The opening of the ‘Figure it Out’ exhibition. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

The nineteenth edition of the Mine, Yours, Ours festival will take place at Filodrammatica (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka) from November 7 to 9, 2024, under the title Figure It Out.

Through a group exhibition (from November 7 to 28) and a two-day symposium (November 8 and 9), the program concludes a two years international project Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures.

Coordinated by Drugo More in partnership with Labomedia (France), VEKTOR (Greece), Unfinished Foundation (Malta), and Kiosk (Serbia), the Figure it Out project explored practices and phenomena in which systems and institutions fail specific communities and populations, wondering how people navigate and challenge institutionalized neglect and hostility. MORE ↴

Figure it Out ** Mine, Yours, Ours #19

Symposium ‘Figure it Out’. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

PROGRAM

MINE, YOURS, OURS 2024

Figure it Out

 

EXHIBITION

7 – 28 November, 2024

☛ Filodrammatica Gallery, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka

 

EXHIBITION OPENING:

Thursday, 7 November, at 7 p.m.

 

GALLERY OPENING HOURS:

Monday – Friday 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. | 5 – 8 p.m.

Saturday 5 – 8 p.m.

 

WITH:

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, RYBN.org, Kiosk, Škart, Tania El Khoury, Figure it Out Research Group

 

**************

 

SYMPOSIUM

8 – 9 November, 2024

☛ Filodrammatica, large hall, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka

 

Friday, 08 /11

.

11 a.m. – 2 p.m.  –  ETHICS OF REFUSAL

introductory presentation & workshop – Mara Ferreri & Irene Peano

 

6 – 8.30 p.m.  THEORY AND POLITICS OF ILLEGALISM

introductory presentation – Valeria Graziano

Keynote lecture – Delio Vasquez: Intercommunialism, the Internal Colonization of Europe and the Criminal Construct

Keynote lecture – Amit Rai: How to do things with attention?

 

 

Saturday, 09 /11

 

11 a.m. – 1 p.m. –  STORYTELLING

introductory presentation – Tomislav Medak

conversation with the artists – with: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, RYBN.ORG, Kiosk, Škart & others

 

**the program is in English

 

 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

The works of international artists and groups, including !Mediengruppe Bitnik, RYBN, Kiosk, Škart, Tania El Khoury, and Figure it Out Research Group  (Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Davor Mišković) will be presented at the Filodrammatica Gallery.


→ PRESENTED WORKS / ARTISTS

Ghost Work | !Mediengruppe Bitnik
video installation

2023 – 2024

 

In Ghost Work, !Mediengruppe Bitnik looks at the ingenious practices which people with little or no power devise when systems fail them.

Ghost Work documents how !Mediengruppe Bitnik buys access to an active account for the on-demand labor platform Upwork from a Ukrainian freelancer. The transaction traces the market for gig labor accounts on messaging apps like Telegram. To boost their pay, workers from lower-income economies “rent” accounts from users in higher income brackets. Although it’s the employers that set the pay, most companies are willing to pay remote workers from higher income locations more for a similar job than their peers in locations which are perceived as having lower cost of living. Accounts can be rented or purchased directly from workers from the desired location. Rent is at least 100$ per month. Some go for as high as 400$, depending on the quality of reputation they come with. Account brokers usually also offer banking services or the sale of payoneer or wise accounts for payout. This is especially important for workers from unbanked locations. To avoid having the rented account get banned, it is paramount that the workers make sure that their location data matches the one stated in the account. This is usually done through a VPN provided by the account broker.

With Ghost Work, !Mediengruppe Bitnik documents these resources and mechanisms as practices of survival that help workers navigate on-demand labor systems that they are forced to rely on and which affords them little agency.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (read – the not Mediengruppe Bitnik) are contemporary artists working on, and with, the Internet. Their practice expands from the digital to physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms. Their works formulate fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues. In the past they have been known to subvert surveillance cameras, bug an opera house to broadcast its performances outside, send a parcel containing a camera to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and physically glitch a building. In 2014, they sent a bot called «Random Darknet Shopper» on a three-month shopping spree in the Darknets where it randomly bought items like keys, cigarettes, trainers and Ecstasy and had them sent directly to the gallery space. Their works are shown internationally, most recently in exhibitions at: Aksioma Ljubljana, Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, CAC Shanghai, House of Electronic Arts Basel, Super Dakota Brussels, Aksioma Ljubljana, Kunsthaus Zurich, Onassis Cultural Center Athens, Public Access Gallery Chicago, Fondazione Prada Milano, Shanghai Minsheng 21st Century Museum and the Tehran Roaming Biennial.

