The Blackmarket thereby narrates the themes and conditions of the protagonists of hybrid identities who regularly cross national borders, traversing and leaving behind them territories, jobs, and lifestyles, bravely eluding the state’s will to order and locate them, or precisely fulfilling the demands of the internationalization of global labor markets as siteless, transitory existences. Stories are also told of the checkpoints and the resistance accompanying the culture of mobility when one is the wrong person in the wrong place.
A broad spectrum of patterns, figures, types, and phenomena of mobility finds entry in the narrated encyclopedia of this night:
The early forms of labor migration in the 1960s. The frequently traveling business citizens of the world with laptop, cell phone, and polyglot flexibility – the nomadic autistic mobility elite.
The current transmigration characterized by a free-floating state of living and working in several places at the same time. The temporary commuting traffic as a form of motion intended to ensure that a feeling of home is maintained. Population shifts and fleeing due to emergencies. The criminalization of migration. And of course the type of the artist as entrepreneurial individual who, in self-determined self-exploitation, appropriates commissions, formats, and contexts and reformats them in ever-new, inventive forms of organization of work, lifestyle, and social responsibility.
The Blackmarket is held in the framework of the festival BEYOND BELONGING – AUTOPUT AVRUPA. It collects its stories and theories along the Autoput, the old transit route through the former Yugoslavia, the most important transportation route from Central to Southeastern Europe, the mythical guest worker route for the first generation of migrant workers in Germany. But it also takes a few detours and deviations from the route to create a truly hallucinatory set of concepts of mobility.