The Yugofuturism Experimental Group

Since 2020, Maska Institute has been developing the concept of Yugofuturism within the pages of the Maska journal, with the goal of translating these contemplations into tangible artistic endeavors. During the past years, the institute is actively involved in numerous performance projects closely aligned with this concept.

On the concept:

While the post-communist, post-socialist, and post-Yugoslav discourses more or less merely enforce the image of an unchangeable presence, Yugofuturism takes inspiration from other ethno-futuristic movements such as Afrofuturism, Sinofuturism, Baltic ethnofuturism, or Hungarofuturims, which strengthen peripheral identities and subversively affirm cultural curiosities.

The former Yugoslavia, which, in its utopian form, unites the best from the North and the South, from the East and the West, from capitalism and socialism, was never a monocultural state. This is why its heterogenous multiethnicity is the main point of Yugoslav futuristic affirmation. We do not wish to stay in the trauma of the region but to encourage the potentials that had no basis and no time to come to fruition. Yugofuturism is a reparative practice in its purpose of restoring the possible futures in times when the young generations have found themselves without any prospects and scared of disastrous economic and ecologic trials.

Can a community whose past has been deliberately erased, and whose energy has then been expended in the search for legible traces of its history, imagine a possible future? _Mark Dery

We need something different, something on the verge of the imaginable. Something completely impractical, something that would fundamentally shake even the most progressive leftists among us, and bring Koča Popović back from the dead. _Asja Bakić (Maska No. 209–210: YUFU 2.0)

The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities – fictions that not only anticipate the future but that can already start to bring it into being. _Mark Fisher

On the team:

Above all, the YUFU team for experimental research gathered different voices, perspectives and methodologies of work, joining sociologist, climate movement organizer and artist Rok Kranjc (Slovenia), visual and performance artist Alma Gačanin (Bosnia and Herzegovina), publicist, critic and Maska’s managing and artistic director Alja Lobnik (Slovenia), writer and dramaturg Diana Meheik (Lebanon/Croatia), and art theorist Vera Mevorah (Serbia).

ON JUGOFUTURISM 

1. Jugofuturism as a political, emancipatory and subversive movement 

– Imagining and building a joint future for a post-conflict region 

– Art as directed poetics 

– Ressistance to hijacking of narratives and to dominant narratives 

– Inspiring action 

– Making Jugofuturism an operative term 

2. For a free and open Jugofuturism

Jugofuturizam as a political, emancipatory or subversive movement

– Imagining and building a joint future for a post-conflict region

We are constantly going in circles building our futures on the past narratives. There is no political will to repair the damages of the past in the region and move together towards a different future. The narratives are repeated over and over again and then internalized by the population. Different political factions and ideologies propagate their own narratives about the past.

Realpolitik of the region shows a disjointed territory.
Croatia and Slovenia in the EU
Montenegro in NATO
BiH unstablized by ethnic divisions, RS slowly moving the country towards a conflict
Kosovo an active conflict
Macedonia in ethnic divisions
Serbia moving toward a fully authoritative regime with a leader with grand aspirational politics
Increasing polarization everywhere.

The challenges are not those of the past but the past is a serious obstacle for the future.

Many will say, there can be no future for the Jugoslav idea in any form. The problem with Ex-Yugoslavia discourse is that it created a deadlock, as Hana Sirovica said in Belgrade – trying to speak about Jugoslavia is like having a constipation.

How are these politics done: parties, revolution, activism? They would all be boggled down by the past.

– Art as directed poetics

Art has no power to direct the movements of realpolitik. But art does have power to direct narratives. It is a dominant practice today, led by desire for social justice and change, pointing towards alternatives. Looked at it from this perspective – jugofuturism as a political movement already exists in the progressive art communities of the region and their practice. Its main challenges are not regional, but global, technological, economic, and normative.

Yet, what we’ve been noticing emerging from a new generation that looks to us as jugofuturistic art isn’t so much focused on the political progressiveness of the region but on reworking of past heritage.