Algoffshore | RYBN.ORG
5 plotter printer prints, 5 UV Lamps

2017 – ongoing

 

Algoffshore is a toolbox to optimize legal environments leveraging the arsenal of the wealthiest and multinationals for tax avoidance: anonymisation and tax evasion through trusts and shell companies, art or cryptomoney as laundering machines, flags of convenience for social and ecological bypasses.

Composed of  five algorithmic flowcharts of tricks and tactics, Algoffshore may appear as a pure contradiction of the collective research of the Figure it Out project, because tax optimization circuitry is the system itself. Nevertheless, within their intricacies, the Algoffshore series reveal – to those who look carefully – information on several fronts against financial techno-capitalism,  such as situated technical infrastructures, legal personalities of ecological commons, and a radical transformation of the notion of property.

For this exhibition, a second series of maps describing counter-systems has been hidden into the Algoffshore diagrams themselves. Hiding maps within maps is a move that takes its inspiration from the Underground Railroad, a secret network, whose maps would reveal information only to those who have been warned about its content, but where critical information remains invisible to the non-initiated.

RYBN.ORG (1999) is an artist collective based in Paris, leading extra-disciplinary investigations on complex systems and phenomena within the realms of economics and cybernetics – high-frequency trading, financial algorithms, flash crashes, market infrastructures, tax avoidance opaque schemes and offshore financial circuits, artificial artificial intelligence, digital labour, etc. For Figure It Out, RYBN.ORG & la Labomedia (Orléans) have conducted a research series of interviews and practical workshops; in this research, the ‘art of living through system failures’ has been situated at a collective level, within political, judicial and financial fields. The corpus includes very actual strategies, such as the creation of legal personhood of rivers (Parlement de Loire), the hacking of legal entities to create a grey area for usage property (Clip, Mietshaüser Syndikat), the ignition of a referendum for expropriate multinationals in Berlin (Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen), the use of complex financial tools for nullifying private property (Foncière Antidote), the setup of independent radio infrastructures for technical self determination (∏-Node, Mur.at, Tetaneutral, les Chatons), and lands acquisition to preserve forests from intensive exploitation (Hauts les cimes).

Women's Affairs | Kiosk
installation

2023 – 2024

 

The work Women’s Affairs is a result of a series of encounters and conversations with women across Serbia, within which the group shared stories about survival techniques and navigating the gaps of a state benefit system which constantly fails to assist and support life. They talked about lifelong work without a single day of official employment, about the diverse gray zones of labor, about real and fictional earnings, invisible union struggles of women, mutual solidarity, the dysfunctional administrative web of social benefits, fake and real divorces, perseverance, small life gestures of resistance and big struggles we undertake. The stories and experiences recorded testify to the incredible imagination and heroic endeavors of women in a hostile environment and various skills we acquire through life and coping. Hospitality, honesty, wonderful homemade specialties, vital energy and strength were all major ingredients of the informal gatherings full of playfulness and joy. The created material of stories, sounds and photographs are now shared both through an art installation and new live encounters.

Kiosk (Ana Adamović, Branislava Stefanović, Jelena Mijić i Milica Pekić) in collaboration with Tara Rukeci Milivojević, Sanja Stamenković, Maja Vučković, Dragana Kojičić, Milica Ivanović, Dženeta Agović, Zuzana Karlečik.

With special thanks to: Nada, Muradija, Jovanka, Agnesa, Duda, Sandra, Sanja, Ajsela, Una, Marina, Ceca, Atifa, Maja, Ruška, Juca, Bahta, Vesna, Hajruša, Zorica, Verica, Ana, Maja, Dušanka, Fatima, Srđana, Sandra, Bisera and Snežana.

Thank you to Vladislav Mijić for the brilliant translation from Serbian, to Paul Leonard Murray for proofreading and multiple support, and to our long-term colleagues and friends, art collective škart for their support and collaboration.

