Gluklya / Natalia
Pershina-Yakimanskaya
THE UTOPIAN UNION OF THE UNEMPLOYED
The Utopian Union of the Unemployed is a project that brings together migrants, artists and institutions in the united aim of developing a pilot model for a new type of work that exists at the junction of art, economics, progressive pedagogy, and the social sciences. The goals and objectives of the project are these: to research new methods for using art and a poetic outlook to integrate newly arrived refugees into the European Community.
At long, long last the “Theater for Migrants” has started moving my way. Although some experts don’t like this name, this is what I have decided to call my project after all. After the initial projects – “Wings of Migrants” in St Petersburg and “Dumped Dreams” in Zurich – it was already clear that working briefly, that is, coming to a place for two weeks, spending a huge amount of energy on overcoming fear of the other, building up a relationship with the participants so that they open up and become my friends, even like family, and then never seeing them again and not knowing if this experiment has added something positive to their lives or not, makes no sense. You see, it turns out that the main monster now dwells in the fact that short courses with people on the fringes of society are a product. That very product which the bloodthirsty system craves, and nothing like a process that makes us alive and able to resist. This is that weak link in neoliberalism comparable with the situation in Hemingway’s novel, where an old man does battle with a huge fish, but afterwards the sharks eat it anyway. In order to make sure that the sharks don’t eat our big, beautiful fish we – artists who have realized that art is in very deep crisis and who therefore work with people from beyond the art community, with people who are really suffering – in order to make sure that the neoliberalism that gives us money for our work with refugees and migrants and other weak people, doesn’t gobble up our efforts, we have to fight for long-term projects, no matter what it takes.
In my particular case an approximation to this ideal only became possible thanks to my meeting Agent Magical Bird. That’s what I call the fragile young woman who agreed to welcome into the space of her small gallery my fantasies on the transformation of society entitled “The Utopian Union of the Unemployed.”
05.09.16
If I wrote a novel, I’d begin it with Marzia’s intense gaze. Marzia is the name of the director of Xenia – an organization that saves refugees. She is the most involved director of any organization that I have ever seen in my life. Her husband is one of the refugees that she has saved, and together they adopted a boy from Afghanistan, who was sent to Italy by his parents – simply put on the bus with his things – so that he would grow up and send them money. The boy is difficult and he resists Marzia with all his might, a frail little soldier whom she fell for with an acute, agonizing love. I met her at the moment when he had just started demanding autonomy, something that was hard for his mother’s heart to accept. It was as if seven knives had been thrust into her heart at once. In Italian churches there are images of the Madonna with a heart impaled on knives – the canons of Catholicism permit suffering to be depicted in this way. Each knife signifies a specific degree of the suffering of Christ, her son, but it seems to me that, as often happens with inspired images that have appeared in our world, we can perceive them all at once, there is a pain that is like seven knives at once, and nothing can be done about it. I told her about my project and said we wanted to ask her to help us with finding participants.
She advised us to try several people. The migrants mentioned included a shaman who had arrived from Senegal and could foretell the future and a writer who was writing the story of his life and working 80 hours a week in seven jobs in order to feed a large family in Afghanistan, where he sent most of his pay. Several women were also on the list, but Marzia wasn’t sure if we’d be able to cope with them, because they lived with conflict inside them and one way or another it always crept out. “They unconsciously provoke conflict, because they were subjected to violence in their childhood or youth,” Marzia said. For instance, one of the women had witnessed the murder of her father and brothers in Bosnia, and also seen her mother being dragged away, and then she heard screams and she never saw her mother again. She was a very good worker but, for instance, she never came to meetings at the office, any relations beyond the bounds of the man–machine function threw her off balance. “You won’t be able to cope with her, she’ll destroy everything for you. You won’t be able to cope with her in such a short space of time,” Marzia said.
06.09.16
As always, projects of this kind begin with thrashing out the ethical norms accepted on the territory of the neoliberal community. Since we carry a deep sense of guilt for the exploitation of slaves in former colonies, we can’t be their teachers.
