Three years after the exhibition “Life after Tourism” in which Ivica Mitrović and Oleg Šuran dealt with the dystopian future of the city and life after a disaster, the authors return to the Museum of Fine Arts with a new project that they view as a continuation, a reflection on their personal practice and the condition of the speculative design practice, which has predominantly been focused, in the two decades of its existence, on dystopian futures. Today, the authors are interested in acting “here and now” – acting before the potential near catastrophic futures (climate, economic, political, technological, health, communal, etc.).
The exhibition is realized in the form of presentation-educational workshops, and focuses on mapping the self-organized local communities that operate from the bottom-up, communities that have shown resilience to crises through their activities and a potential in “fighting” possible future disasters, and that also integrate education in their work. Mitrović and Šuran have mapped several self-organized collectives/associations from around the city of Split that show resistance to possible catastrophic changes in the near future. The exhibition will present some of these initiatives, often created on the margins, where they have built specific mechanisms of resistance. Those dealing with, for example, permaculture, radio amateurs, community media and the like. A series of open workshops is organized during the exhibition, intended for a wide audience regardless of age and prior knowledge, which are going to deal with skills we once possessed, as a society and as individuals, and lost over time (for example, how to produce electricity or our own food, and similar).
Through this exhibition, the authors continue their work in the local context they know well, in collaboration with and participation of local people, but also in cooperation with similar initiatives at the national, regional and global level with the purpose of initiating broader transformative results. Following in the footsteps of what Trojan Horse, an independent educational platform based in Helsinki, emphasizes through their work – “concrete actions are not necessarily a grandiose intervention, they can be gentler gestures.”
