 Good morning, everyone. Good morning, everyone. It is my great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker of today. Jelena Vassitsch. She is an independent curator, writer, editor and lecturer. She is active in the field of publishing, research and exhibition practice that intertwine political theory and contemporary art. Jelena edits and co-edits several journals and art magazines across Europe and curates and co-curates contemporary art exhibitions and projects. Her latest one in collectivising five stories just set up at the modern Galleria in Ljubljana, deals with the feminist interventions, deals with the feminist interventions into the art historical narration in the 20th century avant-garde art collectives. In addition to curation, Jelena's writing has been published in several publications, amongst them the essay book entitled On Neutrality, published as part of the non-alignment modernity edition by Mocha in Belgrade. Tir Jelena, a heartfelt welcome. Looking forward to hear your ideas and the stage is yours. Hello, thanks. I wished it was some kind of plenary political meeting. It is not obligatory that I speak, but I wished, you know, like it's a big hall and some kind of plenary political meeting, but who knows, maybe one day we'll have this as well. So, I will speak today theoretically and also historically to reflect deeper upon the questions that have been discussed all of these days. Also, some of the questions were part of the theater plays, maybe immediately and kind of explicitly of the peace city without women, the theater without the women. So, these are the topics of artistic labor. What I'm going to do is to return to the research and text of mine that I wrote some seven years ago, which is called Administration of Aesthetics and on the undercurrents of artistic jobs, contracting artistic jobs between love and money, between money and love. So, I will discuss the figures of money and love as they play in contemporary semi-capitalism, that means language and linguistics. I will analyze this process from the perspective of the so-called or what we refer to as independent cultural workers, so as mostly content makers. And I will show how these two figures play in this field and how they are actually connected with what I call referring to a friend of mine and former artist Goran Giorgiewicz, Ideology of Art. Because there is obviously certain terrain which I think is established in the moment when the institution of art is established, when the aesthetic is established, when the art is established as a separate sphere or what we refer to as arts liberales. And I think that no matter how much we as critical art practitioners, which most of us are, and independent cultural workers, and of course the neo-avangardists, alternativeists and so on, generations who worked before us, no matter how much we made a criticism to this very ground, where art is established more or less the 18th century and a project of enlightenment, that we are still very much dependent off that ground. So that ground, I mean which we also in a critical theory today criticize observing all these dark sides of modernity. So basically the question is whether there is a reason today in this kind of post-historical, post-knowledge and so on world to defend the project of modernity. And me, as for me, I'm a practitioner and theorist and this thesis or this talk that I was thinking to share with you today interconnects my experience of organization and cultural political labor on the ground organization that we had here, infrastructure, the process of instituting, the organization of the other scene in Belgrade which encompassed a lot of cultural and activist initiatives and collectives. And also need to theoretically reflect our position to understand it better in social sense and in a theoretical sense. So as I said I'm both theorist and practitioner and so in this, but in a way I'm not that much of an academic person which is of course in this kind of mid-career a problem and I discussed, I mean I had a chat with the previous keynote my friend Tom Meduck, where we confessed to each other, I mean it was more a confession of mine I confessed that I have a problem with this PhD academic and I told him how actually I was always ashamed to put this PhD next to my name, Pankishly as always connected to independent scene. And then observing my later reflections I connected to the one theoretical and practical concept this has been also recently excavated by some friends and co-thinkers. The term of situated knowledge by Donna Haraway which is already established in 1988, I always want to say in 1989 because it is a very symbolic year for also this conversation. So the situated knowledge for me always meant delineating possibility to delineate my own speaking position with also bodily presence and with certain exposure of vulnerability and openness to self-questioning vis-a-vis an academic institutionalized certainty. Situated knowledge problematizes view from above from now the perspective of observation that under the guise of neutrality presents itself as universal by hiding very specific position behind which is quite often of course a male white heterosexual human and so on. Such view is claimed to have the capacity to see but to remain unseen itself. It represents while escaping representation we can have the next slide, this is it, this is the slide. Haraway wrote