I don’t know what to do, because now everyone keeps telling me in a single voice that no one must be coerced, and it’s not very likely that they will draw. And what if they don’t want to draw? Mama mia! But this is always a challenge. We’ll see. There is no art without risk.
The most important problem that bothers me is whether imagination and a sense of humor can help the newcomers achieve a condition not only of safety, but what I would call suprematist freedom. Social workers talk repeatedly about the security they must offer to the migrants, whatever it takes. But that’s not enough to oppose the structure of society, is it?
A rose has to have thorns, and migrants have to have imagination and the will to transform themselves and society.
Or is this a sheer waste of time? Can the methods that artists usually employ, such as fantasy, imagination, escaping to different worlds, or orbiting round other realities – be useful to migrants when it comes to integration? Can poetry help them when it comes to integration?
07.09.16
For the third day in a row now my thinking keeps coming back to the moment when a friend – the director of a small European art institution – casually dropped into a conversation that he understood why I work with migrants: because I’m searching for new energy. Somehow the way he said that made me feel terribly afraid – what if he really saw my goal as being only that? I’m actually searching for a new faith as well. And a new platform, the meaning of art.
08.09.16
I don’t have time to write it all down – everything’s spinning so fast, there’s so much of everything going on all around – every individual demands attention, and the information they’re giving out penetrates into every layer of my cells.
Joyful news – our Manifesto has been translated into Italian!
09.09.16
My favorite amusement is to walk along under the porticos and drop into a café every fifteen minutes to drink a little cup of coffee. That’s how I celebrate my arrival in Italy.
I dream of doing it some time with our guys from Nigeria who are taking part in the workshop. And I also think about how we’ll give those T-shirts we’re going to print to illegal immigrants, and how that will be a genuine performance.
10.09.16
Today there are more illegals, and they all stand there holding out their caps.
I should say that every day the way their standing is choreographed changes a bit. Probably behind the scenes a social worker gives them advice, or perhaps they come to an agreement among themselves? Yesterday, for instance, they were all standing in a suprematistically passive pose, but today they are holding their caps out rather determinedly. If it wasn’t a tragedy, it would be very much like an organized flashmob. Every time my perverse imagination suggests different variations on the theme of recasting this sign of the times into the status of a performance.
For instance, if we give them all T-shirts with statements like Unemployment is a state of mind, will it turn out that the beggars are automatically transformed into citizens, if only for a short time? But then again, doubts about the effectiveness of this brief spell prevent me dashing into realizing this particular option
11.09.16
I think it started when, after stepping onto the marble floor of the apartment I’ve been housed in and walking on and on under the porticos of Bologna into the yellowish-gentle orange-pink haze of that same Bologna, which has the oldest university in the world, and St Luke’s Hill, to which pilgrims used to come to ask to be cured of difficult illnesses, but now instead athletes run up the hill, and I saw the unfortunate newcomers begging, holding out napkins, and some simply standing there, dejectedly selling flowers. For some reason I never give them money, and at the same time I feel terribly ashamed, I try not to look at them and hold out. On especially sensitive days I cry at the sight of them. I tell myself then: you have to walk without looking round, I walk and I cry, but I still don’t give them money. A creep, in short. On those days of self-hatred, all I do is make myself feel even worse.
12.09.16
I really don’t know at all why I do this. It’s very painful and frightening for me. I’m not better in any way, I’m a lot worse than these people, whom I am planning (O, God!) to teach something. I’m just a filthy swine, that’s all. What can I do?
I had a dream that reconciled me with reality in a paradoxical kind of way. I know what to start the workshop with today.