– Emancipation for women, for the poor, for workers, for Roma people and other minorities, for migrants, for the environment

If Jugofuturizam were to imagine and propagate a future for all based on identity politics and progressive ideals of green world and socio-economic justice, it would rightly be accused of bland utopia thinking.

How can it even do it? How can you use the imagination – direct poetics towards building a joint and just future for all?

– Resistance to hijacking of narratives and to dominant narratives

Yes, jugofuturizam can do this and I think it is highly valuable. But how does this kind of resistance turn to political action? Wouldn’t narrative have to turn from “against something” to “for something”. Who decides?

Doesn’t pitting narrative against narrative create polarisation? How do you convince people? By imagining beautiful and just futures no-one would be able to say no to? How does a movement emerge from many different lines of struggle, many goals for the future?

– Inspiring action

Art does inspire. I’m certain in many cases to action. But it communicates with subjective experience, different for everyone. In this individualistic world it speaks to our individualist thoughts, needs, and desires. Collectiveness is hard, and it can be authoritative.

A call to action comes from an engaged act, a form of social act which calls others to join in, to build together. To care, to want to join and take up the cause. This could be possible through art as well.

Building chains of engaged acts which would include more and more people. Build new forms of communication and connection.

• How to make Jugofuturism an operative term?
  

2. For a free and open Jugofuturistic thought and practice

It should be free completely, to be everything and anything. Its main goal should be freeing up discourse about ex Yugoslavia.

It should have the freedom to disintegrate and deconstruct the past though its signifier, to disintegrate itself.

It should test the limits of imagination, of communication.

It should also explore the future and through this exploration take part in building at, as future-oriented fiction has always done.

It’s power should lie in freedom to imagine, to play. In connections and communication.

Developing Yugofuturism – Maska’s perspectives

Maska first existed as a journal. In 1920, it was founded by the Ljubljana subcommittee of the Association of Theatre Actors of the Kingdom of the SHS, making it the oldest European theatre magazine. A long hiatus followed, and the journal was revived in 1985 by the Association of Cultural Organisations of Slovenia under the name Maske. In 1991, it was restored to its original name, Maska, and its editorial structure was comprehensively renewed by Irena Štaudohar and Maja Breznik. In 1993, an institute was established, under which the publishing of the journal continued. In the following years, its activities evolved into book publishing, education (Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts) and production (artistic production), giving the institute a distinctly interdisciplinary character, which places it in a very special position within the broader space to this day. 

Yugofuturism was conceived as an idea to name one of the three anniversary issues of Maska journal that we coedited with Pia Brezavšček in 2019, which symbolically united three magazines in a former common space – Teorija koja hoda, Frakcija and Maska, thus reconnecting the once vibrantly collaborating spaces within this issue. By then, Teorija koja hoda and Frakcija had ceased publication due to poor financial conditions, and many of the people who had created and sustained these spaces over the years had moved to the diaspora. As these spaces emptied out, it seemed even more important to think about how to persist in and affirm this periphery, or one might say marginality and regionality. And since the concept remained relatively unexplored within this issue, and seemed to us to carry theoretical, political and artistic potential, we wanted to explore it more deeply.

The next issue, YUFU 2.0, edited by Pia Brezavšček and Rok Bozovičar, dealt with the concept in a much deeper way and, above all, raised the question – what Yugofuturism is? The issue is a compilation of theoretical and also essayistic texts and we have for the first time gathered more comprehensive contributions on yufu from the wider region. 

In particular, it is a question of a transitional generation that wanted to reclaim possibility of imagining the future in the wider area of the former Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the declared end of the future. We felt that national contexts were too narrow and stifling, and we did not feel invited as equal interlocutors in a Eurocentric discourse. 

From our perspective, yugofuturism wants to be informed by the past, but it is not nostalgic; it discovers points in it that were never fully realised, but that carried political potential – public, social, feministic, ecological, workers’ rights, etc. Yugofuturism does not want to be a eulogy for the former common state, it also wants to confront its backside and the failure of a project that ultimately resulted in war and disintegration. In particular, we see yugofuturism as a methodology and a process that, through imagining a common future, has an irreversible impact on our present – through action and cooperation, it is already establishing new affinities and bonds. And as Bojana Kunst suggests in The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care (2023: 19) a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micropolitics aims to unpack new modes of political thinking that would be independent of the hegemonic political apparatus, that would understand political processes as multilayered and heterogeneous, and that would invent new modes of (political) belonging. 

