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ZMUC Zemunski Mali Umetnički Centar
ZMUC Zemunski Mali Umetnićki Centar (Zemun Art Center) was founded in Belgrade, Serbia as an independent art institution by Vesna Tašić, journalist, Goran Denić, sculptor, Pavle Ćosić, linguist and Goran Lakićević, translator and editor at the Besna kobila (The Rabid Mare) publishing house, on 22nd December 2006, on Yugoslav People's Army day. ZMUC logo features a mini golf club and sickle overlapping each other.

Inspired by ideas of Ujamaa as a spontaneous and organically organized community it was borne out of a social necessity rather then ideology. According to the testimonies of its minor protagonists, ZMUC showcased all of its greatness and brilliance when it screened Deep Throat at an open space in the rear of the Šaran restaurant, located on the bank of the Danube in Zemun.

When applied to institutionalized art and culture, according to art historian Maja Ćirić, ZMUC is perceived as a place where ‘self-teaching and self-directed subjectification were a socio-existential exit strategy, a stage setting reminiscent of Altiser’s ideological interpellation’. ZMUC’s peculiar organisational arrangements, marked by spontaneity and by creating ad-hoc situations, are linked to its spatial identification and avant-garde legacy. The identification process triggered by ZMUC meant spontaneously interweaving the spirit of a place and the spirit of a community into existence, creating a space using resources available to it. ZMUC’s avant-garde legacy is seen in the fact that the collective could work beyond the constraints of the resources available to it. Indeed, for the ZMUC, resources were merely elements of a work of performance art taking place at the heart of a social event. It is also reflected in ZMUC’s breaking away from artistic autonomy and in it allowing transgressions that highlight the fragility of the social fabric to take place. In addition to having recognized and embraced self-irony as an approach to everyday life,

ZMUC’s path to becoming an institution was punctuated by spontaneity, casualness, and seriousness. When you transform activities you do with your friends or those you do out of a sense of solidarity, it means institutionalizing, not only spontaneity, openness, and freedom, but also that which manages to escape ideological interpellation. The space thus created became open to a variety of uses (where social, activist, and artistic ideas could take shape) and it further helped to vary the collective’s offering. This is to say that the ZMUC was designed as a place where relational aesthetics could manifest locally, a place where meaning should be invoked as a product of interaction between artist and observer, rather than as something handed down by a person in authority.

ZMUC’s events were displayed in exhibition format, the exhibitions served to highlight the relational character of social practice, the essence of which were minor gestures. ZMUC’s various protagonists are not a product of its own making. Instead, ZMUC was born of attempts to institutionalize a heterogeneous life-and-art community through events that etched themselves into a particular space. As a training ground for a variety of minor gestures, which might have, outside a context, remained unnoticed, the ZMUC generated a potential to transform relations and to drive alternative politics forwards. Glimpses of the breadth of ZMUC’s offering could be seen in events mainly marked by mobility and irony. What mobility and irony have in common is that they are porous and that they allow meaning to slip if you ask indiscreet questions:

1. Consultations
Consultations were quasi psychotherapy art sessions done by 3 Gs (three man with same first name - Goran, who identified themselves as α males) giving advice to all kind of problems when asked and knew all the answers to any kind of question. Consultations were going on with breaks since 2008 - 2011.