Ports, rails, roads…

Discursive program
Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

The twelfth edition of Mine, Yours, Ours will take place from 20 to 22 April at several locations in Rijeka. This year’s topic is logistics, one of the pillars of modern economy that affects our daily lives by forming the structures that directly determine our civil rights and movement patterns.

We invite you to attend film screenings and theater performances, discussions and presentations, workshops and educational program so you can learn more on the logistics revolution, today’s position of Rijeka in it, and how the national transport policies, global trends and labor and citizen actions can shape the future of our city as a site where the local and the global meet.

 
Discursive program
 

Tomislav Medak: LOGISTIC TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD AND THE CITY

Friday, 21 April, 18.00 @ Filodrammatica
– introduction & discussion
 

The fundamental transformation of the world’s economic system over the last couple of decades we call globalization would not have been possible without a revolution in maritime, road and rail transport – i.e. logistics. Since the very beginning of the Cold War, standardization, containerization, computerization and intermodal concatenation of transport by sea and land have enabled an unprecedented intensification of global flows. The value and volume of global trade has grown thirty times over, while the international trade as part of world’s GDP has soared from 5.5% to 20.5%. This expansion has particularly accelerated after the economic crisis of the early 1970s. Logistics have enabled the relocation of industrial production from the developed economies and creation of global production chains, where multinationals are able to exploit to the maximum differentials in prices of labor and raw materials. It has become simply cheaper to export North Atlantic salmon for processing to the Far East and then import back for retail into the Western markets, to produce computers designed in the US in China and then import them back into the country of origin, to import natural water sourced in Croatia rather than bottle water in the US.

Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. Together with his colleagues, he’s running the theory program and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb). He’s a free software and free culture advocate, and one of the people working on various facets of Memory of the World/Public Library project. He is author and performer with the Zagreb based theatre collective BADco.

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Laleh Khalili: QUARTERMASTERS OF CAPITAL

Friday, 21 April, 19.00 @ Filodrammatica
– presentation & discussion

In her talk, Laleh Khalili will be thinking through the overlapping role of the militaries and petroleum companies of Britain and the US – old and new imperial powers – in the making of ports and maritime transport infrastructures of the Arabian Peninsula. In so doing, she hopes to excavate the ghostly presences of colonial and mercantilist structures so frequently present there. In the Arabian Peninsula, the histories of Aden and Dubai, the fall of one and the rise of the other is all about how three things weave together to make ports and maritime transport. These three things are global labour relations, the accumulation and transnational movement of capital, and the embroilment of powerful militaries in local politics.

Laleh Khalili is a Professor in Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She received her PhD from Columbia University. Her primary research areas are logistics and trade, infrastructure, policing and incarceration, gender, nationalism, political and social movements, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East. Her commentary on Middle Eastern and Iranian affairs has been used in several newspapers, including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Financial Times, and Agence France-Presse. Khalili writes regularly for Iranian.com.

Jasper Bernes: LOGISTICS AND COUNTERLOGISTICS IN AN AGE OF WALLED FLOWS

Friday, 21 April, 20.00 @ Filodrammatica
– presentation & discussion

The logistics revolution has facilitated a truly global restructuring of capitalist production and circulation, such that a single consumer good, broken down into component parts, may circle the globe many times before it reaches its final destination. But the logistics “revolution” should, in fact, be thought of a counter-revolution, as it was undertaken chiefly in order to remove from labour its chief weapon against capital, the strike. From pipeline to border wall, proletarian struggles increasingly shift to the sphere of circulation. In the new reactionary populism of the late 2010s, the contradictions of the logistics revolution – accelerating the commodity and value flows, while controlling the movement of proletarians – come to the fore, as right-wing movements and politicians put forward a putative program of protectionism and isolation bound to conflict with the imperatives of multinational capital. The social movements of our day themselves absorb these contradictions at the level of strategy and tactics, crushed between the flow and the wall, forced to blockade and to dismantle, to obstruct and to remove all obstructions.

Jasper Bernes is author of two books of poetry, Starsdown (2007) and We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015), and a scholarly book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, 2017). He is presently at work on a book about revolution in the 21st century. Poems, essays, and other writings can be found in Modern Language Quarterly, Radical Philosophy, Endnotes, Lana Turner, The American Reader, Critical Inquiry and elsewhere. Together with Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, he edits Commune Editions. He lives in Berkeley with his family.

