ŠKART: human failures inspire us

Since ACT is about making a change, we need to talk about impact. We must learn about the sorts of impact art can make, about the role and place of impact in art practices, and about how art practices themselves are impacted, for instance by Covid-19. 

Therefore, as part of the Learning to Impact Work Package of the ACT project, we research the many faces of impact. We do so by interviewing artists. With The Interview Series we tap into their embodied, concrete artistic practices. We want to build an understanding of how these practices (may) evolve in the face of the current challenges. How the artists learn to ‘stay with the trouble’. How the urgency of climate change, ecology and biodiversity informs their attitude towards the social impact of their artistic work. 

#5: Prota / ŠKART: architecture of human relations

The interview takes place online, through Zoom. Prota looks surprised, slightly upset even that the interviewers are wearing just their faces while he himself has put on his chicken mask. Putting on a mask helps you tell stories, Prota asserts matter-of-factish. And so, the mask stays for the entire interview, leaving the maskless feel naked somehow.

It’s not easy to prepare for the interview. The work of ŠKART has always been, as Prota calls it, “unplanned, unstructured, and even unlisted.” As a consequence, the art collective that Dragan Protić (Prota) and Djordje Balmazović (Žole) founded together in 1990 at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade still has no proper biography, Facebook-page, or website. Prota: “it is outside our interest, still.”

The evasive nature of ŠKARTs “actions”, as Prota refers to them, follows directly from how ŠKART engages with the world. Not through big words and long-term plans. Prota: “It is about being slightly conscious of things that need to be done”. ŠKARTs actions can change on daily basis, switching direction when and where needed.

The absence of grand gestures follows from ŠKARTs view of what it means to be human. Prota: “Škart means rejects. Human mistakes, human failures inspire us. To fully appreciate that by yourself, you are never clever enough, never skilled enough and never equipped enough.” For ŠKART, feelings of insecurity and discomfort are the basis for action. Prota: “we need to appreciate what we have and who we are. Otherwise, we are never ready to go anywhere and start anything.”

The ‘never enough by yourself’ condition of any human necessitates working together. From its early days, ŠKART has been all about collaborations. Variety is key here. Forging bonds with groups working in different areas, offering different skills, producing different types of knowledge, and so on, allowed ŠKART to experiment freely, jumping from one medium to another, each time “slightly implementing our own skills”. It defines ŠKARTs understanding of how to make impact: actions as modest gestures, doing what you can, acknowledging your limitations.

In the beginning of 1990s, during the war in Yugoslavia, ŠKART joined “brave resistance groups” like Women in Black, B92 and the Center for Cultural Decontamination, offering their skills as graphic designers by producing images and paroles. Prota: “For me it was the only way to join the resistance and fight with my own skills”. These skills included raising awareness that war is more than people killing each other on battlefields. Prota: “War has so many different aspects. It is everywhere and it affects all levels of life. War destroys the environment, the infrastructure, the landscape. Animals are suffering, plants are suffering. We didn’t have power, media, or weapons. But through our graphic work we tried to make room for everything that was silenced because of the war. Survival Coupons, for instance, was a project in we made useless objects like ‘coupon for orgasm’, ‘coupon for revolution’, and ‘coupon for miracle’ – it was a gentle way to infuriate people about all the normal things the war took away from their lives. Your shit – your responsibility, another ‘action’, was the final anti-war slogan, produced and distributed in 1999/2000, nowadays still useful in different contexts.” 

After the war, ŠKART continued with implementing their “slight skills”, offering some help in the beginning but hoping for new projects to grow independent and self-developing. ŠKART has been involved in projects like Nonpractical Women, which combines creative writing with handicrafts of the older generation, Stubborn pensioners (“paper puppet poetry”) and Horkestar, a “self-regenerating” choir that twenty years later still produces its own songs, arrangements, and ‘music-actions’.

Although there is no fixed strategy behind these projects in a traditional sense – “it is about adjusting yourself to local unplanned conditions” – there is definitely a common denominator in where and how ŠKART hopes to impact: “Fighting for those who are just here with us, but in non-privileged positions. The lives that we don’t hear or see.”

Language, or poetry to be precise, plays an important role in making way for ‘the other’. As far as ŠKART is concerned, the language of politics has become bleak and sterile. But the apparent neutral language cannot hide the fact that we failed. We are destroying our planet, and there is an absence of fairness and care. Prota: “We need to force poetry onto the language of politics and even our daily conversations. We need to refresh the way that we look, talk, and make decisions. Poetry is a way of making room for otherness because only in poetry we can speak in the name of frogs, trees, water, and try to imagine their position and needs. And poetry has its own ‘words-in-progress’, always in the process of phrasing and re-phrasing. It is about finding ways to resist the easy paths already paved in our language.’’

Small, gentle gestures. Architecture of human relations, as co-founder Žole named it once. Embracing the fact that as humans we are flawed and determined to make mistakes. ŠKART is simply not in the business of offering strict solutions. So don’t push them for “bureaucratic proofs” and answers. Prota: “If I would have all the answers, I would not be in a chicken costume. I know what I don’t know. And at the same time, I don’t know what I know. Smart answers don’t mean anything if they are locked in their own safeness and selfishness. Let’s take risks. Let’s keep questioning our position, let’s keep trying something else and let’s see”.

More from ŠKART, not recent, not complete: http://skart.rs

ŠKART participates in the Collection Europe project with Bunker, Domino and NTIL

This is the fifth article in The Interview Series on Impact.