Internationale, 44 days

Every day at noon we placed a speaker into an open window sill directed towards the exterior of the Slovenian government across the street. In a manner of a civil defense siren tone we loudly played a 90-second sound of Internationale - the anthem of mobility in times of immobility. The action paralleld with Federico Fellini's Amarcord, where in 1930s Italy a gramophone wired on the town church campanile, plays a recording of the Internationale, but it is soon shot down by Fascists.

In addition, the Internationale sound caused two dog companions and a cat living in our household to react too. They would get aroused by the action and jump on a window sill while the anthem was being played. In this effect they evoked a correlation to the Russian avant-garde that compares proletarians to animals as important contributors to the production of freedom.

The activity started 19th March 2020, when only three days after enforcing a strict lockdown, the Slovenian government announced they raised salaries for ministers and state secretaries 30%, while any solutions of solidarity for all the rest of the civil society have not been solved at all. Our 44 day lasting activity ended 1st May, on a Labour Day – celebrated each year as a national holiday of labourers and working classes. In Slovenia this celebration is usually accompanied by the activities such as setting of maypole, picnics or gatherings with family and friends as well as trips in nature. This year instead, thousands of people broke out of lockdown to cycle through Ljubljana and protest against the government for using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretense to restrict freedoms, attempting to increase police powers, inflame hatred against migrants, and making personal attacks on civil society, as well as inserting clauses into emergency legislation to block NGOs from consultations about construction projects that severely compromise nature.

In this respect we were further drawn by the whole situation to be inspired by Oxana Timofeeva's book titled History of Animals: A Philosophy (2018), where she writes the following: ... the animal kingdom serves as a kind of model of a society that should be transformed. It is not a matter of the predominance and superiority of one species over another, but a matter of taking everything into account. In so far as inequality between species remains untouched, the equality of people, too, can never be achieved.

In the second half of March, the Confederation of Museums L'internationale, as part of the Artists in Quarantine project, invited about a dozen international artists to establish their vision of current living and working conditions through works of art. Smrekar decided to address the Slovenian artist's view with the work she and her collaborators were creating and documenting in every day. From one of the resulting video documentations, Smrekar created a video titled Internationale, Day 4. The video has been published on the L'internationale and its affiliated members websites; seven European institutions in the field of modern and contemporary art: Modern Galleries (MG + MSUM, Ljubljana); Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), whose online platform has counted more than 15,000 video views of Internationale, Day 4; MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp (MHKA, Antwerp, Belgium); Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, The Netherlands).