THE WAY PEOPLE LIVE / KAKO ŽIVI NAROD

Public Reading/Performance
Maksimir Park, Zagreb February 14th, 2010

On Sunday, February 14, 2010 at noon in Zagreb’s Maksimir Park, Kristina Leko read excerpts from the book “The Way People Live – Life in Passive (Undeveloped) Regions” written by Rudolf Bićanić in 1936. The intention was to highlight parallels between the present-day socioeconomics and those from some 80 years ago when Croatian peasantry was indebted to such an extent that a moratorium on their debts had to be enforced in 1929.

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While the air temperature hovered at -12°C, the reading lasted for 70 minutes, and I went through three book-chapters dedicated to the regional finances and banking in the 1920s and 1930s: “Peasants’ loans and debts”, "Trade and bank loans" and "Peasants on debt relief and regulation of peasant loans". The reading attracted some invited but mostly accidental audiences. Back then, in 2010 and some years prior, rumors were going around about people burdened with debts committing suicide. Starting in 2004 foreign banks defrauded and indebted 100.000 Croatian households with so called Swiss franc mortgages, which were ruled as illegitimate and illegal by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2019 as they were built upon currency speculation. The same fraud took place systematically in all Eastern European and Balkan countries.

Rudolf Bićanić (1905-1968) was a Croatian economist, demographer, economic historian, rural sociologist, politician and university professor. His above-mentioned groundbreaking study helped establish social sciences in the South Slavic region. For his progressive thinking and critical writings on the national economy, he was imprisoned from 1933 until the end of 1936. After being released, he traveled researching throughout the passive (undeveloped) regions of the Croatian and Bosnian highlands and created a very detailed record of local socioeconomics. Bićanić believed that simple people themselves were able to trace causes and roots of their misery as well as to envision solutions for their problems, and therefore outlined several concepts for national and regional economic programs. One of them, related to the peasants’ clothing and similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s khadi, was directed against imports of low-quality textile from western European countries flooding local markets as a profitable replacement for high-quality wool exported to the same countries. Bićanić had been politically instrumental in assisting peasants in their self-organizing for decades which then influenced his sociopolitical views. His work feeds into a legacy of demystification of economic theories.

Just several days before the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis, I happened to stage my first public reading of Bićanić’s texts, which was triggered and inspired by rumors and reports of suicides committed by small entrepreneurs. Aside from the book-chapters related to loans and debts, I also read the chapters: “The question of the peasant dress”, and “The peasant dress from the point of view of the national economy”.

RELATED
blok.hr – Money-Project

CREDITS
The video of the performance was shown later in the Kraljevic Gallery in Zagreb within the exhibition “Money”. Curator: Vesna Vuković. Event production and logistics: BLOK – Local Base for Culture Refreshment, www.blok.hr. Photographs: David Smithson.

GENRE&FORMATS
Project: public reading, performance. Artwork/s and artifacts: video documentation, installation.