how feminist analysis which of course makes it feminist and justifies the needs for such an analysis attempts to recognize how power works and how situated knowledges open themselves for new unexpected, untold and surprising forms of knowledge production. So situated knowledge opens the passage between the theory and practice. It shows how body matter, how context matters and how theory is part of life, how cognitive processes are also body processes. It gives this possibility to disclose the figure of I like I'm speaking from this place, from this body, from this experience and I'm exposing these weaknesses, these strengths, possibilities, impossibilities. I'm trying to think each idea has its limitations, ideas are vulnerable. I belong to the first generation of independent cultural workers, we can have the next slide. Active in this region the so-called freelancers in the official theory of management, flexible personas as Brian Holmes reflected upon the idea some decade ago or more. Precariat, another spreading term which is much larger and encompasses much larger field of production than culture itself and is very much connected to this post for this model that again Tom Maddock have spoken more about in relation to dance. And projectariat which is perhaps the most important term for me and which has been reflected by a colleague Cuba Schroeder in his recently published book ABC of projectariat. The work of my generation was framed by the dissolution of Yugoslavia and dissolution of the institutional and infrastructural system of the socially social state based on the principles of self-management and associated labor. Great theoretically elaborated and applied practically with some problems that have been analyzed in social theory and I can mention here many of the valuable books but they won't because I would like to save some time for the conversation for the discussion. My generation of independent cultural workers returned critically to the heritage of Yugoslav socialist modernist project and tried to apply some positive aspects of it in the contemporary practice. We fought against neoliberalism that is against the false premises of the so-called democratic regime that allegedly replaced Milosevic's nationalist politics and war mogulism. So we fought against the false promise of better life after the end of wars and arrival of democracy, the so-called normal life. We can have the next slide. But normality is a capitalist invention. It is an ideologically loaded word although it might not seem like that at the first glance. The normalization of former Eastern Europe after 1989 assumed the transitional stage in which society and individuals who are making this society have to pass through a certain period of disciplinary transformation following the prescribed norms of Western capitalist normality. Such are transformation of the state and public property into private property, transformation of the public space into the private one, industrialization and mercantilization of every aspect of life and work, commodification of living spaces, of the common urban spaces in which people used to meet and talk without the mediation of capital. This is why the title of this EITM meeting, Work Hard, Live Harder, sounds both opportune and impossible utopian. I would like to understand it as a political demand, the one which suggests that life should be separated from capitalist production. How, if today we speak about life work as a continuum, life-work? If life and work are entwined, if living hard is not an experience, a bliss of life as such, but a representation, a flow of images of internet, a lucrative job of influencers who live the hardest, who are fittest to survive in the representation of life on Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Pinterest, together with many others who compete for attention. Do I live hard enough? In this network of self-representing, in this hard work of presenting how we live harder than others, we are becoming more and more said, said by design as media theorists' heart-loving would put it. But the system requests normalization, normality, so those who work hard and live harder sometimes cannot, but must, because show must go on. So, anti-depressants. In the panel a week ago, one speaker confessed, I'm taking anti-depressants, but you know, I pee, I shit, so my excrements together with anti-depressants are going into water, into soil. They infuse fish, vegetable, or the tweet. All food is full of anti-depressants. Oh, this is why we are so normal, I thought. I belong to the first generation of post-Yugoslav cultural workers who graduated from high school and faculty during Yugoslav wars in the 90s. The wars that still don't have a proper name. Anti-Yugoslav wars can be one of descriptive names, since they destroyed all the structures, political horizons, and human relations built through Yugoslav post-war socialist period. Such as the politics of workers' self-management, public property, not private, nor state, but public, social care, like free education for all, free health, medical services, free holidays in workers and students, holiday houses, on seacoast, and mountains, autonomous position in block division of the world with building the non-aligned movement. I belong to Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav generation, to socialist and post-socialist generation, to generation of 20th and 21st