The Rabble’s Lifecraft: Institutional Tinkering and Popular Illegalisms

Article published in Croatian translation as ‘Životna Vještina Raje: Institucionalno Krparenje I Pučki Ilegalizmi’, Kritika, 5(1), 125-146. 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 the figure-it-out 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. Figure-it-out 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.