with credibility
capitalism and socialism. The territory of Rijeka-Idrija-Trieste forms of a triangle and constitutes an area of approximately 350 kilometers. In the past it played a paradigmatic role as a site for smuggling, with obscure or neglected narratives inconsis-tent with, yet existing parallel to the actual (official) historical moment in the territories of Croatia, Italy and Slovenia. As such, the location can serve as an example to promote broader understanding of the phenomenon.
All of the collaborating towns within the project shared a similar destiny in the past: they were under the sovereignty of the Habsburg Monarchy almost continually until the First World War.3In the long period from eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, their populations were essentially multinational. Another common attribute of partici-pating towns is their geographical position, which influenced their economical status: Trieste and Rijeka were port cities, while Idria, though a bit removed, played an important role over the three centuries.4
Sudden changes occurred after World War I with the decay of the Austro Hungarian Empire when designated towns close to newly drawn borders found themselves either isolated or divided.5The Kingdom of Italy and Yugoslavia (Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) established the Rapallo border (Treaty of Rapallo, November 12, 1920), which endangered multinationalism and multiculturalism in the area and en-couraged nationalist movements in this difficult period during the first half of the twentieth century. The border created ten-sion between different national groups empowered by the dic-tatorships that lead to World War II. As life become harder, friction between local people and the authorities also increas-ed. Moreover, resultant re-divisions of the continent caused by war forced people to develop alternative methods of survival.
Most of those smuggling did it for the sake of survival and not to build up surplus stock.
In the period following the Second World War, Europe faced a kind of ‘stable disunity’, or better put, the exclusivity of the Eastern and Western blocks induced the ongoing potential threat of World War III, embodied in the Iron Curtain pheno-menon.6
Motivated by this history and simultaneously confronted with new political circumstances within the wider region at the moment, the first public presentation held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka offerred a compre-hensive perspective, providing examples from a broad range of cases: contemporary human organ trafficking (Ana Smok-rović), illegal immigrants and human rights abuse in Europe today (Cristiano Berti, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Hassan Abdelghani, the Police Museum), live testimony (Robert Tás-nadi on Sandor Gojak, the owner of the Iron Curtain Museum
3 Continuity was interrupt-ed by short breaks; Rijeka became an autonomous city under the Hungarian Mo-narchy (1779), was occu-pied by Napoleon (1809 – 1814) and controversially
4 Rijeka and Trieste were both made free ports (1717 and 1719). Because of the mercury mine discovered there in the late fifteenth Century, Idrija’s importance gradually increased, so that in 1575 it became the pri-vate property of the Austrian Emperor; www.britannica.
com/EBchecked/topic/605 126/Trieste, www.britan nica.com/EBchecked/topic /503665/Rijeka.
5 Idrija was about fifteen km from the border. Rijeka ended up being split into Italian and Yugoslav parts, considered as a subject by the collective “Association Without Borders” from Rijeka for the project.
6 Yugoslavia was the most liberal country within the Eastern block, and spared the Iron Curtain as such.
near the former Austrian-Hungarian frontier, Hermann Ariel Scheige on the hidden relationship between drug dealing and the neo-anarchist movement in late sixties and seventies), the appropriation of identity (art collective Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Aleksandar Garbin) and the self-or-ganizing and black marketplace in the Balkans (Azra Akša-mija’s multidisciplinary project mirroring not only social is-sues in Bosnia but also the wider process of balkanization7 (Norris, 1999). A large percentage of visual art projects focus-ed on smuggling from World War II until the present, testify-ing to the activity as a creative approach that allowed people to compensate for lack or take advantage of limitations – con-fines, prohibitions, boundaries, walls (Balázs Beöthy, Tomislav Brajnović, Soho Fond, Victor López González, Dušan Radova-nović, Tanja Vujasinović).
Alongside the topics considered in Rijeka, the second public event, held in Idria, displayed rich archeological and historical research material, providing insight into a social reality mark-ed by the political and economic situation that arose with the above mentioned Rapallo border, 264 km long, extending from the Austro-Italian-Slovenian triple-entente border area in the Alps all the way to the Adriatic Sea in Rijeka. The official data speak about 5,214 milestones made of concrete, largely de-stroyed after the Second World War by local inhabitants, as an act of rejection and erasure of memory (Pavšič, 1999: 31-32). Numerous caverns and bunkers on both sides rendered the border visible and in the same time created an incentive to over-come it. Thus, Idrija and broader Idrijsko-Cerkljansko region has proved tempting for smugglers. This research was particularly pertinent, because the cultural heritage of immobility was revealed in barely known archival documents and neglected
7 Balkanization: “to divide a region or territory into small often hostile units”, The Oxford English Dictio-nary, London (1998), see also: http://www.the freedictionary.com/
Balkanisation.