Founded in 2002 in Belgrade by artist Ana Adamović and art historian Milica Pekić, Kiosk is an art collective developing practice based on collaboration, participation, aesthetic experience, collective authorship and research. Team members vary depending on the project and programme; Women’s Affairs brought Ana and Milica together with theater director, professor, sound and multi-media artist Branislava Stefanović and painter and multi-media artist Jelena Mijić. During the process the team grew with multiple collaborators, participants, friends and colleagues.

FLAG STORIES (use and pass on) | ŠKART

Flags on synthetic canvas

2024

 

Survival tools: each different, each personal, each useful.

Through years of field work, Škart have been collecting the experiences of interlocutors and friends in diverse environments – centers for the elderly, orphanages, asylum centers, protest environments, as well as in communities and public spaces.

Endless stories (everyone’s own experience is the most important) are shortened to micro (im)practical situations and presented in the form of a comic strip, enlarged and printed as flags. Story-flags, dancing with the mischievous and messy wind, remind us that every little invisible tool-of-rebellion and riot-step is important.

Or, as Slobodan S. (a teacher at the Children’s Home from Bela Crkva) says: “if you care and dare – you can change reality; if not – you can just look to the sky.”

Interlocutors and friends are Tijana S, Želimir Ž, Jadranka M, Radmila Ž, Dušan T, Pava M, Slobodan S, Nikola I, Iskra G, Ivan Č, Lejla H, Miroslav T, Reza A, Rada G, E.R, E.M, Dž.M, N.N, N.S, K.P, Đ.B, F.V, V.N, …

Through the architecture of human relations and permanent inner conflict, together with countless various collaborators, ŠKART (rejects/ausschus/scarto) group (1990, Architecture Faculty, Belgrade), continuously questions and combines edged forms of poetry, architecture, graphic design, publishing, music, performance, film, comics and alternative education. For ten years, the group engaged in a self-publishing-self-distribution strategy in anti-war street actions including Your shit = Your responsibility and Survival Coupons. Subsequently, and for almost a quarter of a century, the group initiated and developed new collectives and networks such as Non-practical Women, Horkeskart choir, MoonChildren choir, Defiant Pensioners, and Poetrying. In 2011 the group participated in the Venice Biennial of Architecture with SEE-SAW / PLAY-GROW (polygon of dis-balance). ŠKART have performed, work-shopped, exhibited and lectured in Europe, America and Asia. Retrospective exhibitions have been held in Rijeka (Kortil, 2009), London (Space, Hackney, 2010), Belgrade (MPU, 2012) and Nagoya (AICHI Triennial 2013). The recently published book, Škart: Building Human Relations Through Art (by Seda Yildiz, published by Onomatopoeia) captures traces of Škart`s practice from the 1990s to present.

Sejjaħ lil Malta | Tania El Khoury

Virtual performance, VR headset

2024

 

Sejjaħ lil Malta” in Maltese sounds and means the exact same thing in Arabic: “Call Malta.”

The phrase was the response of the Italian Coast Guard on 10 October 2013 when a sinking boat carrying refugees sent out a distress call for help. Thirty-four people died at sea that day-killed through contested maritime borders.

In June of this year, Sejjaħ lil Malta invited audiences in Valletta, Malta to travel on traditional Maltese boats (dgħajjes) while listening to seashells picked up from the shores of Sousse in Tunisia. This performance was recorded using CVR 360 cameras, and can now be experienced through a VR headset in the context of this exhibition.

Sejjaħ lil Malta is a site-specific performance which explores our changing perception of the Mediterranean Sea, a fluctuating space of many borders and a death trap for those seeking refuge. The dgħajjes themselves, once a sign of movement and local craft, now tell a story of a privatized Mediterranean seashore. The seashells whisper oral histories from the community of boat drivers in Valletta struggling to make ends meet, refugees who survived the journey in the Mediterranean, and two artists, one in Sousse and another in Valletta, collaborating across the sea. Sejjaħ lil Malta is the sound of the Mediterranean as a border.

Site-specific performance by Tania El Khoury
Performers: Mohamed Ali “Dali” Aguerbi and Chakib Zidi
Boat Driver: Rudy Camilleri
Narration and music: Yasmin Kuymizakis
Singers: Mouheddine “Huita” Chalchoule and Yasmin Kuymizakis Technical production: Mohamed Ali “Dali” Aguerbi
English Translation: Ziad Abu-Rish
Maltese Translation: Yasmin Kuymizakis
CVR 360 Filming: Heritage Malta & University of Malta
CVR 360 Editing & Mastering: Jacob Saliba, Heritage Malta
CVR 360 Producer: Adnan Hadzi, University of Malta
Photos: Elisa von Brockdorff

Sejjaħ lil Malta was first developed and commissioned as part of “Dal-Baħar Madwarha” exhibition, curated by Maren Richter. In 2024, it was part of Refugee Week Malta 2024.