The point is, it was a dream about a migrant from the previous project in a different Italian city, where the author’s residency turned out to be intensively punk. Any result was declared unnecessary, and that reduced me to total frustration. I couldn’t do anything about it, but then again I started getting dreams that featured characters from the residency, mixed up together with newcomers. By the way, that was where the term newcomers appeared: during the animated debates the Italian activists promoted this term, and the Palestinian activists replied furiously that it wasn’t a recognized term, and after all we should call a spade a spade, so let’s keep the good old word refugee. Maybe it isn’t politically correct, but it’s honest, the Palestinians claimed. But I took a liking to the term newcomers. I think that’s exactly what the migrants can be called. Although, to be honest, all this song and dance about what to call them is exaggerated. For me they are messiahs who have come to tell us the truth. In Marx’s terms I would actually call them the very class which, together with the artists, will make the revolution.
But I’ll go back to the dream: I dreamed of Toslim, a fugitive from Bangladesh, a sad, introverted individual, who turned out to be a brilliant actor, although he couldn’t read and write, even in his own language.
What happened was this. In my dream Toslim tells me about a dream that he has had several times, and every time it began in the same way. Toslim found himself in an unusual garden filled with plants that looked like reeds, but with strange flowers. These flowers were like little fingers with little manicured red nails. The further he went into the garden, the deeper these flowers pierced into him, as if they wanted to grow through him. It wasn’t painful, quite the opposite actually – in the dream he had a feeling of delight and anticipation – if not of a miracle, then of some adventure that was definitely unusual.
I’m thinking of starting to get to know the participants in the workshop with this dream.
By the way, Toslim drew my portrait.
It’s interesting that here I appear as a person with four eyes.
16.09.16
I don’t remember very well where I got the idea of printing, that is, not dancing or eating together (a method for involving people in the process, which is used by artists in participatory projects), or even my usual ploy with clothing, but precisely this technique, but I am very pleased and I think that it’s an excellent way to counter the difficult situation of idleness to which the migrants are condemned. They have to bear the test of the status of being ‘no one.’ You are no one in this society, and until we accept that you can be someone, you can’t work, you can only observe our life unobtrusively. This state of being totally becalmed in uncertainty, into which they are plunged, requires genuine courage.
It’s interesting that artists artificially create this kind of condition of susceptibility for themselves. You could say it requires a certain effort for them to approach the status of no one. The muses of inspiration find excellent nourishment in conditions like this, and they call it autonomy. Consequently, the artist in society is the only figure that a newly arrived migrant can relate to. A good artist looks in the mirror and sees a migrant. Not himself. He is not equal to a migrant, of course, because potentially he has the opportunity to find himself a job, for instance, as a yard keeper or someone else, that is, to stop being an artist. But a newcomer has no alternatives.
AMB also confessed to me that she’s taking a great risk by paying them for working. That apparently just recently there was a raid on a big shop in the city. The police discovered that the owner of the shop was hiring illegals and paying them, and they closed it. AMB is taking a great risk by getting involved with me. If they close her gallery, all the blame will fall on my shoulders, of course.
17.09.16
Today was the first day when all our participants came. Tony, Prince and Precious. It was very difficult. Prince is still kind of all right, a cheerful kind of guy, like nothing gets to him. But Tony is really terrible. It’s like talking to a rock. And the rock actually paralyzes you. But I resist, of course, we don’t have any other way. That’s the poignant aftertaste of misery and misfortune. Mama mia!
But actually, even Tony isn’t really as difficult as Precious, who has taken on the entire grief of the Nigerian nation. They all came from small towns in Nigeria. So far all I know about them is that they won’t tell me immediately what happened to them. And I don’t ask. And we’re not going to get in touch with the organizers, because they’ll immediately forbid them to come and won’t let them go anywhere at all, after all, they’re not allowed to work. Plus, I really was feeling very bad. The level of iron in my organism had fallen catastrophically. The girls from the Academy of Art bent over double and drew little sketches of the models for about two hours, very clumsily and completely off the subject. They spent the other hour and a half smoking and chattering in Italian.
In the end I went so far as to express minimal criticism of their drawing and the fact that they weren’t making the slightest effort to get any closer to the newcomers.