[5] Lorenzo Cianchi and Michele Tajariol:
FalseBottom, installation detail, maps of smug-gling routes (Trieste territory), Rijeka, 2013.
archaeological remains; finally this material could bear wit-ness to the tightly interlocked coexistence of the people living along this border.8Aside from the roles Trieste played as a shopping pilgrimage city for former Yugoslavian citizens in socialist times and as a referent for smuggling, the last event of the project in Trieste approached the subject from the per-spectives of history and contemporary art, with an accent on the theoretical analysis of empirical examples. Thus the gen-eral aim was to show how artistic and theoretical interpreta-tions (the basis of our consideration of smuggling) encompas-sing both documentary and fictional approaches can contri-bute to a broader understanding of the phenomenon (Marco Cechet, Federico Constantini, Gia Edzgveradze, Michele Taja-riol and Lorenzo Cianchi).
Restraint vs. motivation
“The relation between control and escape is one of tem-poral difference: escape comes first. Unsettled bodies move, they become vagabonds who escape, they leave the stage of forced immobility; power reorganizes itself in order to respond to their exit.” (Papadopoulos, 2008: 77) This quotation extracted from sociological discourse could at first be criticized for pointing us in the wrong direction, but it actually serves us here by refining our comprehension of the relationship between prohibition and smuggling (in corre-spondence with the relationship between escape and control).
To paraphrase, the interrelationship is based on a temporal difference – first smuggling occurs and thereafter comes pro-hibition. But, once the restraint is there, smuggling does not stop, but persists; the efficiency of the prohibition motivates an effort to override it. We are used to thinking that the aim of smuggling is to struggle either for survival or for a profit, but it can also occur as a form of revolt. The peculiarity of the quo-tation under consideration lies in the unusual interprequo-tation of a situation that is reminiscent of the well-known chicken/
egg aporia. From this vantage point an unexpectedly simple answer appears to the question, how does smuggling begin?
Smuggling happens in the natural course or flow of things, from a natural inclination, one the regime retroactively sanc-tions. “Unsettled bodies move, they become vagabonds who escape…” Since it is impossible to imagine the smuggler pre-ceding the prohibition (being a conceptual and temporal par-adox), the unavoidable conclusion is that the smuggler was given a name and merits his/her status thanks to the prohibi-tion that apropos favored the taboo and supported its mar-ginality.
8 The first public activity of the project occured in Idria in the form of a two workshops mentored by the institute “Ad Pirum” (April 10-11, 2014), http://www.
smuggling.si/index.php/
news/175-novica-2-en#.
Without going deeper into the theme of prohibition, an impetus for the project was the evident yet unresolved dispro-portionate imbalance between smuggling as a method of sur-vival and its unquestionable illegality, revealing a state of con-flict between jurisprudence and praxis, restrictions and coun-ter-actions, law and life. Therefore the project relied on the interpretative impact of smuggling, oral history, and written sources, dissensions and concordances of relations between the official and unofficial, the penned and established versus the fluid, oral and emotional, in order to look into these mat-ters free of the burden of forming any moral judgment, dis-approval or disinclination, and finally taking the perspective that personal practices are not necessarily in line with any ide-ological frames.
Our inquiry concerns what might lie behind the stigma of the prohibited. The large response (a total of 101 entries) to our open call in the summer of 2012 supported the resonant uni-versality of the theme and its historical quality. The material that we received from the Police Museum, apart from serving as a daily update on current discoveries of contraband, en-abled a comparison of the art projects submitted with the clin-ical depiction of offenses in the newspaper’s crime section.9
Museum as safe haven
Taking into consideration the tempting nature of the unre-solvable dichotomy between permitted-forbidden, legitimate-illegitimate, moral-immoral, and using the benefits of the con-text of art, it was natural to break the silence around a social phenomenon that takes place in concealment, out of sight in everyday life. Without adjudicating or persecuting, we spot-lighted the unspoken phenomenon usually hidden in drawers, dossiers and behind bars. In this process a museological pres-entation was not an obstruction, on the contrary it helped to mediate the theme; not because the general tendency of muse-ology is inclined to favor historiography, but rather due to the possibility of placing things in their appropriate context. We applied the status of the museum as a site of presentation, a space open to public view and discussion, protected by the con-text of art. We also took care that the theme did not infringe upon the ‘plurality’ (multitude), that it be easily understand-able to everyone and therefore welcoming, even at the price of moral questionability, because it is exactly this plurality that commands credibility.10
For many, smuggling is reprehensible as base and worthy of prohibition. Thus, there is still one question to be resolved here: could smuggling ever be morally justifiable? Justification can be found in the paradigmatic example called ‘a noble lie’
9 The collaboration with the Police Museum was on the initiative of its senior curator Željko Jamičić.
10 Referring to Virno’s explanation of the multi-tude “which has to do with defending plural
(Jay, 2010: 51) that Plato brought forth with the aim of sus-pending the absolute prohibition of lies, introducing as a cri-teria circumstance and social responsibility. To paraphrase, smuggling could be exceptionally justified, in cases where it occurs modestly, out of necessity. Without being led by the idea of relativism, but rather taking in account the codex of the ethical-legal domain, the project to a certain extent aimed at the promotion of freedom of speech. “The ideal of parrhesia or truth-telling, was extolled as early as the fifth century BCE in the plays of Euripides and other texts.” (Foucault, 2001;
Martin, 2010).
