Bastards of Utopia

A remixable Documentary

ZAGREB

A city is more than a backdrop for the lives of its inhabitants. Zagreb’s roads, billboards, transit systems, and markets offer glimpses of a changing urban landscape. Read More

Anarchist daily life frequently intersects with the emerging consumer landscape of hypermarkets.  Activists engage the world around them in a transnational manner, with styles, tactics, and organizing methods borrowed from around the world.  Cunningham (2000) suggests globalization is a process of identity construction in which individuals, using the rhetorical and symbolic resources available to them, come to constitute their actions and social worlds as global.

But these activists also live their politics  within a specific Croatian context.  What’s compelling about their activism (the way they physically engage the urban landscape around them) is that it tells a story from below of the transition to capitalism in Zagreb and Croatia more broadly…in their actions you get a portrait of just how much and how quickly life has changed in so few years.  After the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, perhaps nowhere else on earth was the triumphalism of neoliberalism’s market orthodoxy more strident than in Eastern Europe.

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Wheels

Wheels
High-rises, parks, and bridges shot from a moving vehicle.

Vegetable Central

Vegetable Central
At Zagreb’s central market, vendors rise at dawn to set up fresh produce in their stalls.

Rails

Rails
Trams and funiculars crisscross Zagreb.

Heroes and Criminals

Heroes and Criminals
Banners, graffiti, and the names of public places write the politics of the streets in Zagreb.

Big Box Stores Grow Like Mushrooms

Big Box Stores Grow Like Mushrooms
There’s been an explosion of multi-national chain stores in Zagreb throughout the last decade.  With them come billboards, neon signs, and sprawling parking lots.

Antler Salesman

Antler Salesman
At Hrelic, an expansive flea market on the outskirts of the city, vendors sell second-hand goods of all kinds.