I think that today, yugofuturism is even more urgent and has even greater political potential. 

As Mark Fisher has argued, while right-wing populism has been terribly successful, anti-capitalism has not proved to be a sufficient mobiliser, as it has defined itself mainly as opposition and critique and has ceased to be associated with a positive political project. For it, the creation of (economic) scientific fictions is an indispensable political task that could exert pressure on possible realities and redraw the map of the possible and the impossible, the conceivable and the unthinkable.

Yugofuturism is understood precisely as the opening up of a number of alternative perspectives, as an open and experimental spirit that can potentially become the driving force for the development of future policies – for example, what a new housing, health or transport system would look like, and what kind of society would facilitate this development.

The task of Yugofuturism is therefore to create fictions that can turn into efficient machines that not only anticipate the future, but also bring it into being.

At the same time, we wanted Yugofuturism not to be a matter of theoretical debates, but to become part of a broader cultural-political imaginary that is not defined by an authorial position, but exists as a multiplicity of responses and understandings and practices. 

At the YUFU cycle in January 2024 we had the premiere of Alma Gačanin’s How Well Did You Perform Today? which reflects in particular on the concept of work, on hidden, invisible, overtime work and what are the emancipatory potentials for the future. And Future 14b, a kind of open interdisciplinary laboratory where performers, activists and researchers came together to create speculative scenarios of the future and invite people to experience it.  

In collaboration with the Kompot group, which worked with Pia Brezavšček to develop an open-source platform for the collaborative editing of the Yugofuturist Manifesto. The main aim is probably to continue to inspire interesting imaginaries of the future, bringing together different people and contexts in this way.

To this end, together with the Kompot programming group, which advocates open hosting on the increasingly monopolised web, we have developed a group editing website for the Yufu.kompot.si Yugofuturist Manifesto, where anyone will be able to enter new concepts related to the concept and edit existing ones. The result will be a collective text that will continuously grow.

To paraphrase Pia Brezavšček yugofuturism is also about stopping being ashamed of one’s peripherality, but turning this shame into the value of a specific position from where one can see better or experience differently than from the center itself. This, she writes, is also in line with contemporary queer theories, for example the idea of reparativeness as understood, for example, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 

“Far from being a system liberated from fictions, capitalism should be seen as the system that liberates fictions to rule over the social.” Mark Fisher, Economic Science Fictions

The left today defined solely by its opposition to capital, it’s not a positive project. 

Capital’s economic science fictions cannot simply be opposed; they need to be countered by economic science fictions that can exert pressure on capital’s current monopolisation of possible realities. The development of economic science fictions would constitute a form of indirect action without which hegemonic struggle cannot hope to be successful. It is easy to be daunted by the seeming scale of this challenge – come up with a fully functioning blueprint for a post-capitalist society, or capitalism will rule forever!

But we shouldn’t be forced into silence by this false opposition. It is not a single-total vision that is required but a multiplicity of alternative perspectives, each potentially opening up a crack into another world.

The injunction to produce fictions implies an open and experimental spirit, a certain loosening up of the heavy responsibilities associated with the generation of determinate political programmes. Yet fictions can be engines for the development of future policy.

Fictions about what, say, a new housing, healthcare or transport system might look like inevitably also entail imagining what kind of society could house and facilitate these developments. Fictions, that is to say, can counter capitalist realism by rendering alternatives to capitalism thinkable. Not only this; fictions are also simulations in which we can get some sense of what it would be like to live in a post-capitalist society.

The task is to produce fictions that can be converted into effective virtualities – fictions that not only anticipate the future but that can already start to bring it into being. 