century, to pre-internet and post-war, I'm half-half. I have two brains, two minds, two hearts, two nervous systems, two confronted ways of thinking. I'm bipolar. Psychologically, I or we, my generation, in the early stage of life and the past, I'm half-half. I have two brains, two minds, two hearts, two nervous systems, two confronted ways of thinking. Psychologically, I or we, my generation, in the early stage of life and the primary school, which is very important stage of political formation, are formed. And this is also something that the very image, which is part of the banner of this conference in a way implies and announces. We are formed psychologically on a certain shock labor, like a collective voluntary work in actions. Okay, I don't understand this idea of shock labor as a kind of socialist propaganda connected to the project of modernization, which it was as well. I rather understand it in a land in a sense as increased social responsibility and the will to learn and self-improve continuously, which is, I think, embedded in this image, showing of the conference, work hard, live harder, which is showing the brigades of young shock labors or voluntary brigades who are in the process of collective labor for better now, for common good, for better tomorrow and so on. Okay, I'm speaking about some premises, psychological, that we had in our childhood and which I think very much built our personalities and which we kind of processed intellectually and as cultural labors in the later stage of our life. And the other thing can be called, which influenced our psychology in this early stage, can be called the partisan ethics, like the ethics of solidarity, just struggle, help to the weaker, dedication to the higher common goals, mutual support, sharing knowledge and resources, fighting for autonomy and justice. With this psychological construction and ethics, my generation of independent cultural workers independent because it didn't want to join the national and often nationalist institutions, which adopted new managerial competitive logic as a part of the so-called democratic changes after Yugoslav wars, but wanted to act autonomously, creating parallel cultural stream, we called it other scene. With psychological construction of self-improving, hard laborers and just enthusiasts, we paved the way to capitalist transition with our bodies. Internally, we fought against the capitalist expansion and created the blueprint for different instituting of cultural policies and activism, both in theory and practice. We can have the next slide, thank you. Other scene initiated in 2005 was encompassing more than 7T, 7O organizations of feminist activists, artistic groups, theater and dance groups, theoretical journals, activist groups, film groups, alternative media and education collectives, internet activists, hackers and pirates. Internally, we fought against this expansion and for some ideas, while externally, since the ideological apparatus is a heavy structure and sometimes falls over bodies and desires like heavy cover or top, which we in theory also call ideological over determination, we bridged the gap between the vanishing socialist infrastructure and capitalist structure in making or becoming with our bodies, with our enthusiasm, which in the capitalist conditions operates as self-exploitation. We struggled to show how actually immaterial labor, which was the key term of our times, actually contains in itself certain materiality, which is why the art is labor. We wanted to show that loving your work or labor or love labor, the labor of love in a broader sense, should be recognized as work and receives a remuneration like salary for life, universal basic income. We thought of these things already in early 2000s. All the infrastructures we have built are erased in the belated but very hard, harder wave of budget cuts after the financial crisis in Europe in 2008, which hit the periphery of the former Yugoslav region so strongly, resulting in cutting almost entire independent cultural sector. Many actors emigrated from the country. Many couldn't continue to do previous work. Many became seriously depressed or sick. Many collectives fell apart. All the structures we made dissipated in this process. This reflection between love and money stems from these struggles and I try to articulate the specificity of our project-based independent cultural labor and to articulate its apparatus, the apparatus of production. The title also contains the notions of administration of artistic jobs in this foggy zone of hard work and harder life that operates between love and money, money and love. Okay, I have to check slides later. Okay, now a little bit of history. I hope you will not fall asleep. How love and money are historically confronted in the history of social and in the way state institution of art? Why art is represented as more about love and less about money? Although it is very much about money when we enter the conversations about star system or the figure of artists as an operative ideal for the figure of cool businessmen such as Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other techno feudals. And now we can have Francisco Nesk's slide, thank you. The institution of art built in the project of European modernity appropriated the divine prerogative of creation. But at the same time it used that same prerogative to open up the space for denying material