by Vladan Jeremić and Rena Rädle
The economic devastation after the break-up of Yugoslavia and almost complete deindustrialization of Serbia that followed represent one of the crucial problems today. Everything that could be privatized in Serbia has been privatized, the majority of factories and businesses have been dissolved and their estates sold. The import lobby of domestic comprador bourgeoisie has been working for the last decade on abolishing the local production and placing instead of it imported products that the citizens of Serbia should buy from credits, thus incurring more and more debt.
In this hostile setting only rare companies have managed to survive the privatization or dissolution. The major part of the Mining and Smelting Basin of Bor (RTB) in east Serbia (city of Bor) is still owned by the state. The RTB has so to speak “recovered” during the previous couple of year because the price of precious metals on the global market saw a significant increase during the pick of the world economic crisis. Today, the Mining and Smelting Basin of Bor is experiencing a sort of a modest economic growth, because although the RTB has been reduced from 20,000 employees to only 5,000, it still represents one of the important employers in Serbia.
In the form of the publication Workers’ Collective, the authors Vladan Jeremić, Rena Rädle and Saša D. Lović have visualized the political concepts and alternatives for social-ecological transformation, the future of workers and mining, as well as the struggle for sustainability of the commons, recommunalization of privatized goods and similar concepts. Workers’ Collective represents a contemporary political and artistic intervention in the very visual material, as an artistic tool that is trying to condense the past, present and future, emphasizing the continuity of the common goal of striving – that the workers should directly manage the resources and means of production – the production and reproduction of everyday life and work.
Acțiune de distribuire a publicației Colectivul de Muncitori la intrarea principală a RTB (Întreprinderea Minieră a Bazinului Bor), ianuarie 2013/Distributing the Workers’ Collective at the main entrance of the RTB, January 2013
Last year, we saw the celebration of the 65 years from the publication of the “Borski kolektiv”, the first organ of the employees in the RTB after the liberation in 1947 and the leadership of the company by the People’s Front (http://kolektiv.co.rs/ ).
The art publication Workers’ Collective make use of the old numbers of the “Borski kolektiv” from 1947-1948, as well as other photographic material scanned during the process of digitalization of the Local Department of the National Library in the city of Bor, recontextualizing and reincorporating them. The segment in the publication that was specially conceptualized by Saša D. Lović, “Sašina šarenica”, addresses workers and the culture of workers’ humor directly in Wallachian, Romani and Serbo-Croatian.
Vladan Jeremić & Rena Rädle are artists based in Belgrade, Serbia. In thier artistic practice they research the intersection between contemporary art and social activism.
Understanding the situationist derivé in the urban landscape as a tool to detect the burning issues of a society, they develop an artistic method combining documentary video, photo-collages and drawings into the unique installations, contextualy and spacialy designed.
Currently in the focus of thier artistic research is the meaning of modernist urbanism today, history and future of the socialism and situation of the migrants and the minorities in Europe such as situation of Roma in Europe.
http://raedle-jeremic.modukit.com