In 2024, the performance was produced by Unfinished Art Space, within Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failure, co-funded by the European Union and the NGO Co-financing Scheme of the Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector.

Tania El Khoury is an artist who creates interactive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory, and visual materials, transformed through audience interaction. Tania’s work engages questions of displacement, border systems, privatization, and the politics of space in how they are shaped through nation-building projects and colonial legacies. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessie Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

Figure It Out Online Zine | FIO Research Group

Online archive

2024

Figure it Out Online Zine

Figure It Out Online Zine is an online archive created by the FIO research team, presenting materials collected over the two-year inquiry into popular illegalisms and forms of ingenuity people with little power develop amid systems failure to secure sustenance and joy. It brings together stories, interviews, essays and a digital library, which document and provide insights into various figure-it-out practices across different social contexts and their politically-disruptive and solidarity-generating import. The website is running on Sandpoints, a collective writing and experimental publishing framework, which can also be easily turned out into a print-on-demand zine, a handout that can, much in the spirit of bonfire talks that built the basis of our fieldwork methodology, be passed around and read collectively.

Click here to access the website.

FIO Research Group consists of Mara Ferreri, Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak and Davor Mišković who gathered around the realization of the Pirate care project, and in various collaborations worked on other projects. Their research focuses on issues of precarity, commons, housing, healthcare practices and various collective practices, inspired by feminist and degrowth pedagogies. Their background combines political theory and organization studies (Graziano), geography and urban studies (Ferreri), digital and media cultures (Mars & Medak), cultural theory (Mišković).



ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM:

This two-day gathering covers ethical research methodologies, vernacular practices that transgress rules and laws, and the role of storytelling in counteracting institutional limitations, to provide a space of encounter to explore creative and critical approaches to living through intersectional system failures.

Symposium ‘Figure it Out’. Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)

Day one begins with the Ethics of Refusal session (11 a.m. – 2 p.m.), where Mara Ferreri and Irene Peano will address the methodological and ethical dilemmas researchers and artists encounter when documenting the transgressions and counter-conducts of constituencies that navigate the fringes of legality. When and ow to document and create knowledge about these acts without inadvertently exposing participants and their coping tactics to scrutiny and repression from authorities?

Following this session, there will be a workshop that continues exploring this theme. It is open to researchers, artists, activists, social workers, and anyone engaged with participants where disclosing their practices and identities might lead to repression and harm. If you want to participate in the workshop, write us an email to info@drugo-more.hr.

MORE ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
This workshop is open to artists, researchers, activists, and practitioners engaged with individuals and communities whose stories might not benefit from conventional forms of publication and sharing of knowledges. Together, we’ll explore the “ethics of refusal” — rooted in collaborative decision-making between practitioners and participants about what knowledge should or should not be produced and shared, and how. Rather than concealing information, this practice seeks to preserve communities’ autonomy, allowing them to respond to issues on their own terms.
Refusal is not about hiding or erasing knowledge; it’s about refusing a presumed entitlement to it — especially when that knowledge offers nothing to the communities from which it is gleaned. It involves acts of solidarity and trust, and an ethical/political commitment to counter the academy and the arts’ impulse to extract, represent, expose, gather, archive, and contain. Refusing to divulge or engage is often a protective manoeuvrer, acknowledging subjective narratives shifting the gaze away from communities and towards the systemic forces that oppress them.
In this workshop, we will dive into ethical questions of engagement and anonymity, representation, the responsibility to honour other knowledge systems, and the values of situated research by acknowledging communities’ capacity for strategic self-representation. Participants will be invited to reflect on their practices, discuss shared challenges, and reimagine ways to ethically engage with and represent the communities they work alongside and in solidarity with.