So, I think in this passage, we’ve already touched upon most of the themes I’d like to explore with you today, namely: 

– The economy, Capitalism, as a fiction 

– Alternatives are, in fact, out there (but we will qualify this a bit, looking at degrowth & commons as counter-hegemonic discourses, research fields, and somewhat loosely associated sets of practices and recommendations, that could come into play in “immersive and interactive utopian theatre of alternative political economic possibilities”) 

– Performing alternatives is something without which radical change is not possible, or let’s say, unnecessarily difficult; I am intrigued by this notion. Prefiguration comes in many shades, one is to do it in practice, another is to do it in practice vis-a-vis fiction. You have to admit, it has certain strengths, in how it’s possible, if only in an imaginary space, or through some form of medium, to circumvent all the barriers in the way of realising post-capitalism, and iteratively, reflexively, experimenting, hands on, lets say, with eutopian proposals. Even books – if we didn’t have writers like Ursula le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, the landscape – and prospects – of change would undoubtedly be a lot more bleak. 

– And lastly, how to produce fictions that can become what Mark called effective virtualities; something that already starts bringing the future into being. 

Questions of co-authorship and specific forms of reception, interaction or co-design: a blueprint to save the world, let alone coming from an individual, isn’t going to work. And participation, participatory design, and whatnot, on the other hand, can mean a lot of very different things today, and is often very much used to justify the interests of capital and those in power. So sticking with certain degrees of normativity when it comes to articulating and playing out alternatives, is an important thing to consider. 

Sure, with fiction, the risk is small, and you can let your imagination go, and expand it, to the extent you are able. But we must remember to keep asking the question, who is in a position to be able to do so? To craft futures. Besides the problems with participation mentioned, It is painful, also, for many, with the brutalism of everyday capitalist reality, normalized, internalized, full of anxieties about ones personal livelihood or that of their loved ones. 

What I’d like to do is now is first take a little step back and invite you on a journey through some conceptual foundations and methods/approaches/formats of, let’s say, utopian performatives, that have been inspirational for me. 

And then, I’d like to briefly think through with you a soon launching project with Maska, constituting probably yeah its first public teaser for it. But, rather than focusing on this specific project – I wanted this to be a little exercise in imagination, and going with the theme of this string of Maska’s events, I’d share with you my idea for a future, bigger project – not 17 years down the line, I hope – that could possible result from this relatively small scale experiment we will do with Maska, and you will able to experience for yourselves in January of next year. 

As someone with a degree in sociology, not in performative arts, I’ll stick mostly to what I know,

– Sociology of emergences 

– Utopia as method 

– Other terms (quick overview) 

– Foresight & futures studies, experiential futures (critique, potential) 

– Participatory futures (global swarm), participation – critique, production – critique – Let’s venture a bit, none the less, into theatre: Klaić: Plot of the Future – Notes a decline in utopian, mostly dystopian (still serving a critical, utopian function, but in a dystopian mode, which can of course be interesting, subversive, etc., but going back to the opening quote, it would usually serve the critique of capital, thereby perhaps even somehow solidifying it as inescapable)

So concepts, methods – all well and good, but what about the content? 

As we speak, there are discursive battles going on for our economic futures: sharing, circular, cooperative economy, smart cities, regenerative economies; either these models essentially stem from capitalism in the first place (circular) or are quickly co-opted and merged into a techno-capitalist futurity. 

There are frames like degrowth and commons, which as frames may not lend themselves so much to capitalist cooptation, but certainly many practices that some might associate with them are cooptable. And also, through their framing or positioning, as counter-hegemonic discourses and practices, they additionally risk marginalization, even ridicule, etc. 

But instead of going new really deep into what is degrowth, we’ve been talking for 8 years now in Slovenia what is degrowth, and we’re still not on the same page, and the commons, or the common, — well, if you are here today, listening in, I assume you have some ideas of what alternative political economies could look like. 

I’d much rather talk about this project idea, the one that hopefully won’t take 17 years to do, and cover some of these themse there. As a kind of gesture already towards the performative. 

Tentatively, I call it the Futures Festival; but it can mutate – Four Futures of Food Festival, you name it …