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croatian in Mars & Medak 2017

enthusiasts Skill sharing (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) and various events and gatherings in the fields of hackerism, digital
cultures, and new media art. Marcell regularly talks and runs workshops about
hacking, free software philosophy, digital cultures, social software, semantic web
etc. In 2011–2012 Marcell conducted research on Ruling Class Studies at Jan Van
Eyck in Maastricht, and in 2013 he held fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart. Currently, he is PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
Tomislav Medak is a cultural worker and theorist interested in political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is an advocate of free software and
free culture, and the Project Lead of the Creative Commons Croatia (Creative
Commons, 2016). He works as coordinator of theory and publishing activities at
the Multimedia Institute/MaMa (Zagreb, Croatia) (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
Tomislav is an active contributor to the Croatian Right to the City movement
(Pravo na grad, 2016). He interpreted to numerous books into Croatian language,
including Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and A Hacker Manifesto (Wark,
2006c). He is an author and performer with the internationally acclaimed Zagrebbased performance collective BADco (BADco, 2016). Tomislav writes and talks
about politics of technological development, and politics and aesthetics.
Tomislav and Marcell have been working together for almost two decades.
Their recent collaborations include a number of activities around the Public Library
project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), exhibitions in
Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2014) and Galerija Nova (Zagreb,
2015), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital
Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), and Catalogue of
Liberated Books (2013) (in Monoskop, 2016b).
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Ana Kuzmanic is an artist based in Zagreb and Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy at the University in Split
(Croatia), lecturing in drawing, design and architectural presentation. She is a
member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Since 2007 she held more
than a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in numerous collective
exhibitions in Croatia, the UK, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, the USA, Lithuania
and Slovenia. In 2011 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests traditional roles of artists and viewers, giving the
observer an active part in creation of artwork, thus creating spaces of dialogue and
alternative learning experiences as platforms for emancipation and social
transformation. Grounded within a postdisciplinary conceptual framework, her
artistic practice is produced via research and expression in diverse media located at
the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
ABOUT THE C

2 (Multimedia Institute, 2016a); in 2000, you established
the Net.culture club MaMa (both in Zagreb, Croatia). The Net.culture club MaMa
has the following goals:
To promote innovative cultural practices and broadly understood social
activism. As a cultural center, it promotes wide range of new artistic and
cultural practices related in the first place to the development of
communication technologies, as well as new tendencies in arts and theory:
from new media art, film and music to philosophy and social theory,
publishing and cultural policy issues.
As a community center, MaMa is a Zagreb’s alternative ‘living room’ and
a venue free of charge for various initiatives and associations, whether they
are promoting minority identities (ecological, LBGTQ, ethnic, feminist and

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others) or critically questioning established social norms. (Net.culture club
MaMa, 2016a)
Please describe the main challenges and opportunities from the dawn of Croatian
civil society. Why did you decide to establish the Multimedia Institute – mi2 and
the Net.culture club MaMa? How did you go about it?
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (MM & TM): The formative context for
our work had been marked by the process of dissolution of Yugoslavia, ensuing
civil wars, and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms in the early 1990s. Amidst the
general turmoil and internecine bloodshed, three factors would come to define
what we consider today as civil society in the Croatian context. First, the newly
created Croatian state – in its pursuit of ethnic, religious and social homogeneity –
was premised on the radical exclusion of minorities. Second, the newly created
state dismantled the broad institutional basis of social and cultural diversity that
existed under socialism. Third, the newly created state pursued its own nationalist
project within the framework of capitalist democracy. In consequence, politically
undesirable minorities and dissenting oppositional groups were pushed to the
fringes of society, and yet, in keeping with the democratic system, had to be
allowed to legally operate outside of the state, its loyal institutions and its
nationalist consensus – as civil society. Under the circumstances of inter-ethnic
conflict, which put many people in direct or indirect danger, anti-war and human
rights activist groups such as the Anti-War Campaign provided an umbrella under
which political, student and cultural activists of all hues and colours could find a
common context. It is also within this context that the high modernism of cultural
production from the Yugoslav period, driven out from public institutions, had
found its recourse and its continuity.
Our loose collective, which would later come together around the Multimedia
Institute and MaMa, had been decisively shaped by two circumstances. The first
was participation of the Anti-War Campaign, its BBS network ZaMir (Monoskop,
2016c) and in particular its journal Arkzin, in the early European network culture.
Second, the Open Society Institute, which had financed much of the alternative and
oppositional activities during the 1990s, had started to wind down its operations
towards end of the millennium. As the Open Society Institute started to spin off its
diverse activities into separate organizations, giving rise to the Croatian Law
Center, the Center for Contemporary Art and the Center for Drama Art, activities
related to Internet development ended up with the Multimedia Institute. The first
factor shaped us as activists and early adopters of critical digital culture, and the
second factor provided us with an organizational platform to start working
together. In 1998 Marcell was the first person invited to work with the Multimedia
Institute. He invited Vedran Gulin and Teodor Celakoski, who in turn invited other
people, and the group organically grew to its present form.
Prior to our coming together around the Multimedia Institute, we have been
working on various projects such as setting up the cyber-culture platform Labinary
in the space run by the artist initiative Labin Art Express in the former miner town
of Labin located in the north-western region of Istria. As we started working
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together, however, we began to broaden these activities and explore various
opportunities for political and

