne uspijeva osloboditi pristup svim ostalim publikacijama ni ukloniti tržišnu logiku iz akademske distribucije znanja. Pritom se susreće s predvidljivim problemima: bogati izdavači imaju daleko više resursa i ulažu ih da bi očuvali status quo, pa znanstvenicima nude značajno bolje uvjete za objavu sadržaja i ulažu više u zakonsko lobiranje, što čini sustavne pomake prilično sporima.

Organiziranje protiv ustaljenih oblika moći

Značajniji utjecaj stoga imaju one inicijative nastale po uzoru na piratske prakse koje djeluju u sivoj zoni ili u potpunom nesuglasju sa zakonom. I ovaj tip “pobunjeništva” karakterističan je za hakersku zajednicu. Etnologinja Gabriella Coleman (inače vrlo pouzdana istraživačica hakerskih kultura) navodi da hakeri međusobno čine jake i povezane zajednice, ali da su pritom buntovni prema vanjskom autoritetu i skeptični prema formalnim institucijama i drugim ustaljenim formama moći. Budući da im “domaći” teritorij Interneta omogućuje popriličnu tehničku slobodu i relativnu sigurnost, hakerske zajednice sklone su kršenju pravila u znak građanskog neposluha ili naprosto u svrhu zaobilaženja nepoželjnih ograničenja.

Piratstvo je utjecalo na kulturnu distribuciju pukim brojevima – masovno i nekontrolirano internetsko dilanje sadržaja uzdrmalo je sve ustaljene oblike distribucije – no i svojim je stavom ostavilo pečat na aktiviste u drugim poljima koji su preuzeli i metodu i političku drskost hakerskih kolega. U izlaganju Against Innovation aktivisti i istraživači Tomislav Medak i Marcell Mars navode da su nakon iskustva s reformističkim inicijativama ipak zaključili da je piratstvo mnogo efikasnije: “U doba kad tržišne sile neometano vladaju i kad se sve može ograditi i komodificirati, piratstvo je pokazalo da se politizacija ne mora dogoditi alternativnim pristupima stvaranju nečeg novog, nego organiziranjem direktnog načina da se razbije staro.”

U području kulture, spomenuti je dvojac 2011. pokrenuo “knjižnicu iz sjene” Memory of the World gdje je besplatno dostupan digitalni katalog raznih publikacija za koja nisu osigurana autorska prava. To je u skladu s logikom knjižnica iz sjene koje su, kako Medak navodi, “u neposluhu spram autorskopravnih ograničenja, pomažu čitateljima u izrazito nejednako razvijenom svijetu obrazovanja i znanstvenog istraživanja da svi jednako ostvare pristup.”

Na sličnom principu funkcioniraju slične opće knjižnice Aaaaarg.fail i Library Genesis te umjetnički arhivi UbuWeb i Monoskop. Sve one namjerno zaobilaze copyright kako bi omogućili jednostavan pristup inače zaštićenim publikacijama. Time odmah uspijevaju izvući kulturne sadržaje van tržišnog polja i potiču distributere na prilagodbu, no zbog toga se svi ti projekti i njihovi voditelji redovito susreću s pravnim tužbama i logističkim problemima.

U slučaju većih knjižnica iz sjene, doista se može govoriti o vrlo značajnom utjecaju na izdavačko polje. Sci-Hub je znanstvena knjižnica iz sjene koja je nastala iz istih motiva kao Open Access – s ciljem da omogući svima jednaki pristup akademskom znanju – no ne funkcionira unutar sustava, nego naprosto ilegalno objavljuje sve znanstvene članke do kojih može doći. Trenutno Sci-Hub omogućuje otvoreni pristup preko 80 milijuna znanstvenih radova iz cijelog svijeta. Pritom se radi o vrlo maloj i jednostavno pokrenutoj organizaciji: knjižnicu vodi Aleksandra Elbakjan iz Kazahstana koja je bazu pokrenula 2011. kao 23-godišnja studentica. Sci-Hub svoj opstanak može zahvaliti zakonskoj neujednačenosti na globalnoj razini, točnije činjenici da Elbakjan živi u Rusiji i da se pristup knjižnici može ostvariti preko domena iz država s blažom zakonskom regulacijom. Iako je američki sud presudio da Elbakjan mora platiti izdavačima Elsevieru i ACS-u ukupnu svotu od 19,8 milijuna dolara, kazna je bezvrijedna jer Rusija neće izručiti aktivistkinju SAD-u. Ipak njen status i rad Sci-Huba ovise o političkim okolnostima i zakonima u Rusiji i svijetu, o čemu svjedoči i recentna odluka Twittera da blokira račun Sci-Huba na svojoj platformi (o čemu je detaljnije pisao Lujo Parežanin).