The afternoon session, Politics and Theories of Illegalisms (6 – 8.30 p.m.), brings Valeria Graziano, Amit Rai, and Delio Vasquez together to explore the political significance of popular illegalism, tracing its roots and cultural variations across different contexts. Drawing on examples like the strategies in India’s jugaad culture, the anarchist tradition in Europe, and the Black Panthers’ theorization of class, they’ll discuss how these practices emerged as responses to neoliberal and neocolonial pressures and have evolved as a forms of political strategy.

Camera & Editing: Valentina Botica / Filmaktiv


→ KEYNOTE LECTURES:

Delio Vasquez: Intercommunialism, the Internal Colonization of Europe and the Criminal Construct

In 1970, the Black Panther Party developed the theory of intercommunalism, an early analysis of globalization which was an outgrowth of the organization’s understanding of colonization. Delio Vasquez’ talk Intercommunalism, the Internal Colonization of Europe, and the Criminal Construct makes use of this theory as a starting point to analyze the internal colonization of Europe.  The argument is that it is only by identifying the historical relationship between Europe’s colonization of its own populations and its colonization of external populations that can we grasp well the power of modern criminalization for the suppression of poor people’s everyday efforts to sustain themselves.

Camera & Editing: Valentina Botica / Filmaktiv


Amit Rai: How to do things with attention?

How do we attend to subaltern techniques of ethical refusal such as jugaad (a word meaning ‘illegal work-around’ in Hindi/Punjabi), hacking and piracy without value extraction in and for participatory action research? What criteria can we use to help us decide what to make public and what to withhold when working with illegalized populations? Solidary research develops anti-colonial strategies and collective practices of attention, making the politics of perception more than a question of revolutionary party discipline. Knowing when, why, and who talks to the cops is important in moments of urban protest, and becomes irrelevant in societies of generalized facial recognition software. This talk will present commoning modes of attention that can hone the intuition of the changing technological and political conditions of the hacker’s radical know-how of counter-surveillance and counter-insurgency (what Gloria Anzuldúa called the subaltern’s facultad or intuitive capacity for surviving the colonial contact zone). Therefore, we argue for attentional practices that can negotiate the lived complexities of everyday extraction, dispossession, social domination, resistance, hacking and refusal.

Camera & Editing: Valentina Botica / Filmaktiv

Day two session titled Storytelling (Saturday,9 November, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.) focuses on storytelling as a tool for resistance, with presentations from Tomislav Medak and artists !Mediengruppe Bitnik, RYBN, Kiosk and Škart, exploring storytelling as a medium for marginalized and counter-narratives. The session will explore how communal storytelling offers a way to resist dominant narratives and engage with the social and political structures that impact us without consent.


→ ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:

Mara Ferreri

Mara Ferreri is an urban and housing geographer. She is Senior Researcher on the ERC project Inhabiting Radical Housing and Core Team Member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab at DIST, Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. Her work on temporary and platform urbanism, housing precarity and organising for housing commons has been published in edited volumes and journals including Urban Studies, Antipode, IJURR and Housing Studies. She is the author of The Permanence of Temporary Urbanism (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and a co-founder and editor of the international open access Radical Housing Journal.

Irene Peano

Irene Peano (PhD Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge) is Assistant Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Bologna and a visiting professorship at the Bucharest University Research Institute. Her research has addressed different aspects of labour migration, its governance and its various forms of resistance, always seeking to adopt an engaged stance which uses solidarity as a method.

Valeria Graziano

Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist and organizer based in Rijeka, Croatia, whose work is rooted in collective practice and shaped by Italian operaismo, institutional analysis, and materialist feminisms. Her research centers on strategies of work refusal, the commoning of social reproduction, and the politics of pleasure. She is one of the convenors of the Pirate Care Syllabus (https://pirate.care) and a coordinator of the working group “Analysis, Theory & Politics of Care” (COST Action CA21102). Valeria’s work has been published in a range of journals and books, including MIT Press; Theory & Event; ephemera. Cultural Studies; and Capitalism Nature Socialism. Her book Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, co-authored with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, is forthcoming from Pluto Press in 2025.

Delio Vásquez

Delio Vásquez is an educator and scholar of political theory, philosophy, Black studies, and social history.  He is a professor at New York University where he studies the criminalization of the poor and their forms of resistance.  He was born and raised in the Bronx, NY.