body, the artist's life. Something that critical art practice would file under artistic work or artistic labor or the social function of art. In the concept of creation and creativity, which are the key elements of ideology of art, in this ideological narrative the work is replaced by free and almighty flow of inspiration of the artist genius. While the work of art is solely defined by immunity or the author's trademark, like uniqueness, singularity, originality. And precisely in the concepts of authorship and originality, in the contrast between the divine attribute of creation, creatio, and the worldly profane production, produccio, lies the ideological opposition between arts and goods, which has been constantly and confidently perpetuated by the institution of art. So we have in a previous theory this idea of art world made by Artordanto, which is very much determinate the art of 60s and 70s and understanding of it and is a reflection of the art of 60s mostly. Then we have this idea of artistic labor as free autonomous labor that is opposing the wage labor, classical labor. So the idea of art as free labor, which is when the art is understood as creation, as creatio, as this divine prerogative. In the contemporary enterprise culture, art is almost never represented as market, not even when it has been nominally legally and institutionally constituted as market example, such as free art fair in London. We can have next slide. A manifestation that without any doubts exhausts its function and meaning in art sales and trades, although its self-representation refers to something completely different. And we can have next slide. In the function of representation and experience, this manifestation frequently employs vast symbolic capital of communication, aestheticization, intellectual work, creativity, and finally money. In order to dissuade visitors, art lovers, collectors, and even actors in this operation, at least for a moment that it is all just about money and goods. I observed this phenomenon as a distance reflex of truths rooted in modern aesthetics and history of art in the moment of establishing the academia and art as an institution. The 18th century art academy provided lessons on distinction between high art and its public function and commercial art as the synonym for the law. That heritage, I claim, has more or less played constitutive function for the institution of art in all its later stages of self-transformation. So, next slide. The examples are numerous. In example, Giorgio Vasari, one of the first, we say, art historians who wrote this life of most famous painter, sculptors and architects Levite in Italian in 1550. Underline all the time this idea of perfection. Then Winklemann, who dealt with modernity and antiquity, with the history in visual representation, called this connection between antiquity and modernity as noble, simplicity, and quite grandeur. Then it's the draw who reviewed the Paris Salon, which is an institution that's preceding the formats of biennial exhibitions today, which are grand art institutions of today. He was mentioning the terms such as corruption of taste by luxury or money that is throwing both arts. Then Joshua Reynolds, one of the founders of the British Academy, observed the very art attributes as this kind of intellectual dignity, which as he says, mobles the painter's art and draws the line between him and pure mechanic who does not produce art but mere ornaments. So we see how this idea of public art, which is not mere decoration, which is not merely something that's useful, which is also not craft, they would insist on it, but is a kind of intellectual dignity, is made for public good or state good, is very ideologically representative. So we see in these examples how the true art has historically divorced from money, from this kind of remuneration. Thank you. I think this was for the previous, for control of the previous slides. Now, in such contrasting antagonistic and variable attempts to remove money, labor, and labor relations from the stage of art representation, there are obvious consensual efforts to explain that art cannot be understood as business as usual, as labor and work, but rather as something completely different. And this is in the very structure of art, in the very history of art, if we observe contemporary uneasiness or the number of paradoxes that are stemming from this, like in example the other day the speaker was telling how Greek cultural minister spoke about art as something that lives in a grey zone. And he's right in a way, I mean, theoretically, though he obviously uses this ambiguity for propagandistic reasons, for bad political reasons. And we can have the next slide, please. Now, how this relates to the case experience of the other scene and the labor of independent content producers. I wanted to investigate in this research the very production apparatus of the project-based practice, and I spoke about projectariat and projectization, to try to get closer to the economic reality of workers active in an ever-expanding world of art, in all its domains of self-critical negation, transformation, excesses, inclusions, exclusions. I wanted to focus on the very moment when projects and collaborations come into life, and to explore the modes of production, which are established by means of language and communication. So, I mentioned at the beginning this semi-capitalism, the term that