Mesh of Relations

Certain strategies and tactics emerge as creative counterpoints integral to particular communities’ survival in grey and black economies, postwar economies, cities where state or municipal infrastructures have collapsed to the point of nonusability, and places that are systematically exclusionary of certain ethnicities and socioeconomic groups.

Many such tactics may be used in less urgent contexts, within more day-to-day logics of getting by. But what happens when one dislocates these tactics from the streets to the realm of contemporary art?

Vlatka Horvat’s playful invitation calls for artists living outside their home countries to share artworks in exchange for her own. These artworks are ferried across a network of participants by hand. Contributions from so-called “foreigners” find a home in Croatia’s national pavilion, while Vlatka’s body of work is intentionally distributed across multiple countries and time zones far beyond Venice. The pavilion puts on display not only the objects it contains but also processes of exchange and transfer that veer from the standards of the most commercialised zone of the art market (i.e., professional art handling and logistics firms and high-value object insurance). That this dispersal is coordinated for an exhibition context—a context that typically centralises artist and their own work—is exemplary of Vlatka’s practice at large.

To pass something from hand to hand in an age of barcoded packaging, online ordering, and Amazon lockers at petrol stations is to wilfully swim against the tide of smooth, semiautomated, monitored and surveilled distribution. I say “semiautomated” here only to recognise efforts of the human Deliveroo driver or Uber courier. That is not to say these individuals are outside of the computerised. They are in the program but outside the software, albeit subject to its protocols. In other words, they give up their agency for prescribed periods of times (i.e., their shifts) to function in certain mandated ways.

The techno-solutionist city aspires to be a smart phone, or if it can’t become a phone, then at least an Apple Park campus. Smoothness is the presiding quality of the fantasy of the “smart” future city: a fantasy of objects and people in automated Teslas circulating with the dreamy ease of a finger gliding across the glass of a touchscreen.

At the same time, the movement of smaller artworks (works that cannot be read as such at customs and border control because of the everydayness of their constituent parts, or that can be believably labelled as something else considered to be of less value) through such hand-to-hand exchanges has long been part of the informal circulation of work for artists without the financial means to circulate them otherwise. Like other forms of unpaid or low-paid labour (including self-exploitation) in the art world, these countermanoeuvres are a product of the financial unsustainability of many artists’ practices. Perversely, such countermanoeuvres in turn are what allow many institutions to be sustainable, or at least enhance their capacity to function.

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While new cities and corporate districts are being constructed with an eye toward this frictionless phantasia, there are also cities that defy it and specific communities that are excluded from its promises. In his 2004 essay “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” the urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone writes of cities that are “characterised by incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used. These intersections, particularly in the last two decades, have depended on the ability of residents to engage complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices. These conjunctions become an infrastructure—a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city.” [i] In this context, he goes on to outline the notion of “people-as-infrastructure”: “which emphasises economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life.” Although Simone’s reference point is the Johannesburg of twenty years ago, we can draw parallels between his description of these intercity logistics (rather than the demographics and geography) and his articulation of people-as-infrastructure and the circuits animated by Vlatka’s artwork: not the discrete artworks being passed around by hand, but the mesh of relations itself. This exhibition context enables us to abstract and scrutinize the notion of people-as-infrastructure, decoupled from questions of livelihood.

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Demodernisation is typically theorised as happening in specific places: say, across industrial towns in the post-Soviet landscape or among the collapsed factories and their interdependent workforces in cities like Detroit. It is the violent reaction to extractive growth elsewhere. There is a point where the hand-to-hand distribution tactics used by groups navigating the demodernised urban spaces across Europe begins to mirror the tactics of the informal socioeconomic cityscapes of Havana (I’m thinking here of el paquete semanal, Cuba’s offline digital-media-circulation system, based on in-person file sharing, which was introduced to me by Nestor Siré) or the Johannesburg that Simone describes. At the same time, there are many kinds of precariat, and they shouldn’t be confused. While the displaced artist can experience conditions of making do similar to those of an unregistered migrant worker, they can also potentially have different levels of agency and access, even within the same cities.

By the Means at Hand shares conceptual space with Feral Trade, 2003–, an informal trade network initiated by artist and economist Kate Rich. Whereas this project initially focused on the movement of consumable goods distributed based on the multiple addresses of those in this network, By the Means at Hand has the Croatian Pavilion function as a centralising, a kind of temporary port city within the historic port city that is Venice. In this context, the functionality of a project like Feral Trade is replaced with a set of ludic exchanges and as yet unknown outcomes. This brings to light the value of indirectness. We are being asked to deprioritise and efficiency so as to be open to other values that come with taking the long route home. This can extend to the structure of a text.

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Many years ago, a friend made a small maquette for me, about the size of a cake. Rushing to leave a taxi, I left this maquette in the boot of the car. The taxi circulated the artwork around the city for several hours. Eventually, I was able to contact the taxi controller, who contacted the driver, and the work was returned. Through this small mishap, an adventure had been visited on the life of this object to which I will never be privy. This, of course, does not change the formal qualities of the sculpture, but it did affect how I felt about some experience of the object had been locked away from me, kept to itself. By the Means at Hand pries open our imagination around an object’s biography before its arrival to us. This is all the more poetic in the age of the trackable or self-tracking object, of objects without privacy.

Vlatka Horvat instigates or collectively conjures an artwork through inconvenient means. Inconvenience is a necessary by-product of degrowth; it urges one to find a different value in the difficulty and duration of processes, rather than consuming energy and producing waste unthinkingly. By the Means at Hand constitutes itself slowly, as a plurality of movements, of hands, of exchanges, of cities, of friendships that coconstitute the eventual material outcomes, objects laden with stories of their own arrival. This choreography of many hands reminds us of the wonder contained in the simplest of questions: How did these particular things come to be side by side in this room? Vlatka’s work gifts visuality to a set of clandestine or less observable actions and networks. Here materials are gathered by refusing the shortest distance between two points. By the Means at Hand incorporates nonlinearity, cultivates happenstance, rejects totalising and courts the unpredictable… What could go wrong?

[i] AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16, no. 3 (2004): 407-8.

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer living on the UK inland waterways. He is currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works. Recent group exhibitions include “Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous” in Amsterdam; “Chronic Hunger, Chronic Desire” in Timișoara, Romania; and “Storm Warning: What does climate change mean for coastal communities?” at Focal Point / Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Penzance, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include “Dolphin Head Mountain” at the Horniman Museum in London; “Mark The Spark” at Nieuwe Vide project space in Haarlem, Netherlands; and “Experiments with Everyday Objects” at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK. Harun is currently co-developing community gardens in Merseyside for Bootle Library and Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Arts Catalyst research project, “Emergent Ecologies.”