More precisely, the project was challenged by the notion of free speech to speak about a subject denounced in moral terms as distrustful towards social order. Thus, it was neces-sary to suspend the prohibition against it and disregard the black and white optics of legal dictate. I read smuggling as a model of exceeding dichotomies like private-collective, hid-den-public, official-nonofficial, proven-unproven, true-false, in consideration of the lost-hidden facts behind the official truth, whether in the form of a disavowal or a forgotten bit of data, the material that was typically rejected as personal, or irrelevant or even nearly mythical and ultimately brushed aside as highly improbable. The project encouraged the reha-bilitation of meta-historical matters as part of our common cultural heritage. In that context the project anticipated a mo-tivational reward for the best-recorded interview of Smug-gling Anthologies, whose jury (comprised of the project’s cu-rators) awarded three artists (Nikola Ukić, Ivo Deković and Igor Kirin) for their documentary on Herman Ariel Scheige, who represents a singular example of a great smuggler who was led by the aim of remaining outside the system.11
11 “1999 Hermann Ariel Scheige was sentenced by District Court of Aachen to twelve years of imprison-ment. After being released in 2011, he came back to Düsseldorf... the whole thing was 2.5 tons of co-caine in 38 cases within 1.5 years.” (quotation from the documentary film Ariel).
He passed away suddenly in February 2014.
[6] Ivo Deković, Igor Kirin, Nikola Ukić:
Ariel, video, 2013.
Conclusion
Smuggling Anthologies elucidated the nature of smuggling not only through testimonials and the perspectives of artists, but also in the form of historical and academic research that pro-vided evidence of smuggling as a longstanding creative econ-omy. From these scientific researchers I learned the distinc-tion between a minor and major smuggler; the difference be-tween those who smuggled for the sake of survival (contra-bandists) and those for whom smuggling was a means of prof-iteering. (Žigon) Smuggling Anthologies not only provided some profiles of smuggling in the past, but also drew attention to its remote or indirect repercussions, emphasizing its signifi-cant and substantial contributions that underpinned stan-dards of living and socio-political changes, providing us with new perspectives on the understanding of human preferences.
I have corroborated the fact that smuggling develops chang-ing territories and markets with the dynamics of administra-tive and political changes.
The three editions of exhibitions, symposia and concomi-tant programs bear witness to the fact that smuggling took place at the intersection of the anonymous and the officially confirmed, by and large as singular acts. Even though smug-gling is referred to as a systemic phenomenon, individuals are on the run wherever it occurs, under cover.
[7] Alessio Bozzer: Blue and Black Jeans, video, 2014.
Production: Videoest and Trieste Contemporanea, Italy, 22'.
The section of the project prepared in Trieste by Trieste Con-temporanea had three manifestations: a conference in collab-oration with Comune di Trieste held on November 7, 2014 in the auditorium of Museum Revoltella – Gallery of Modern Art, an exhibition of contemporary art at Studio Tommaseo that ran from November 7th to December 17, 2014, and the production of a documentary film entitled Black and Blue Jeans.
Contributions to the Trieste conference, of which this vol-ume presents complete texts, prevailingly approached from a historical perspective with a focus on social history and the history of contemporary art, the latter of which was augmented by statements from the artists whose work was selected for the exhibition in Trieste.
Historical and sociological contributions (Božo Repe, Bo-jan Mitrović and Melita Richter) centred mainly on the region of the former Yugoslavia and on smuggling after World War II, when Trieste was the main hub not only between two coun-tries (Italy and Yugoslavia) but also two different political and economic systems (communism and capitalism). In this con-text, smuggling played an important role in the economy of many families. The authors examined the imaginative ways the local community devised in order to survive in these bor-der areas where petty smuggling took place, rather than the serious and lucrative trafficking committed by international criminal organizations, though it was heavily present also.
Historical material and documentation in the form of inter-views were analysed (thanks to the contributions of the video artists involved), together with a series of images provided by the Police Museum – Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Croatia.
The documentary film Blue and Black Jeans was realized thanks to historical research by Giampaolo Penco. Made for the project in co-production with the audio-visual production house Videoest Srl, the film focuses on the period of the sixties and seventies in Trieste – in which the city adapted to the de-mands of cross-border consumers and the Ponterosso market was born – and examines the history of the trade in jeans that