Beneath a Starless Sky, As Dark and Thick as Ink: Revised and Expanded

Doplgenger
Beneath a Starless Sky, As Dark and Thick as Ink: Revised and Expanded
Three-channel audio-video installation
2022

In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles

Doplgenger’s intervention in the footage of Yugoslavian television that recorded the processes of Yugoslavian labour migration to Western European countries in the 1960s and the export of Yugoslavian technology to Non-Aligned Countries in the early 1970s. Different approaches to the media representation of these processes reveal various subtexts, enabling the understanding of the wider economical, historical and ideological context.

In the 1960s, Western European countries needed workers for their economic development, and encouraged temporary economic migration. In 1965, Yugoslavia reformed its economy and liberalised its migration policy, signing agreements on the employment of the Yugoslavian labour force with Austria, France and Sweden, and later with the Federal Republic of Germany (1968). The protagonists of these processes were designated as immigrants, foreign workers, economic migrants, gastarbeiters or workers “temporarily employed” abroad. In the early 1970s, due to the oil crisis and changes in global economic relations, new models of labour force migration towards Non-Aligned Countries appeared.

Support: Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.