Smuggling

Recently, I’ve remembered a promise to my grandfather, the photographer and cameraman Antonio Perajica, that I would look after his films. All I could remember, sixteen years after his death, was that one of the film reels was brought to the Croatian city of Rijeka by Turi Quattrocchi, an Italian photographer, immediately after the Trieste Front.¹ Or, seen from the other point of view, after the Occupation of Trieste. I found nine 16mm films, all recorded in Tito’s First Proletarian Brigade. But there was something else about this footage, something beyond watching material never seen before, stored for over fifty years and featuring strange scenes such as the meeting of Tito with Bishop Alojzije Stepinac. It was not the footage itself, but the history that was »smuggled«.² No traces of such a meeting were left behind. At precisely the time I first saw this material, almost the same war, in precisely the same location, was happening again.

Partisan massacres discovered not long ago in Slovenia, as well as Croatian and Slovenian territorial disputes, have suddenly resurrected the argument that Trieste was »deliberated« by Croatian partisans, and within only a couple of days the idea of Trieste as a lively and splendid city would rise again. Trieste was the city which held a major street-market for the South-Communist countries at the mythical place of Ponte Rosso. If the concept of »the Other« was visible anywhere, it was particularly here, in a city conquered by Yugoslav Army, whose economy was pretty much reliant on socialist demand. The situation now is quite different, not only for the city of Trieste, being colonised by Chinese shops, but also in all post-socialist countries, where the global market has spread. Only drug and cigarette smugglers, as well as human traffickers, still cross these borders illegally.

Yet, in the same places, there is still a sad echo of the old image of the smuggler, one that crosses the border illegally, bringing not only contraband, but life’s necessities. During the period of the extremist state rule, when the two states in question were of completely different economic – and thus political – organization, a utopian idea was preserved of sailors as smugglers, bringing knowledge. Apart from major goods such as playing cards for »briškula« and »trešeta«, and, later on, espadrilles, chewing gum, or jeans, they were importing novelties forming a hybrid but autonomous culture of an imagined place on the other side of the border. Their commercials, stolen with satellite antennas, being decoded in a different way, were changing society.³

Chains of smugglers were connecting, from border to border, countries that are now known as separate entities. Starting in Slovenia and Croatia, across Bosnia and Serbia, deep into Romania and beyond, they carried »capitalist« goods – usually clothes such as jeans, worn one on top of another.⁴ Some of these smugglers appeared as heroes in popular culture, though in different versions: »Sir Oliver« in the »Alan Ford« comic, for example, was a British character selling a range of watches with suspicious origins, while Kusturica’s »Once there was a Country« (1996) included a gun smuggler, and even »White Cat – Black Cat« (2005) featured a gas smuggler.

[b]The Smuggler in cultural history[/b]
But are smugglers only gypsies, ill-educated Barbarians? History, especially art history, has proven not. One such myth relates to the founding of the New York MoMA by Alfred Barr, who concealed European masterpieces in an umbrella in order to smuggle them into the USA, whose territory remained uninvaded during the last World War.⁵ The second, more contemporary example is of Marino Cettina, a lonely gallerist who ran the famous Dante gallery in the small city of Umag, which published its shows in magazines such as »FlashArt«. Cettina smuggled many artworks, bypassing socialist controls, to major art shows and even art fairs such as ARCO.⁶

But the phenomenon goes further still: A smuggler brought a monograph on American minimalism across the Yugoslav border, which affected the painting of the »Peristyle in Red« (Split, 1968). Sadly, drugs were also smuggled, which led to the death of one of the artists and to another becoming criminalised as a drug dealer.⁷

Newspapers have claimed recently that smugglers are now part of the political elite of ex-Yugoslavian countries accusing both Serbian and Montenegrin presidents of smuggling tobacco, and suspecting a Croatian minister of smuggling pornography.⁸ Clearly, it seems that smugglers have legalized their businesses as soon as the market for their goods became legal. Yet some places still remain as secret lairs for smugglers. We know of some: Behind Sisley Xaffa’s sculpture in Venice is a hole through which we can enter the building, bypassing the official entrance. Yet in art, this still appears as a strategy less related to profit, more a method of survival.

The »Smuggling Anthologies« project, a co-production between Trieste Contemporanea (Italy), the Labin Museum (Croatia) and the Gallery of Piran (Slovenia), connects three countries to provide a common basis for the analysis of smugglers’ secret crossing places. The strange history of Trieste, which was occupied by the Yugoslav army in order to later become the »dream capital«, is closely connected with the history of the bay of Piran, which represents a hurdle for the Croatian entry into the EU. Despite political separation (former capitalist – socialist, now EU – non-EU), these territories are connected with smuggler tunnels, narratives and passages, with the smugglers themselves (švercer, contrabbando) as heroic figures in certain historical periods.

The project aims at positive research on smuggling as »bringers of the message«, as a method of holding and passing it on where the environment prohibits it, whether through censorship, taxation or other means. In times of recession this kind of reversal is particularly important, especially in the art world. It becomes particularly visible in Venice, at the Biennale, where in the past many artists – Tanja Ostojic, Sisley Xhafa and others – have »smuggled« work into the official selection. The theme of this year’s Biennale, »Swimming Cities«, brings together 25 artists from the USA, who will construct three sculptures using scrap material found on the Slovenian coast, with the intention of floating them across to Venice for the Biennale opening.