Antun Sevšek: PRESENTATION OF THE RESEARCH ON THE RAILWAY SERVICES IN CROATIA

Saturday, 22 April, 16.00 @ Filodrammatica
– presentation & discussion (in Croatian)
 

The Institute for political ecology from Zagreb is currently conducting a research on the management of Croatian railway services. A broad group of researchers is trying to explain the process and results of the current management system, watching it from the perspective of historical development of railways in this region, the evolution of the legislative framework and its comparison with a number of European examples.

The importance of Rijeka within a national network is equally representative for the tempered history of the politically directed development of the infrastructure, as it is for the possibilities of its improvements through the changing priorities of the European transport and thereby conditioned possibilities of financing.

RIJEKA – PORT CITY

Saturday, 22 April, 17.30 @ Filodrammatica
Round table (in Croatian)

Guests: Mladen Jovičić, Bojana Manojlović
Moderator: Ana Vračar
 

Ports and port systems are one of the oldest symbols of traffic and logistics whose importance remained constant throughout history. Even though they still play the significant role in the global transport chain, the ports and their workers experienced major changes during time, caused by the technological and organizational modifications of the work process. These shifts had also changed the position of the workers, who needed to fight against the reduction of jobs – as a result of the implementation of technological innovations –  and the precarization of labour and working conditions. Their struggle is particularly interesting if we have in mind the militant position that the port workers’ trade unions occupy in the imaginary of the workers’ movement, with a strong international network of solidarity and community.

In the local contest, the Port of Rijeka makes an important part of the town’s identity – physically, as it is placed in the very centre, and for historical and cultural reasons. There is also the major economical aspect of the Port of Rijeka, which was the biggest port in the former Yugoslavia. However, while the physical, historical and cultural importance remains unchanged, the same cannot be said for the port’s share in today’s economy of Rijeka and Croatia. For the past twenty years, it suffered huge losses in traffic, in the terms of business it got run over by the nearby ports of Koper and Trieste, and lost a significant number of its work force.

Syndicalists, workers and media experts directly connected with the maritime transport sector will discuss the reasons of the mentioned fall and offer some positive examples from the neighbouring areas and the rest of the world.

Giorgio Grappi: CORRIDORS OF STRUGGLE: LOGISTICS, SPACES, STRIKE

Saturday, 22 April, 19.00 @ Filodrammatica
– presentation & discussion
 

From a discrete branch of transport and distribution activities logistics has become a driver for the expansion of global capital and a leading force behind political transformation. Logistics’ glittering face suggests the freedom of flows and resiliency as the ultimate values of our times. Nevertheless, against the background of a discourse that pretends to generate smoothness and homogeneity, what we observe is a violent reorganization of global political spaces. This ‘politics of corridors’ encounters obstacles and resistances that result in a variation of forms and sites of struggle over territories and labour: while logistics describe these frictions as technical problems–understanding them as bottlenecks–it constantly operates to renovate its discipline over labour and mobility. Standardization advances through the production of hierarchies and differences. Disruption and blockades have been considered a strategic possibility, but the possibilities of disruption are often limited to a tactical move confined in time and space. The contrast of the political economy of logistics requires deeper political gestures and to rethink our idea of strike.

Giorgio Grappi is research fellow at the University of Bologna, Department of Political and Social Sciences. His main research areas include logistics, the transformation of the state form and the political dimension of migrant labour. He has been part of the collective writing of ‘New Keywords: Migration and Borders’, Cultural Studies (2014), and is currently involved in the tricontinental project Logistical Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour. His most recent publications include the article ‘India’s corridors of development and new frontier of capital’, with Ishita Dey (South Atlantic Quarterly, 2015), and the book Logistica (Ediesse, Roma, 2016).

Film screening
 

THE FORGOTTEN SPACE

Thursday, 20 April, 20.00 @ Art-kino Croatia

Directors: Allan Sekula & Noël Burch
Netherlands / Austria, 2010, 112 min.

