Paper short abstract:

This paper embarks on discussing the ruins of socialist industrial modernization and the immanent project of postindustrial capitalism as they shape the everyday lives and livelihoods of industrial workers employed by Gredelj, once the biggest Croatian rolling stock company located in Zagreb.

Paper long abstract:

To think of the ordinary as of impasse shaped by crisis; a zone of convergence of many histories that endangers the good life, is to think of our present, wrote Lauren Berland in Cruel Optimism (2011). This paper embarks on discussing ruins of socialist industrial modernization and the immanent project of postindustrial capitalism as they shape the everyday lives and livelihoods of industrial workers employed by Gredelj, once the biggest Croatian rolling stock company located in Zagreb. Our research follows the release of the hybrid feature film titled What’s to be done? (2023) directed by Croatian filmmaker Goran Dević, and made in collaboration with redundant workers of the Gredelj railway factory. Along the lines of Navaro-Yashin’s affective geographies (2012), we aim at discussing the notion of affective artscapes as new zones of knowledge and affect production. We will show in which ways they enable engagement with the concepts of work, working wo/man, and class, as well as their postindustrial undoing. The narrations of industrial ruinscapes that inform affective artscapes of the film What’s to be done are seen as a vehicle to reach and discuss ever-diminishing ideals of decent work and good life. Our ethnographic material is based on participation in the 10-year film-making project and anthropological consultancy during its making. It stems from narratives collected with the protagonists on the occasion of experimental film screening.