This essay will address a series of issues and problems related to art practices based in and settled in Rog as a space (the facilities of the former Rog bicycle factory) as well as related to Rog as an institution (Autonomous factory Rog – ATR) between 2006 and 2016. In order to do so, it will be necessary to sketch a short history of this art production, as restricted to individual and collectives that consider themselves as artists, art groups, association of artists and/or art producers. Due to the lack of organized archives, this narrative will be making use of testimonies, interviews and dispersed documents as main sources and as such must be considered provisional and incomplete. It will, however, provide us some preliminary tools for studying art production in Rog in its own context, addressing it as a complex open process that has its own specificities and dynamics and it is at the same time inscribed in local and regional traditions. The relationship (or absence thereof) that artists working in Rog establish among themselves as a group, with local art institutions, with the rest of the community of ATR’s users and with ATR as a project in formal and conceptual terms, will help us toward a better understanding of ATR as a whole and the logic of its (self-)representation in different moments of its history. The first part of this essay deals with the issue of art production in squat culture and the general problems it usually poses. These problems will lie at the base of the rest of the analysis, which looks in its second part at some specificities of ATR in the context of Ljubljana and Slovenian culture that in a large way affect the way art is produced there. The historization of art practices in the context of ATR is the main focus of the third part of this text. I describe there some dynamics of Rog’s artistic life in this framework, and how structural aspects and material conditions of production determine and influence the kind of art that is and has been made in Rog. The sum of all these aspects will speak about how art practices of ATR function as very symptoms of more general cultural diseases, artistic conditions and social conflicts.
