Škart

a wasted leftover in the production process, anything rejected as unusable or wrong, the meager result of some failed attempt.¹ Or, to put it more precisely: something too unsuccessful to become a commodity. Labeling something as “škart,” a term used widely in the context of production processes, was to describe that object or part of it as already on its way to the bin. Since their formation in 1990, ŠKART has initiated, produced, organized, and staged numerous public actions and events that, in their cogently modest manner, have altered the meaning of art’s social engagement in Serbia’s public space. The list of ŠKART’s activities includes writing, designing, and printing books, notebooks, posters, flyers, boxes, and other paper and cardboard products; street actions ranging from pasting their visual poetry posters on walls to distributing their poems and other printed works to specific groups; broadcasting experimental radio programs that set up conflicting and dissensual situations positioned between the public and the private spheres; celebrating the “small heroes” of everyday life and participating in activities of the organizations of civil society; founding and organizing amateur choirs and initiating poetry festivals and tours; collaborating with and doing embroidery with groups of refugee women; and co-authoring various musical and theatre performances with children who lack parental care. This list of their activities is far from complete, and all of their activities are situated and site-specific. For the sake of classification, their activity could be accorded the proposed art-historical labels of “relational art” and “participatory art”—or, more generally, community art. But regardless of such art-historical exigencies, their practice must be viewed primarily as a self-determining activity, developing and being deployed wholly within specificities of its local context and habitus, even of its local “traditions”. It is hence a practice that was not instigated or even particularly informed by the emerging artistic “trend” that simultaneously came into view in other places. In a nutshell, the practice of ŠKART during the 1990s (the period from which the selection of printed works and videos acquired by the Kontakt Collection dates) could be described by the notion of “the politics of small gestures” proposed by Mika Hannula: “A small gesture generates opportunities to think, feel and, hear alternatives—and then to learn how to implement and to maintain them. Not in a full-scale solution for the big gesture, but in a mundane, day-to-day act of trying to make everyday life a little more worthwhile. It is about the beauty of ordinary acts. A process that is filled with trial and error, and with amazingly few successes.² A small gesture is about how to manage to make a meaningful difference in our daily realities. A small gesture is nothing if it is not anchored in and committed to the continuation of a context in which it tries to become what it wants to be.”³ The daily reality of 1990s Serbia could be considered rather extreme. With its war-mongering policy and its role in organizing and supporting paramilitary forces that committed numerous war crimes, the Serbian state became fully isolated from the international community and spent more than four years under strict UN sanctions. All this generated Europe’s worst hyperinflation, which reached a crescendo in January 1994 when the official monthly inflation rate was 313 million percent. Young men who avoided conscription were prosecuted, and participation in antiwar activities was labeled treason by state-controlled media. The group’s reaction to this situation and, most importantly, to their own living and working conditions was a successful attempt to bring about situations in everyday life that were both poetic and directly engaged, that were about the immediacy of the poetic in certain social reactions or embodied propositions that acted as an alternative—small, weak, and marginalized, but an actual alternative amidst the circumstances described above. Their work was also about laying out something conflictual, something suppressed, something that collided both with the aggressiveness of the warmongering project and the passivity of the silent majority among the citizenry. The working method of ŠKART is, in fact, based on conflictual relations between its two members that each work only partly resolves. It is with a characteristic dose of self-irony that this is shown, for instance, in an early video entitled “Forrest sings, Forrest shines” (1994), in which the two members quarrel about the content of the very film of which this scene is part.⁴ B.D.