Trailer 

 
The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which – maybe in a more fundamental way than financial speculation – leads the world economy to the abyss.

The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.

A range of materials is used: descriptive documentary, interviews, archive stills and footage, clips from old movies. The result is an essayistic, visual documentary about one of the most important processes that affects us today. The Forgotten Space is based on Sekula’s Fish Story, seeking to understand and describe the contemporary maritime world in relation to the complex symbolic legacy of the sea.

Since the early 1970s, Allan Sekula’s (1951 – 2013) works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows and sound recordings have travelled a path close to cinema, sometimes referring to specific films. However, with the exception of a few video works from the early 70s and early 80s, he has stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001, with the first work that Sekula was willing to call a film, Tsukiji, a “city symphony” set in Tokyo’s giant fish market. Sekula’s books include Photography against the Grain (1984), Fish Story (1995), Dismal Science (1999), Performance under Working Conditions (2003), Titanic’s Wake (2003), and Polonia and Other Fables (2009). These works range from the theory and history of photography to studies of family life in the grip of the military industrial complex, and in Fish Story, to explorations of the world maritime economy.

Born in the San Francisco in 1932, Noël Burch has been living in France since 1951. He graduated from the Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinèmatographiques in 1954. While primarily known for his theoretical writings, he has always positioned himself as a filmmaker and has directed over twenty titles, mostly documentaries. Burch has been publishing since the 1960s. Among his numerous publications are his first and best known book Theory of Film Practice (1973) and To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (1979), which remains the most robust history of Japanese cinema written by a Westerner.

Performance

SAID TO CONTAIN: 

Friday, 21 April, 21.00 @ Rijeka breakwater
Saturday, 22 April, 21.00 @ Rijeka breakwater

Authors: Bojan Đorđev, Laura Kalauz, Maja Leo, Christopher Kriese, Lisa Schröter, Miriam Walther Kohn

Admission for the performance is free, but due to the limited number of seating places, tickets must be booked earlier at: ivana[at]drugo-more.hr

Said to contain: @ Rijeka breakwater
Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

“Said to contain” (STC) is the contract-term used by shipping companies to accept containers for transport without verifying their contents. Because of the fact that carriers could not know exactly what would have been loaded into the containers, they add this expression on the face of the bills of lading that they have issued in order to protect themselves.

SAID TO CONTAIN: is also a performative research project initiated by Laura Kalauz, Maja Leo and Bojan Djordjev in 2013. They shipped themselves from Hamburg to Buenos Aires on a cargo ship following the logistics supermachine for 24 days in spring of 2016.

The artists aim to investigate economic phenomena with performative actions in order to make them more understandable for a broader public. For their research, they explore manifestations of global trade in their hometowns of Belgrade, Hamburg and Buenos Aires and in Zurich. Tracing the routes of containers filled with goods, tracking the companies behind them and analyzing the regulations that make all this possible, they try to get beyond the opaque shell of global capitalism and find out how the production, consumption and flow of goods shape our way of being, thinking and living.

Artists developed their own working method and called it “Thinking Public”. It is not only the act of incorporating “the public” into their (artistic/activist) practice, but also the mechanism used to literally explore the possibilities of thinking in public. In collaboration with local artists, researchers, and others interested in order to engage a discourse about neo/post-colonialism with a broad public, they develop performative “Thinking Public Sessions”, a hybrid format between performance, workshop and discussion where cargo containers become an anchor for dialogue and performative production of knowledge. A physical container in the public space serves as their working studio, space for encounter with the public, as a performance venue, but also as something that is constantly filled and emptied with “goods” – knowledge, situations, discoveries, lectures – immaterial goods that they attempt to materialize in performative public thinking sessions.

Performers: Maja Leo, Bojan Djordjev & Stephan Stock

A collaboration of Nada Especial Tanz, neue Dringlichkeit (nD) i TKH-Walking Theory

A coproduction of Zurich University of the Arts, Theater der Künste (Zurich), Magacin Cultural Centre (Belgrade) and Art Space La Darsena (Buenos Aires)

Supported by: Culture Department of the City of Zurich, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Migros Cultural Per Cent and Pro Helvetia

Sound installation

THE SOUND OF THE PORT OF RIJEKA IN THE TIME OF ITS HIGHEST ACTIVITY

Friday, 21 April, 20.00 @ Rijeka breakwater
Saturday, 22 April, 20.00 @ Rijeka breakwater

Author: Ivo Vičić

In order to evoke the glorious past of the port of Rijeka and the period of its highest activity, artist and sound recordist Ivo Vičić created a sound installation. Placed at the breakwater of the main port basin, it’s a reminder of the time not so long ago when the port was one of the city’s main industries.

