Nottingham Contemporary

Workers from the Occupied Factory and Worker’s University in Tuzla in conversation with Nottingham’s Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

In 2015 workers at the DITA Factory in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, occupied and took control of a factory inactive due to bankruptcy and corruption. Drawing from the force of the plenums (public encounters for resisting state corruption held in Tuzla’s national gallery) workers have the factory up and running and are joined by activists, artists and researchers in founding a Worker’s University within the factory walls. How do the ideals of self-managed socialism find themselves in recent movements which contest the global webs of debt, corruption and neo-liberalisation on a global scale? How do these relate to histories of worker struggle in the Midlands and how they are being reconfigured, particularly when they are increasingly reliant on the so-called ‘knowledge economy’?