Shared Visions

One of the main activities in Shared Visions is the Radionice event series. It is a series of multi-day workshops, designed to introduce the idea of an international artists’ cooperative to a wider circle of artists, discuss it with them, and through that both gather potential members and adapt the cooperative to their needs and existing practices. Most of our collective work has continued online. So far, each workshop opened a different door into the question of how artists can organise and produce together, and the online follow-ups became our testing ground for whether those doors lead anywhere.

After Radionica #1 in Belgrade, we held three online sessions to continue developing the ideas born there – from community gardens and digital support networks for artists, to cooperative media formats and public art interventions. The sessions started with enthusiasm but gradually revealed the limits of spontaneous workshop production. It proved difficult to develop ad hoc concepts into viable, long-term artistic practices without deeper preparation or connection to participants’ ongoing work. Many of the ideas existed in an “in-between space”, being conceptually rich, but detached from the concrete practices of participants. After the third meeting, we decided to pause this line of work, acknowledging that not every spark needs to become a structure.

In contrast, Radionica #2 in the Banja Luka Social Centre (BASOC) grew steadily through its online continuation. Four initial project ideas (a satirical fanzine, a local community studio for repurposing spaces, a printing studio for riso/screen/digital methods, and a “Problem Chain” platform that treats problems as value) were merged into one initiative: The “PROBLEM” Hyper-Fanzine. The group, with artists from Zagreb, Belgrade, and Banja Luka, has been meeting every Thursday at 17:00 (fourteen sessions so far!) to shape a collective publishing model to be launched via Patreon. We write the campaign text together, with Dina keeping the process on track and supporting copywriting; Vid leading creative writing and contributing to the concept (which originated in his team during the workshop); Dražen providing ongoing editorial feedback; and Ljupko and Luka handling layout and graphic materials + with Luka also developing the visual identity of the campaign; and Maja, Tijana, Noa, and Milan working on the Patreon setup and membership options. The plan to “make over” BASOC by immediately starting a full print workshop space has been postponed for a later time, when the local conditions in Banja Luka make it feasible. So at the end, the project functions as a practical test of collective publishing and small-scale economic cooperation across different contexts.

Workshops #3 and #4 also took place in the meantime, but they’ll be covered in a separate report(s) soon.

Building on these previous experiences, Radionica #5 in Novi Sad focused on the existing projects and programs that participants brought with them, using them as a base for experimenting with participatory funding. Artists representing five ongoing practices that are expected to become part of the cooperative’s activities (Club Podzemljica from Kragujevac, KC Radionica and Artist in the Local Community / Oaze 2.0 from Belgrade, Urban Sketchers Novi Sad, and Vishni Residency from Struga) used the quadratic voting method to allocate a shared seed fund. The session concluded with an agreement to meet again after a month, when each group would present a development plan that would outline how the received support would be used, and more importantly, how it could contribute to the practice becoming sustainable. The goal was to activate the seed money, to see how it could generate new collaborations, local engagements, and small-scale economies around each practice. The first follow-up meeting took place online, where participants shared drafts of their plans and discussed concrete steps for developing five supported projects. Each group is now working within its local context, exploring ways to connect artistic work with community needs and collective sustainability.

Throughout this series, one thing became clear to us: collaboration is not a moment but a process. Workshop participants and their collective practices are already a part of building the cooperative, i.e. their participation is already changing the way to think about it and its shared visions, which demands time, care and sustained attention.