It is a sound story about the harbour full of huge cargo ships and tugboats, swarmed with traffic, cargo and freight trains, when the machines were buzzing, sirens were wailing, workers were shouting and cranes were creaking. If only for a moment, these sounds are returning to the place where they can’t be heard anymore.

Part of the installation will be joined together with the sounds of other distinguishing city sites of industry and traffic, such as the Main train station, Milutin Barač Street (previously named Industrial Street), and Zvir and Hartera factories. The created soundscape will fill the space of Filodrammatica during the intermissions of the discursive program on Friday and Saturday.
  

Ivo Vičić is a sound technician and designer. He records sounds for different radio programs and films. Independently or together with other artists, in the last two years he has participated in designing exhibitions, soundscapes and audio installations, and taken part in various art festivals.

His works were exhibited in Ethnographic Museums in Zagreb and Udine, Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka, Telašćica Nature Park, at LegendFest, Venice Biennale, etc. In Filodrammatica gallery space, Drugo more presented two of his sound installations, A Track in a Time in 2015, and Harbour of Rijeka: Underwater Soundscape in 2016.

Workshop

DESIGNING THE FOOD NETWORK SYSTEM

20 – 22 April (Thursday – Saturday) @ Youth Cultural Centre Palach

lead by Leo Kiriničić and Marko Luka Zubčić

According to the United Nations, roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally every year. If we take this information into account, the world hunger begins to appear as a logistical problem. The process of developing global solutions is lengthy and complex, and includes geopolitical issues of cooperation. On the other hand, the development of local solutions – where it is possible – seems more feasible in the short term.

The participants of this workshop will act as consultants for The Food Network (Mreža hrane), a Croatian platform for building up an efficient national system for food donation and distribution. Their aim will be to design a logistics chain that would make the food, destined to be thrown away, available to those most in need.

The workshop will take place from Thursday to Saturday, April 20 – 22, at the Youth Cultural Centre Palach. Participation in workshop is free. You can apply by sending an email to dubi [at] drugo-more.hr.

 
Participants will search for the Food Network’s existing logistical problems and develop possible solutions. On the last day of the workshop, they will form a small campaign in order to inform the public about their findings, possible solutions and currently unsolvable problems.

Through reverse logistics and speculative design exercises, the participants will apply the knowledge from the existing logistics systems while developing logistical solutions, and possibly create the new types of interventions in the existing supply chains.
 

Leo Kirinčić studies Media Design at University North, where he explores the media and their influence on society. He works as a visual communications designer with the professional focus on typography.

Marko Luka Zubčić is a PhD student of Philosophy and Contemporaneity at the University of Rijeka, with the interest in social epistemic systems. He works as a copywriter on a number of different projects.

Party
  

MILE LOVES DISCO

Saturday, 22 April, 23.00 @ Klub Život

For almost 6 years, Mile Loves Disco (Mile Voli Disko) is a playlist, a series of parties, and some would dare say, a brand. Rijeka’s own Mile Hund‘s “guilty pleasure”, a list of underground disco hits of the late 70s and early 80s.

Mile Loves Disco emerged in 2011 in the nightclub Discordia as a continuation of Mishu Mitsubishi disco-funk parties and a great collaboration with Mr. Brown Sugar.

“Who’s the man who constantly brings fresh Disco sound to the city of Rijeka?
Who leaves the podiums coated with body fluids (watch out – slippery!)?
Who makes you fall in love with the sound and image of every party that he makes?
The master of sleazy ’80s music, expert hipster, “newly composed” raver knows his disco balls and knows your Disco tastes.
Mile loves Disko,
Disco loves Mile,
And we all love each other when Mile does his thing”

– Mr. Brown Sugar