But then I was cheered up by the young male students. Giovanni suggested the slogan “Fear of Integration,” and Fabrizio suggested printing the parts of the constitution where it says everyone is guaranteed equal rights.
18.09.16
The girls from the Academy of Art didn’t show up. So okay. In utopian alliances there’s always someone who falls away. And that’s what happened this time. But the ones who stay are the ones who really need it. Yesterday I asked Prince for the clothes in which they sailed from Libya to Italy on those boats: T-shirts or anything at all. They said they’d think about it and frowned.
I said perhaps it could be valuable to show the clothes of people who didn’t drown in the sea, but reached the shore safely. Usually talking about their clothes helps people to open up and start talking about their problems. But this time it’s probably better to focus on producing drawings to print.
19.09.16
This is what I’ve managed to find out about Tony. He grew up in a village in Delta State, Nigeria. His mother died when he was five. He was raised by his father. “He looked good after me,” Tony said. His father was a hard-working farmer, and then he fell ill and died. Tony used to go to church on Sundays, someone had taken him there once. Even now he likes reading the Bible. Basically, there are two books in his life: Italiano di Base (Basic Italian) and the Bible. One fine day (this was what he said: on the happiest day of my life) a man came up to him and asked: ‘Do you want to go to Europe? I can take you with me.” And he took Tony to Libya. Tony asked him: “Why have you brought me here, and not to Italy, as you promised?” The man said that after Tony worked for a while, washing the mud off trucks, he would take him to Italy. Obviously, those were the same trucks that drive across the desert crammed to the limit, and sometimes someone tumbles out along the way and dies. Tony started working, but he was detained by the police for three months.
When he got out of jail, he came to Italy by sailing over in a boat. But it’s only Tony who has come clean about himself. The others have completely clammed up and we don’t know anything about them. That’s why we need long projects, in order to understand more about these people, and not just work brazenly: do this, do that.
Short projects are what capitalism needs.
20.09.16
Tony has created a masterpiece. He put down his mobile phone and simply drew round it. All I had to do was write in “phone” to make it read “Iphone” and transfer it to a sheet of film.
A telephone is the most precious thing that a migrant has. You could say that he drew his own God.
21.09.16
The workshop went amazingly well today. Why? Because Tony opened my sketchpad (all on his own, no one made him do it) and started painstakingly copying my pencil portrait of Olya Zhitlina. Obviously it wasn’t a waste of time. Then I showed them the video The Utopian Union of the Unemployed! The very first part, with the voice of the poet Osminkin and Tsaplya doing the montage. We made that video in the old premises of the Center for Independent Social Research in St Petersburg, before they were declared a foreign agent. The point is that in this video ballerinas teach unemployed men, and then the other way round. The point was equality. And the fact that, firstly, this is the only reality for us and, secondly, it is like a dance, the pirouettes and pliés are there in order to achieve this elegantly, taking each other’s subtle nuances into account. Grace? How great it is that the guys took it the right way. They saw me copying their drawings, transferring them to the film for silk screening, and they took that to mean they could copy my drawings too. I was so delighted because Tony did it himself. Usually the most difficult thing about them is that they’re clenched up tight and don’t do anything without being asked or supervised. I have to keep asking and urging them on a countless number of times.
22.09.16
From the exchange of texts about “What’s up?” between Agent Magical Bird and Tony:
AMB: What are you doing?
Tony: Having supper.
AMB: What exactly are you eating?
Tony: Bread.
AMB: What, just bread?
Tony: Yes, yes, just bread.
AMB: Just bread and nothing else?
Tony: Yes, just bread and nothing else.
23.09.16
I read that in 2010 Nigeria was the hungriest country in the world. I don’t think that anything has changed radically in 2016. But I have to read more about it, of course. I also noticed that the guys lie down a lot. After all, they don’t have anything to do.
They showed me a photo of their apartment. Not too bad, in principle.
