Hacking Liquid Tree City

Working on: Hacking Visibility

Intro: Air pollution is known to be a problem that plagues many metropolitan areas around the world, but did you know that cities in Eastern Europe, especially in the Balkans, top the list of the most polluted places in the world? According to activists, air pollution in the urban centers of the Balkans is so bad that you can see it, smell it, and even taste it, especially in the fall and winter. A report on air pollution in the Western Balkans in 2020, for example, confirms the problem, highlighting high emissions of harmful particles that often exceed EU and national limits. But who really cares about this outside a region that is invisibilized and silenced by “core Europe”? If the region is to receive attention, it should be for something negative: the racialized and orientalized Other (Maria Todorova, 1997) against which the normative order of the West should define itself.

Our mission

In the Balkans, as in many other places around the world, the green transition manifests itself as a rhetorical cover for the brutal extraction of minerals and other raw materials, as well as other resources and labor. Based on the initiative of Based on the ZBOR initiative, the meeting and platform for united Balkan resistance and work (Združeni balkanski otpor i rad), which was founded at the Allied Grounds conference of the Berliner Gazette in 2023, we committed ourselves to expand the idea and reality of ZBOR by organizing one or more screenings of films on extractivism, starting in Germany, and background talks. We aim to bridge the gaps between the different ends of the supply chain of extracted minerals and resources and build solidarities around exploitation and exclusion in the present and the future.

Hacking the Liquid Tree City

What is a “Liquid Tree”? It is a perfidious tool and symbol of “green” capitalism in Belgrade, where trees are cut down and replaced by liquid trees: Boxes of water and microalgae, urban photobioreactors to combat greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality. We interpreted the liquid tree as a metaphor. Its rootlessness, destructiveness of nature, and the tyranny of technological solutions that in reality solve nothing but create problems, we unpacked as the ideology of green transition. In the Balkans, as in many other places around the world, the green transition manifests itself as a rhetorical cover-up for the brutal extraction of minerals and other raw materials, as well as other resources and labor. The devastation is shifted away from the core capitalist countries and out of sight.

The Balkans is one of many extractivist frontiers created by the agendas of the so-called green transition, where this cost shift targets already struggling societies whose mental and physical resources have been depleted by war and previous transition over the past decades. Already impoverished, these societies are likely to be drained of people and livelihoods by this latest wave of destruction.

We will prepare a program package that will clear the rights for public screening of the films and briefly describe the purpose and content of the film program. With this package, we will approach one or more groups who might want to help us organize a screening and discussion, initially with a focus on Germany. It can be one event, but later it can be several, and the screenings can be geographically distributed. We aim to organize the first one for the (late) spring of 2025.

In order to build alliances and extend the reach of this struggle and discussion, we want to prepare a week of background talks and meetings with people from social movements, NGOs, political parties, trade unions, research institutes, media, etc., to take place before the first screening. We would like these potential allies to be present at the screening(s) or to be involved and supportive in any other way they see fit.

If you know of locations, groups, organizations, or individuals who might be willing to help organize a screening, or know of people to contact for background conversations and invitations, contact the ZBOR team via Instagram: @ZBOR_2024 or email: zbor@systemli.org

Credits

The ‘Hacking Liquid Tree City’ workshop was facilitated by Holger Kral. Particpants were: Zoë Aiano, Dražen Crnomat, Nina Djukanović, Andrew Gilbert, Jelena Gugić, Iskra Krstić, Svjetlana Nedimović, Zoran Pantelic, Christin Stühlen, Norma Tiedemann

This project was conceived at BG | berlinergazette.de’s annual conference 2024 entitled KIN CITY.

All text and images: Creative Commons License 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0). All images were taken at the KIN CITY conference.