Amit Rai

Amit Rai teaches and researches in the fields of subaltern DIY media ecologies, everyday hacking of social reproduction in subaltern communities, racial capitalist attention ecologies and their disruptions, the financialization of artistic and cultural value and its sabotage, race as a form of real abstraction. He is a lecturer in London and in the Netherlands. He was born in Bhopal, India and grew up in Boston, NYC, CA, DC, the UK, and Bombay.

Tomislav Medak

Tomislav Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public library project, and a political organizer with a focus on care, ecology and technology. With Valeria Graziano and Marcell Mars, in 2019 he co-instigated “Pirate Care”, a militant research and collective learning project on which they have a book forthcoming with Pluto Press. He authored two short books: The Hard Matter of AbstractionA Guidebook to Domination by Abstraction (V_____erlag für Handbücher, 2016) and Shit Tech for A Shitty World (Aksioma, 2015).

Marcell Mars

Marcell Mars is a programmer, media theorist and activist. He develops and maintains software infrastructure for a number of radical projects. Marcell Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.

Davor Mišković

Davor Mišković is a cultural worker and a Director of the non-profit organization Drugo More, where his work ranges from programme selection to executive production. He is also working as a researcher of the cultural sector, actively participating in the creation of cultural policies and the management of cultural institutions and networks. He has a MA in sociology from the University of Zagreb. He has published more than 50 articles for cultural magazines and books. He has worked for the Ministry of Culture for seven years and was a part-time associate in a number of cultural associations, market research agencies, daily papers and magazines.





You know the way, but you can’t go down it. They won’t let you, you can’t afford the toll, or something else is in your way. You have to go through the forest, since you can’t travel the road. The forest is dark, full of those who guard the path, tricksters, or people like you. Even the powerful and wealthy don’t travel by road—they fly, somehow they just arrive. But you have to navigate the forest and find your way through.

Figure it Out is a project that focuses on those who navigate the forest, who strive to reach their destination outside the prescribed paths, who discover their own routes or follow the trails of others like themselves. Sometimes these trails become well-trodden paths, marked on maps to guide others, but more often they are quickly closed off under the watchful eye of the gatekeepers. All those who embark on these journeys have a reason why they cannot travel the “official” route. These reasons range from evasion of duties, like tax evasion, to sheer necessity, survival, and subsistence. There is no clear boundary between them, and the behaviors of those whose survival depends on their success with these alternative strategies and those who stand to profit greatly can often appear quite similar. We justify or condemn them precisely because of this.

The framework of acceptable behavior and the achievement of goals is set by social consensus or imposed by the will of the powerful. This framework wraps around our needs and desires, dictating our actions. However, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we do not wish or cannot adapt to this framework, so we adapt it to ourselves. The behaviors through which we do this include lying, scheming, forgery, theft, and the like. When we see such actions in the pursuit of rights guaranteed to others or due to poverty and survival, they evoke a smile, and we admire human ingenuity. But when we see them done for personal gain or profit at the expense of others, they provoke outrage. Thus, the level of amusement these behaviors inspire is an excellent indicator of whether we are ready to accept or condemn them.

Some examples of these practices include the possibility of buying light bulbs at Polish flea markets at incredibly cheap prices to swap them out at work and save a few cents, or the market for cow ears in India, where cut-off ears serve as proof to insurance companies that a cow has “died,” allowing the insurance premium to be collected. Similarly, poor families from southern Serbia go on vacation to apartments in Greece to roast peppers and cook ajvar there because electricity is free in the apartments. In the digital sphere, there is the practice of Asian platform workers adopting German or other Western European identities, as work fees are dependent on the nationality of the worker. There are many similar anecdotal examples, and each of us knows at least one such story.

Collecting these stories and anecdotes is the backbone of the Figure it Out project. By systematizing them, we gain insight not only into the ways people find to get by but also into the failures of the system in which such navigation is even necessary. From the collected stories, it becomes clear that these are not reckless but necessary practices, behaviors that arise in response to the inability to meet basic needs within the existing framework.

From these stories, artistic works have emerged that highlight many of the collected stories, or are themselves inspired by them, revealing some possible practices. These works form the exhibition around which this year’s event Mine, Yours, Ours develops.

– Davor Mišković




Co-funded by the European Union - logo


The project ‘Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures’ is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Co-funded by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

Project is co-financed by the Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs. The views expressed in this publication are the sole responsibility of Drugo more and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs.



Annual Archive

Annual Archive

Annual Archive

ARCHIVE SEARCH