Franco Berardi before has often written about. So, I focused on the agreements on art, content production of independent cultural labor, which is often funded in peer-to-peer basis agreements that are unofficial and paralegal. The moments of negotiation about the delivery of content or participation in various cultural events. So, these production forms of the independent cultural sector are precisely laid out through this paralegality, through the relationship one-to-one, whereas the institutional official dom, legal verification of agreement comes as an administrative confirmation of something that has already happened. I was interested in the dramaturgy of the processes of contrasting works in art, contracting works in art, in the context of independent cultural labor. I was interested in the field operated by protagonists who live at the bottom of the economic ladder of enterprise culture. Freelance writers, guest lecturers, experimental curators, critically-oriented visual artists, left-wing intellectuals, alternative theater companies, independent critics. In other words, all those who answer to various institutional calls or to the calls of independent organizations, so peer-to-peer. In this text, Between Love and Money, I tried to dramatize these two figures in the characteristic communication schemes. My story was about culture workers who collaborate in various self-organized initiatives behind the curtains of immediate production of glamour and success. The subjects that Gregory Chalet calls dark matter. In the sense of their voluntary political decision to leave the place with the most exposure and immediate connection with the star system and market demands. In this adventure of going down to the field of production or a kind of scenario overview where every similarity with the real actors is intentional, the accent is put on several types of contractual relations in which the relations between love and money play and labor. This is the second comparative binom. Here, I'm trying to think in not binomial way, but in a kind of more differentiated and more nuanced non-binner logic. However, we have these figures, Love and Money, Play and Labor, which are appearing in the speech registry where we always have one person who is a content maker and another person who is organizer, which I signed with the A and B letters, and we can have the next slide. So these are some dramaturgical examples, which are, I don't know, maybe more real than reality, in which I'm trying to catch some of the phrases which are occurring in communication and how this actually language of love dominates in the process, in the very process of contracting artistic works in the case of content makers and independent cultural scene. So you have these terms, like, will you join me, you were chosen, you are the only one, you are invited, I only want to do this with you, looks more as an invitation to love affair than as a process in which we should contract the work. And then we have answers of the two content makers in which they emphasize different things. In the first case, the person doesn't want to talk about budget, but content says writing should not be a profession, and I'm not doing this because of money, but because it makes sense for society. So confirmation of this logic of art that should always be public good and that is very much close to what I said, what I spoke about, than it did draw corruption of real art by money and so on and so forth. But B2, who is a person who still tries to make a living, but is not questioning this dialogue, which I call this scheme of the letter, I called it parade of ladies and gentlemen, or nobility without the protection because everyone is consensual about how it is not nice to mention the word money or fee or something like that. So the B2 person who is eager in actually knowing also about this fee thing will use quite often the terms which are implying organization, like can you tell me something about organizational details, maybe I'm interested in production, more about the whole project, can you tell me something about whole project, about the conditions, et cetera, et cetera. But they are expressing themselves in the language of love, in the language of creation, because art should not be a production. Then the second case, which I call tripartite letter, short reckonings make long friends, and this tripartite letter is more or less naturalized as a canonical form of conversation about contracting in terms of engaging artistic work. And the obligations, of course, are moral, collegial and reputational, and such letters usually involve three information blocks. First is the information on the content and scope of the project. Second is the information about the nature and scope of involvement, place and time of the content delivery, and third is information on the fee. So the letter of the person who invites in this kind of dramaturgical format, which I made on the base of real practice, may sound something like DRXXX, I received your contact details from YYY, are you interested in writing a text concerning the topic of MMMs for ZZZ magazine? Kindly find, attach the concept in attachment, you find something which is very brief and general description. The text should have X to Y words, the length of the text is strictly limited. Unfortunately, the deadline is tight, this is what we hear most of the times. All texts should have to be