They really like that they have a television there. And in our gallery they draw for all they’re worth. All my concerns were groundless. I can see that they like it and it gives them pleasure.
24.09.16
The reason for the guys’ exceptionally intense despondency has become clear. It turns out that the man who took Tony to Libya did it in exchange for Tony sending him a large sum of money once he got settled in Europe. Tony won’t say how much.
He only said that he gets 75 euros a month from the Italian authorities while they’re waiting for confirmation of their status. It’s the same for Prince. I don’t know about Precious. It has also become clear that they are so extremely unforthcoming and reluctant to tell us anything about themselves out of fear that we might be connected with human trafficking and sex slavery. There are women in Italy who hire guys like these and turn them into slaves. Now I understand the reasons why Tony never reacts to my jokes. For him any frivolity or sense of humor is associated with the sphere of bodily pleasure. If someone talks to you and jokes, it means they want something. And what could a white, charismatic woman want? It stands to reason!
25.09.16
The workshop happened yesterday!
We even printed with our feet! Our boys finally went away cheerful!
It’s all due to the exceptional vitality of a girl from Belarus (who has preferred to remain anonymous). While I was sitting at the table, copying Tony and Prince’s drawings, and had lost control of what was going on, a joyful orgy was taking place in the next room. The girl from Belarus took the guys’ feet and dunked them into black paint. The great tradition of hospitality suddenly came to life.
They told us about being hungry too. They accepted everything and are willing to go to the restaurant with us!
26.09.16
Today after our activities Tony sent me a text: “My father teached me that I can not do bad things. Do not still and do not still the wife of other man.”
27.09.16
I’d just come out of the gallery to buy some pills in the chemist’s to ward off a cold coming on, when I saw Prince beside a supermarket, standing there cap in hand in the celebrated pose of a beggar. I was so embarrassed that I went on into the supermarket, vowing determinedly that when I came out I’d present him with a heap of money and invite him to the gallery again.
The thoughts were swirling round in my head like a tornado. In the supermarket the abundance of food fogged up my brain so badly that, after getting totally confused with the new automated tills, when I finally came back out, I didn’t find Prince there, he had disappeared. Imagine my surprise when I was struck completely out of the blue by the doubt that perhaps he had never really been there and the whole thing was nothing but hallucinations. I immediately ran to the girls in the gallery and told them everything. There had just been a workshop in which a state of unity was achieved, and now all of a sudden, just like that, everything had gone to pieces! Reality had spat in our faces! Were our feeble efforts worth anything at all?
I have to stop telling Agent Magical Bird about anything and everything. There, I’ve gone and told her the way things are and now she looks at me strangely, and she has a sad air. In fact her face very often looks exhausted, but when I tell her that, she never admits anything, never, never, she always denies it and says she has loads of strength. I’m afraid all the time that the moment will come when she’ll collapse like a scythed reed. She told me her grandfather was killed by Poles who had just been released from a camp, when they tried to steal jewelry from his shop. Her grandfather used to sell jewelry. He ran out after the thieves and they killed him.
29.09.16
I’ve overdone the work a bit, probably, and I need to go to the swimming pool urgently.
But when I got to the pool, they wouldn’t let me in. You can only buy a pass for a year. You can go just once of course, but that would be for 70 euros. That’s really a bit too much when Tony and Prince are eating just bread and standing with their hands held out on the other days. I’d better just have a hug with Veronica and it will all pass off.
And now Marzia is proposing to set up a factory to make clothes based on the patterns of clothing from the migrants’ countries.
30.09.16
Last night I had a strange dream. We were swimming in the pool – AMB, and all the friends of the gallery, and the newcomers. But for some reason Tony wasn’t swimming. I felt awkward that he was sitting there and examining us, but then I got used to it. In the middle of the swimming session Tony suddenly stood up at full height on the edge of the pool and said: I have to tell you that I’m very much afraid that you’ll use me as a sex slave and I’ll never be able to pay the man who brought me here 30,000 euros.
