Join us on Saturday, January 15, 2022 at 11 am at Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka) for a public presentation of our latest project – Get Along Comrade.
 
The concept of this emerging research and artistic project will be presented by the members of the research team – Mara Ferreri, Carmen Wiesskopf, Domagoj Smoljo, Đorđe Balmazović, Dragan Protić, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Davor Mišković – that has been working on the design of the project in Rijeka from January 10 to 16.

Get Along Comrade is a complex multi-year artistic and theoretical research project, focusing on practices such are tinkering, cheating, lying and forgery done by deprivileged groups in order to gain certain rights or privileges that are administratively disrupted or blocked to members of those groups. Institutions recognize those practices as ones that are morally suspicious and sometimes even criminal. And we can’t agree more that this is often true. But, there is also a socially determined practice of tinkering, cheating, lying and forgery, when recipients of social welfare – which is too small to provide livelihood – are lying about their irregular jobs they do aside. Or, when immigrants from Middle East or Africa are forging documents to prove that they are political and not economical refugees in order to enter to Western world.

There are many cases in our societies where administrative rules are imposed over basic human rights and where, in order to secure own life or livelihood, people must adopt tactics and strategies to overcome those rules by all means. In that sense, we can examine those practices as a workarounds, adaptations and tools to enhance own freedom or the freedom of others in a dysfunctional institutional setting that embodies an unequal power dynamic.

Brainstorming

In the framework of the Get Along Comrade project, we have already started a scientific (social sciences) research branch with partners from several European universities. We are now moving on to initiate artistic research, with the aim to uncover individual experiences, emotional states, hidden relations, stories and narratives that will be used as markers in the artistic concept, that will be open to other artist for participation.

In this first phase of the project we are setting up a concept and making decisions on how to include other artists and producers in the whole process. Expected results of the project are the creation of collectively written syllabus, accessible through specifically designed software Sandpoints (already applied in the Pirate care project), production of individual artworks, group exhibition and an interdisciplinary festival.

Work in progress

Working sessions and the public presentation of the project were made possible by the i-Portunus Houses Grant.

The i-Portunus Houses pilot scheme is implemented, on behalf of the European Commission, by a consortium of organisations that have been pioneers of European cultural mobility programmes themselves. Coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam), the i-Portunus Houses consortium involves MitOst (Berlin) as main mobility implementer and the Kultura Nova Foundation (Zagreb) as lead in evaluation and analysis.

Cover image: “The Conjurer,” painted by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Hieronymus Bosch and workshop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)