ready no later than 001 date. In case you are interested in cooperation, kindly send us the draft of your text by the end of the week. So then from this letter one can see, one can see, or you can read it further, and one can see that I receive your contact details from YYY, and the short deadline usually means that you are not the first invited person to do that, but who knows, maybe third, second, fourth, who is recommended by somebody else and which is why the deadline is so short. So here we have the two content makers, the two different type of content makers, B1 and B2. So B1 can think for themselves or discuss with friends on the base of this letter, which is very clear and very rational, but this may also cause different feelings in case of B1. The person who is also kind of rational and maybe cynical in a way would say, eventually I really prefer working for capitalists, at least everything is clear. What you see is what you get, they exploit clearly and publicly, and not under the table like state institutions or our friends who always negotiate also in this language of love, which okay can have and does have much of the good political possibilities and connotations, but is also quite often used as a tool of self-exploiting. So the person B is one of those who is again defending the institution of art and its nobility. I hate when someone talks to me like this as writing a piece of text would be twisting screws. This is an intellectual humiliation, as if writing is not the most important part of magazine production and so on and so forth. And then what, and we can have next slide, thank you. And then I have one longer letter, which is more or less the example of communication, like more warm communication, friendly communication, et cetera, which is I think happening most of the times on this independent scene, in which case the response of B would be mostly direct reflection of the text A, and they do share information about the context of production, about some details, and of K, this is also warm and friendly understanding and so on. But still there are these things on one side on the other side, so on one side such process can be perceived from the perspective of power, from the recognition of the effects of super state ideological apparatus that project work is exposed to, like international foundations, project networks, et cetera, and there's subordination to totalizing tendencies of neoliberal social order. In this case, such a para-contract would mean an concessual agreement of A and B to be beaten by the hand of humanism, a kind of warmer but also creepier version of the previous model. And this extending hand of beating flexible work comes from restrictive scheme of the project form. And the project form is really key for us ideologically, which is characterized by lack of available time, tight deadlines, competitive networking, and self-precarization. You yourself precarise yourself. You do these things. And this is somehow what the project form implies because it also has its canons. In project forms, individuals put themselves into cooperation and interdependence, determine and reduce their own incomes, while the factor of modern technology speeds up communication and production. The number of project increases as well as the amount of work, while the fees are decreasing. And I'm mentioning again this book, ABC of Projectariat, by my colleague Kuba Schroeder, who analyses these things in greater details. On the other side, to finish with maybe a little bit of hope, but I would like to stay in this field of ambivalences. Individuals in this context of production do have certain autonomy in project management. They have the opportunity to intervene in the field where worker does not apply working conditions, but the working conditions apply the worker. And to convert this classical form of suppression into its opposition. A good manager, like a train switchman, is in the position to re-route the parts and direct the movement totes tendency into another direction. And we can remember the character of divergent in partisan movies or in some kind of revolutionary movies. The possibility of intervention and action now opens towards a wider community as well and refers to collectivist, more democratic model or approach. Love would be unifying element of such collectivization. And here we can find the particle which is as a tote brought by revolutionary feminism. And this is an attempt to create micro-communities, modern cooperatives in which interpersonal working and social relations are organized differently. In her time, Alexandra Kolontai, a Bolshevik feminist, was inviting for a certain parallelism a simultaneous construction of both new social apparatus and of change and the change of personal and interpersonal relationships. Believing that the end of capitalism lies not only in the abstract organization of the state, apparatuses and laws, but also in this concentrated and organized effort to transform personal and interpersonal relationships. Certainly Kolontai linked these issues to the question of emancipation of women and socialization of childcare. But I believe the request for change of social relations on a molecular level of interpersonality can be set as a universal request through a transformation of human consciousness. And this invitation can be also seen as an invitation to revolutionize relationships based on peer-to-peer in line