+++
title = "Figure It Out: The Art of Living through Systems Failure"
has_bonfires = ["rijeka.md", "mosorin.md", "berlin.md", "orleans.md", "belacrkva.md", "everywhere.md"]
+++

# Introduction

Figure it Out (FIO) is an artistic and research project engaging practices and phenomena of coping, tinkering, making-do, and circumventing exclusions that are developed by marginalized, underserved, discriminated, and vulnerable people. Gendered, racialized, bordered, disabled, and exploited, these constituencies are often forced to develop tools and strategies that are considered unacceptable to the institutions of the system. Sometimes these tools and strategies are forged out of necessity, of survival, sometimes to exercise rights or to secure access to basic services available to those deemed more “deserving”. Other times, these coping mechanisms reclaim rest, beauty, or pleasure as part of a dignified life. What FIO practices and phenomena have in common is that they are not about scamming peers or those more vulnerable than them. Instead, they are practices that take issue with formalized, normative forms of oppression (state, welfare institutions, corporations, workplace, credit, housing, utilities etc.) that have sets of rules and conditions of access that specific populations or individuals cannot meet. They are actions directed at the conditions that produce and reproduce systemic violence and which reformist approaches aim to fix in the long run. Fio practices instead inhabit different temporalities from the perspective of those who cannot and will not wait. In their urgency, they open up spaces where different ethical practices can emerge, where knowledges are passed on in ways that complicate claims to a universal and transparent public sphere.
The production of the FIO project has involved different yet interconnected research and creative processes carried out by a constellation of collaborators (artists, researchers, activists) working across media, resulting in newly commissioned art projects (including by RYBN.ORG; !Mediengruppe Bitnik, and Škart), two exhibitions, a radio festival, two symposia, five bonfire events, and a web platform/publication inclusive of interviews, commissioned texts and a dedicated library of resources. Partner organizations in these productions are Drugo More (Croatia), Kiosk (Belgrade, Serbia), Labomedia (Orléans, France), Unfinished Foundation (Malta), and Vektor (Athens, Greece). 

The following text will focus on contextualizing the subject matter in historical terms and introduce one specific project among the many that compose FIO, namely the process of research-creation that focuses on storytelling. 

## Cheating, Lying, Stealing

The FIO project begins with tales of individuals or entire communities outwitting the system. By "system," we mean any administrative structure or organization that sets and upholds the "rules of the game". These rules are composed of numerous "small rules," which are specific conditions we must fulfill to participate in the game. We all recognize this experience: for example, to rent a house or cross a border we need proof of identity, which usually requires various types of evidence. Similar conditions apply to receiving social services, refugee status, or to enroll in public schools or colleges. These prerequisites can be political, economic, demographic, or social. When we fail to meet some of these conditions, we face a choice: either give up or use our ingenuity. Sociologist Robert K. Merton’s strain theory—which became the basis of criminal sociology in the 1950s and 1960s—described innovation as accepting socio-cultural goals (like citizenship) but finding alternative ways to achieve them when regular processes fail. Innovation, in this context, involves bending the rules, employing charm, deceit, forgery, hacking, or other means considered illegal, criminal, or at least immoral.[^1] According to Merton, while excluded groups must innovate to participate, the system often views their innovations as scams.

But what if we start from the idea that the game itself is rigged? Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann has shown that since the 1970s mechanisms for single mothers in America to access social support have been set up as a nearly impossible game. The rules prohibited them from working or having a partner’s support, while the aid they received was insufficient for survival. As a result, many women had to cheat the system, such as by hiding their employment. Is this a scam or a survival strategy? Such borderline cases reappear over and over again across times and geographies. As political theorist Kathi Weeks put it recently, the contemporary ubiquitous reliance on minor forms of illegalism hints to a becoming lumpenproletariat of vast segments of society, calling for a re-conceptualization of this class as one of the major uncompleted projects inherited from Marxist and anarchist debates of the previous century.

Over the past two decades, the weight of what David Graeber called “total bureaucratization,” a tangled web of surveillance, punishment, and neglect, has only grown heavier. This bureaucratic machinery was already reconfiguring capitalist societies when Fourierist and anarchist movements at the turn of the last century took notice. Later, it seeped into the critiques of autonomists, Maoists, Black Panthers, and public intellectuals like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, as they all took aim at the insidiousness of institutionalized production of delinquency.

Thus, deceiving an unjust or biased system can be justified. In the FIO project, we wanted to focus on the ingenuity of socially excluded groups trying to survive. No one who is not in serious economic need would bother buying broken light bulbs at a flea market to swap them out with functioning ones at their workplace, to take those home instead, as some urban poor do. These practices arise from necessity. We must ask ourselves what kind of society creates a market for broken light bulbs or forces single mothers into impossible situations—without questioning the morality of their "cheats."

These scenarios blur the line between personal gain and survival strategies. Historically, this distinction was made by officials in administrative offices—immigration officers, social workers, bank clerks, insurance employees, state institutions, and municipal offices. The judgment of these street-level bureaucrats, based on context, experience, political views and empathy, differentiated fraud from survival. As digitalization and automation transfer ever more decision-making power to algorithms, this bureaucratic boundary becomes less permeable for those struggling to participate in social processes. The digital realm thus became a crucial topic within the FIO project because it interacts with idiosyncratic life circumstances and automated procedures, leading to new forms of knowledges and subcultures aimed at overcoming digital governance’s unintended consequences. For example, Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud’s Picidae web application helps users bypass Chinese internet censorship by transforming websites into digital pictures. Conversely, activists repurpose surveillance technology to expose illicit “push-backs” of asylum seekers when authorities violate prescribed procedures. The FIO project focuses on sousveillance practices and little scams that are developing in response to algorithmic decision-making models that reproduce or exacerbate existing exclusions and injustices. People adapt to these models by deceiving them.

## Storytelling

## Bonfires as methodology

## Ethics of refusal 


[^1]: Merton, Robert K. “Social Structure and Anomie.” In Social Theory and Social Structure, edited by Robert K. Merton, 185–214. New York: The Free Press, 1957.