Iako djelovanje Sci-Huba besramno krši zakone o intelektualnom vlasništvu, iznenađuje koliko je široka akademska potpora radu ove knjižnice, što je vezano uz nezadovoljstvo spomenutim izdavačkim oligopolom. Godišnja pretplata na znanstvene časopise može iznositi do 2 milijuna dolara, a čak je i Harvard još 2012. objavio da ne može priuštiti daljnji rast cijena publikacija. Cijene pretplata su u posljednjih osam godina nastavile rasti unatoč brojnim reakcijama američkih i europskih sveučilišta. Sci-Hub stoga odražava bijes akademske zajednice, ali često naprosto služi i kao jedini slobodan izbor relevantne literature. Lanjsko istraživanje pokazuje da najveći broj korisnika Sci-Huba doista dolazi iz siromašnijih zemalja kao što su Iran, Indija, Rusija ili Tunis. Tim podacima uvjerljivost daje i komentar argentinske povjesničarke Paule Seiguer:  “U Argentini javna sveučilišta i knjižnice obično nemaju čime platiti izuzetno skupe cijene koje veliki izdavači žele iznuditi od njih, a moji kolege i ja nismo dovoljno plaćeni za taj trošak. Ako ne možemo hakirati pristup nekom članku, pitamo kolege koji su na rezidenciji u Prvom svijetu da nam ga nabave. Ako ni to ne možemo, onda naprosto ignoriramo članak. (…) Država mi je platila obrazovanje, plaću i istraživačke projekte, dok se istovremeno neuspješno pokušava pobrinuti za 30 % populacije ispod granice siromaštva. U takvim okolnostima, privatizirati rezultate istraživanja trebalo bi biti krivično djelo.”

Od “sive zone” do solidarnih praksi

Dok se reformističke inicijative relativno neuspješno trude provesti dugoročno rješenje, piratske prakse relativno efikasno uvode kratkoročna rješenja. One dugoročno mogu utjecati na promjenu svijesti i stvoriti pritisak na promjenu sustava (kako se to donekle dogodilo u muzičkoj industriji), no njihova duža perspektiva je dakako upitna iz praktičnih razloga. Osim salonskog pitanja jesu li takve prakse načelno prihvatljive, uvijek je upitan opstanak svake stranice, kao i sudbina njihovih voditelja koji se suočavaju s drakonskim kaznama. Elbakjan je (zasad) na sigurnom, no brojni drugi hakeri su završili u zatvoru, a najtragičniji je slučaj američkog hakera Aarona Swartza koji je, suočen s mogućom maksimalnom 35-godišnjom zatvorskom kaznom zbog masovnog skidanja akademskih članaka s JSTOR-a, počinio samoubojstvo neposredno prije početka suđenja.

No piratske prakse doista uspijevaju otvoriti pitanje odnosa prema distribuciji kulture jer se moćniji politički i ekonomski režimi trebaju prilagoditi njihovoj praksi (umjesto obrnuto). Uz to one funkcioniraju upravo kao commons od kojih smo krenuli: pronalaze javnu funkciju koju država i tržište ne ispunjavaju te je same vrše neposredno, brzo, samoinicijativno i samoorganizirano. Stoga ne čudi što je “piratstvo” prešlo iz virtualne sfere u fizički prostor gdje postoji potreba za istim tipom organizacije. Medak i Mars su lani, zajedno s istraživačicom Valerijom Graziano, pokrenuli Pirate Care, transnacionalni istraživački projekt i mrežu za prakse “iz sive zone” koje potiču solidarnost i zajedničku brigu. U kontekstu dominantne neoliberalne politike koja je demontirala javne oblike zajedničke brige (zdravstvo, obrazovanje, smještaj, azil, socijalna pomoć…), Pirate Care okuplja neformalne prakse koje ispunjavaju te funkcije. Mreža povezuje ljude koji takvu skrb nude ili organiziraju, a kroz #silabuse i ostale edukativne materijale nudi niz različitih primjera i modela za slične prakse.

Dakle, ideje otvorenog pristupa i samoregulacije, koje su u računalni svijet došle iz starijih akademskih principa rada, sada se vraćaju iz virtualnog u fizički dio društvenog aktivizma. Upravo sada, kad postaje očito da dominantne političke i ekonomske institucije ne uspijevaju adekvatno reagirati na zdravstvene i ekonomske posljedice pandemije, “piratska skrb” postaje aktualna, prvenstveno u siutacijama gdje treba momentalno i direktno pomoći ugroženim pojedincima ili skupinama koji ovise o skrbi drugih. Ne znamo nudi li Pirate Care dugoročan, sustavan i “revolucionaran” odgovor na dvojbe političkog sustava, ali možda se upravo kroz činove momentalne i neformalne solidarnosti u svakodnevici polako počnu graditi temelji povezanih i funkcionalnih društvenih zajednica kakve liberalni politički programi dugo pokušavaju rasturiti.