with the struggle for integral social change. So I do think both this as a positive note and first as a thing that really limits us, the projects, the project-based structure, and that really has its ideology and its kind of conquering logic. And, okay, the last slide. So this last slide is, okay, a well-known meme, but I was thinking that it is interesting to kind of return to it in this context of work hard, live harder, and in regard to the reality of body in that body and psyche. So thank you, and I'm open to your comments, questions, what do we do, and so on. Maybe people are hungry. I'm also fine if there is no question. I'm open for discussion, but also I don't insist on discussion. I believe in the notion of... Delayed, also delayed, delayed talks, delayed discussions. Not everything has to be like really fulfilling the form, if you have some questions, or especially comments, or especially other ideas. I'm here, also here we have one hand. Hi, thank you very much. I'm thinking and delaying a lot right now. What do you think we need to learn to change this? To do a step forward, because it was really interesting for me, and then say, okay, I'm totally into this. How can I break the circle? If I had an answer to that question, I wouldn't have a necessity to talk about all this, I think, in this moment. I don't know, I mean, in a style, in a context of situated knowledge, we can also be frank. So, my feeling is that reality struck us very strongly, so that in a way, our entire paradigm, in which we all are with this critical art, like inhabited with all these serious questions, like really pregnant with questions and ideas and desires and projects and content and terms and everything. I think that in a way, it's already, or it's kind of doomed to that. Maybe it's replaced by something else, I don't know. Today, I'm assigning myself as a cultural worker, while my nephew, who is doing special effects and earns well from that, he assigns himself as an artist. So, I wonder, you know, like we are more or less the audience here mid-career generation, and there are new things that are coming, and I think that in these new things that are coming, the new more industrialized concepts of art are replacing our forms of art as thinking, as differentiation, also theory, explanation. Tell me precisely how this thing is, this is our question. Well, the question for younger generations is obviously something else. It is not a question, I mean, as far as I had a chance to observe it, it is more like, see this, see that, see this, see that, and so. So, accumulation of sensations, okay, we are also exposed to this as well, which makes us bipolar because we try to think, but we also try to see this, that, and to be fast enough. So, I don't know, maybe we should more seriously reinvent the entire field, or we die, I mean, as a paradigm. Okay, we die, definitely, as human beings, but I think as a paradigm, because I wonder what we are now speaking about, okay, art as kind of public good, as something that's part of public, this need that when you do something, when you write about something, when you reflect, when you research, when you make an artwork, a piece, you dance and so on, you try to address this to, I don't know, society. You are not doing this just because of yourself, selfish self, but it is embedded in our art practice that it is for some kind of public. So, without this horizon, somehow, the very paradigm through which we act does not exist anyway. And I wonder in which situation we are now today, where this entire artistic intellectual paradigm is just another bubble of reality. Like, okay, you have this bubble, I don't know, of people who believe in creationism, you have this bubble of people who, I don't know, love cats, and you have this bubble of people who are interested in art and theory and so on. I wonder whether it is today our situation, which may be the case. Okay, now I'm speaking to you the most extreme thoughts I have, which is not pedagogical, but okay, I'm not a pedagogue. Okay? Hi, thank you. I have one comment and one doubt to throw in, if I may. So first, thanks for all that. I wanted to say also when you talk about the love and you gave those examples of writing, I also see this, and it's interesting that you kind of explained it to me in a way, something that I started to perceive that I'm not sure if any of you encountered this, but also now in receiving emails that say no to your application, this love language is employed, which I find very interesting and very frustrating, because sometimes I actually, after reading an email, I'm not sure if they said no or yes. You know, and I have to, I feel almost forced to feel for them, although they are in a position of power in a certain way. So just to say like, if you do that, please don't, because it's somehow, it's strange. Or it's producing something strange. And the other thing is that, I mean, I'm just thinking also because from the artistic position, I'm kind of curious in the form that you used for the presentation and how this also immobilizes us as an audience. So I want to throw a doubt about the meme and it's not a critique. It's really a doubt that I'm also struggling with, because maybe some of you know a very viral thing now in Dan's performing arts field is a somatic-based content, which is the Instagram account, which is very popular and it's already, for example, in Poland, we