y. We are well aware that reality is more complex than our ideals. However,
the collective sense of purpose inspired by an ideal can carry over into useful
collective action. This is the core of our interest …
PJ & AK: There has been a lot of water under the bridge since the 2000s. From
a ruined post-war country, Croatia has become an integral part of the European
Union – with all associated advantages and problems. What are the main today’s
challenges in maintaining the Multimedia Institute and its various projects? What
are your future plans?
MM & TM: From the early days, Multimedia Institute/MaMa took a twofold
approach. It has always supported people working in and around the organization
in their heterogeneous interests including but not limited to digital technology and
information freedoms, political theory and philosophy, contemporary digital art,
music and cinema. Simultaneously, it has been strongly focused to social and
institutional transformation.
The moment zero of Croatian independence in 1991, which was marked by war,
ethnic cleansing and forceful imposition of contrived mono-national identity, saw
the progressive and modernist culture embracing the political alternative of antiwar movement. It is within these conditions, which entailed exclusion from access
to public resources, that the Croatian civil society had developed throughout the
1990s. To address this denial of access to financial and spatial resources to civil
society, since 2000 we have been organizing collective actions with a number of
cultural actors across the country to create alternative routes for access to resources
– mutual support networks, shared venues, public funding, alternative forms of
funding. All the while, that organizational work has been implicitly situated in an
understanding of commons that draws on two sources – the social contract of the
free software community, and the legacy of social ownership under socialism.
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Later on, this line of work has been developed towards intersectional struggles
around spatial justice and against privatisation of public services that coalesced
around the Right to the City movement (2007 till present) (Pravo na grad, 2016)
and the 2015 Campaign against the monetization of the national highway network.
In early 2016, with the arrival of the short-lived Croatian government formed by
a coalition of inane technocracy and rabid right wing radicals, many institutional
achievements of the last fifteen years seemed likely to be dismantled in a matter of
months. At the time of writing this text, the collapse of broader social and
institutional context is (again) an imminent threat. In a way, our current situation
echoes the atmosphere of Yugoslav civil wars in 1990s. Yet, the Croatian turn to
the right is structurally parallel to recent turn to the right that takes place in most
parts of Europe and the world at large. In the aftermath of the global neoliberal
race to the bottom and the War on Terror, the disenfranchised working class vents
its fears over immigration and insists on the return of nationalist values in various
forms suggested by irresponsible political establishments. If they are not spared the
humiliating sense of being outclassed and disenfranchised by the neoliberal race to
the bottom, why should they be sympathetic to those arriving from the
impoverished (semi)-periphery or to victims of turmoil unleashed by the endless
War on Terror? If globalisation is reducing their life prospects to nothing, why
should they not see the solution to their own plight in the return of the regime of
statist nationalism?
At the Multimedia Institute/MaMa we intend to continue our work against this
collapse of context through intersectionalist organizing and activism.

AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES

Our vision is to make sharing, aggregating and accessing catalogs easy and
playful. We like the idea that every rendered catalog is stored on a local hard disk,
that an amateur librarian can choose when to share, and that when she decides to
share, the catalog gets aggregated into a library together with the collections of
other fellow amateur librarians (at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org). For the
purpose of sharing we wrote the Calibre plugin named let’s share books and set up
the related server infrastructure – both of which are easily replicable and
deployable into distributed clones.
Together with Voja Antonić, the legendary inventor of the first eight-bit
computer in Yugoslavia, we also designed and developed a series of book scanners
and used them to digitize hundreds of books focused to Yugoslav humanities such
as the Digital Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), Catalogue
of Liberated Books (2013), books thrown away from Croatian public libraries
during ideological cleansing of the 1990s Written-off (2015), and the collection of
books selected by the Black Panther Herman Wallace as his dream library for
political education (Memory of the World, 2016b).
In our view, amateur librarians are complementary to professional librarians,
and there is so much to learn and share between each other. Amateur librarians care
about books which are not (yet) digitally curated with curiosity, passion and love;
they dare to disobey in pursuit for the emancipatory vision of the world which is
now under threat. If we, amateur librarians, ever succeed in our pursuits – that
should secure the existing jobs of professional librarians and open up many new
and exciting positions. When knowledge is easily accessed, (re)produced and
shared, there will be so much to follow up upon.
TOWARDS AN ACTIVIST PUBLIC PEDAGOGY

PJ & AK: You organize talks and workshops, publish books, and maintain a major
regional hub for people interested in dig

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