31.09.16
I enjoy working with the guys and I don’t worry any longer now about what it’s for and how to do it. Basically I think this is the only way to protect yourself against the emptiness of art. I think we enrich each other. But of course you have to unite the totally vulnerable ones and the stronger ones. What I mean is that the Utopian Union of the Unemployed is always an association of the strong and the weak, and in this particular case it’s no accident, of course, that the activist Raffaello appeared. I’m not a genuine therapist, after all, I create a situation and sort of supervise it, but I don’t promise anyone any answers. Today I signed a contract with the gallery for two years. During that time all the gallery’s artists must work with newcomers in one way or another. That means, if artists don’t want to do work on the subject of migration or involve participants, then they’re obliged at least to tell newcomers about their art. And in addition we concluded a separate contract that lists the conditions for the future owner of the silkscreen printing board.
The future owner can print as much as he likes, make as many prints as he likes, but at the same time he or she is obliged, according to one condition stipulated in the contract, to transfer the money from the sale of these prints to the organization Xenia, which undertakes in turn to send newly arrived migrants to the art gallery or directly to the artists.
The contract was one of the items in the exhibition, we gave it the status of a work of art. We enlarged the text of the contract, printed it in one meter by one meter size and hung it on the wall. “Next time we’ll print it on marble,” said AMB.
1.10.16
The great day has finally arrived!
The performance “Hunger Strike” has taken place! It happened like this. Raffaello, a documentary film maker and activist who has visited refugee camps several times, came three hours before the beginning and shot the preparations. This got in the way a bit, but intellectually I realized that it was kind of the right thing to do and I even managed to say something to camera in the process of ironing the banner “Fear of integration,” made by the student Giovanni. “Bologna is not a restaurant” was our basic slogan. We also wore white clothes with “Kabulonia” written on them, made by Ian from Kabul, the same one who works 80 hours a week to send his money to his family. There were other slogans: “Unemployment is a state of mind,” and little white frocks.
We walked out of the gallery like the full-start cast of the Utopian Union: 4 newcomers, 4 students from the academy, 2 cameramen, AMB, the student sociologist Marzia, who was talking on the phone all the time, and me.
We paraded solemnly through the streets of the city of Bologna, across the main square, past the citizens dining demurely at the most sacred hour – between eight and nine in the evening. The citizens chewing and hardly even reacting to us (only occasionally was it possible to catch a sympathetic glance) only energized our drive. We reached the main square, went past the cathedral that was left unfinished because the Pope didn’t want there to be a cathedral anywhere bigger than in Rome, and walked into a restaurant. We sat down at a table and asked for water. We hardly spoke to each other at all. And if there is happiness in this world, it was then, at the moment of solidarity, when we were united by the idea of resistance. The waiters sensed the intensity and seriousness of the people sitting at the table, and after approaching us with the menu a few times they moved away and stood in the corner of the room, talking to each other and eyeing us. I looked at Agent Magical Bird sitting opposite me and saw a Christian woman prepared to go into a cage with a lion. Tears came to my eyes. I looked at the barely breathing girl sociologist who had attached herself to us at the last moment, and then at Tony, Prince, and Precious, who were genuinely beautiful in the gravity of their drama, which sweeps away all the dross in the world, leaving only the most important thing: the exalted moment of solidarity of people around an idea that doesn’t bring anyone any pragmatic benefit. So it turns out this is what I live for. My thanks to all of you, dear friends. After an hour and a bit the waiters broke down and brought us pasta. We looked at each other, got up and walked out of the restaurant.
24.09.16
I have good news!
The newcomers from the previous project have got in touch: Allilu answered me that he is alive and well, and intends to send his diary soon! Allah be praised!!!
And Tony wrote about “What’s up” that he’s been summoned to the committee again, and he’s very worried they won’t believe that the man who brought him to Italy is expecting 30,000 euros from him and he’s very afraid.