have now the Polish version of it that is getting a kind of notoriety. But then I'm thinking, and this is a discussion I have with my colleagues, is the meme enough? Or is it like, what is it that it's produced that we can immediately recognize ourselves through certain images and we can laugh at it? But then I think taking an example of somatic-based content that it's, first of all, it's quite elitist, I think, sometimes to refer to certain notions that are shared only by a specific group of people. But then I'm also thinking if the memes, more in the cultural way also, as a certain culture of the meme and in terms of signaling certain political problems, is it not preventing us from actually digging deeper into certain things, which I'm not saying with you, but I'm just thinking, because even looking at this image I'm thinking, if it also allows us to kind of love, but then what I feel, if I would be honest with you, I love but I feel despair looking at it, and I feel profoundly sad and disturbed. So also how to reckon with this and how to, because I think it's also a certain sign of times that this sort of form of communication is proliferating, and then I wonder what are the challenges and also the dangers and kind of staying with that medium, for example. Okay, I see your comment more is a reflection than is a question. Maybe what was a bit under the question was this question of a meme and how it operates. Okay, you said yourself how greatly the meme operates, but you also pointed to the second thing, which I would just agree with, that the meme quite often induces this laughter, or some kind of reaction which stems from recognition, you immediately recognize something, you see allusion basically in it, and then this is the end of your labor. It does not inspire you to think further. It is also a view with which I can agree, and what I can say that for me it draws its criticality, and this is why laughter maybe or some kind of reaction is provoked similar, so criticality, similar to the process of, I don't know, appropriation art and so on in the 80s, and it has been a lot of interpretative mechanisms and thoughts employed around the analysis of appropriation art in the 80s. So meme has to do with this logic. On the other hand, somehow knowledge today and political responsibility is quite often replaced by cynicism, and meme is one of the grandest conveyor of this logic, especially on the right. So, yeah, I mean, this is maybe a little bit more extended comment to meme that structured around what you already said, but I agree. For your context and my context, I think the response to the conundrum that you pose in the end or how do we get out of the project horizon has been collectivized, and you create collective structures and you create just a different division of roles and the capacity of sort of resilience and resistance to the division that is imposed by project work. The problem is that that strategy requires one to continue scaling, to kind of be able to contest the context in which one works and exists. That can be political context in the most immediate sense, and I feel that here in Belgrade, in Serbia, that political context has in many ways crushed independent culture in the way that it hasn't managed in Zagreb. So, I just wanted to hear your thoughts about it. You spoke in the beginning about the second scene, Drogacena, and how that is now kind of a thing of a past. So, I would just be curious to pick your brain around what you think about collectivizing. Now, I guess, ten years down the line. I think, I mean, okay, this is... First, here, there is this big difference in the very social structure of Belgrade and Zagreb, which shapes institutions, decision bodies, and so on and so forth. And what I also noticed, there is also like a bit different spirit. I think that here we... which is kind of scandalous that I would say this, but I really do think so that we exaggerated in exercising of self-criticism as well in this process of instituting the independent culture. So, I always used to say, and I have spoken about that the other day with Mariana and the co-organizers of this conference, how we remembered how I used to say all the time, I don't want to go to City Hall to talk to these people because I don't want to teach capitalists how to become better capitalists, like more right, more kind of precise, intellectual, and blah blah blah, and less sloppy in this Serbian sense, kind of more literate in a sense of Brussels and less sloppy and bohemian in a sense of, you know, like Belgrade type of organization. So, I think that the difference that independent cultural workers to capture through other initiatives in Zagreb managed to do more for independent cultural scene, but it is also part of this political structure which is that you manage somehow to at least on the level of City of Zagreb to bring another kind of political bread which is, you know, like very stinky here for years with heavy right wing, and we can't do much. It's a big corruption, it's also like more, it's bigger system, like more differentiated system, and as self-critique, I would say as self-critique of myself now, I would say that I was really one of the harbingers, one of the heralds of this expansionist, unnecessary self-criticism which we used to exercise a lot, and also the second thing is fractionism, which is quite often the malad of the left, and the end. Thank you.