Having met Zelimir Zilnik for the first time two years ago, Sebastian Lasinger and Alexander Vojvoda return to the Crossing Europe Film Festival on the occasion of the first screening in Austria of his new film “The old school of capitalism”.
In the interview Zilnik talks about his new film, a mixture of documentary and fiction, which traces back the current Serbian workers’ protest to the first wave of workers’ revolts to hit Serbia since the advent of capitalism.
The Serbian filmmaker explains how he got involved in the workers’ protest movement and reflects on the relationship between political activism and intellectual discourse as well as the current post-socialist situation in Ex-Yugoslavia.
Zilnik concentrates on the crucial relationship between intellectuals and workers which gives the movement an essential force. He also highlights the surprising revitalisation of the socialist idea of workers’ self management and their selfawareness, putting in question a construction of identities solely based on nationalistic ideas.
The 3rd Subversive Film Festival whose theme this year explores”Socialism”, will be held from1 to 25 May in Zagreb. Apart from a rich film, theoretical and artistic programme, there will also be a large international conference. The conference will be held in the Europa Cinema from 3 to 7 May entitled “The crash of neo-liberalism and the idea of socialism today”, whose directors are Slavoj Žižek and Srećko Horvat.
Apart from Žižek, numerous intellectuals have confirmed their attendance such as Gianni Vattimo, Samir Amin, Michail Ryklin, G. M. Tamas, Michael Lebowitz and others. Noam Chomsky and Michael Hardt will participate via video-link.
Sebastian Lasinger will attend the conference and will conduct various interviews on new real utopia, the future potential of alternative societal and economic concepts with special regard to socio-economic transformations in former Yugoslavia and new worker protest movements in Serbia.
Lecture, Q/A:23 April, 17.00 – 19.00 pm Renaming: Identity Overwriting or Potential Agency by Suzana Milevska
Participating artists: Magnus Bärtås | Zdenko Bužek | Liljana Gjuzelova | Igor GrubiC | Dejan Habicht/Tanja LažetiC | Kalle Hamm | Albert Heta | Sasha Huber | Hristina Ivanoska | Sanja IvekoviC | MONUMENT Group | Oliver MusoviK | Dan Perjovschi | Lia Perjovschi | Tadej PogaCar | Dejan SpasoviK | Sašo StanojkoviK | Alexander Vaindorf | Žaneta Vangeli
The project The Renaming Machine looks at the complex entanglements involved in the political and cultural processes of renaming. Its main concept reflects the crucial need to question the way these processes have influenced the construction and destabilization of the memory of national, cultural and personal identities in the former Yugoslavia and South-Eastern Europe over the past two decades. The project examines various artistic and cultural phenomena, strategies and research formats of work associated with the notion of “renaming” in order to determine the extent to which renaming affects visual culture and shapes the cultural identities and cultural politics in the region and elsewhere.
LiWoLi is an open lab focusing on Free/Open Source Software (FLOSS), Open Hardware and open contents in digital art and culture. This event will offer workshops, lectures, presentations and performances.
LiWoLi raises the question of whether a practice of “doing it together” (DIT) might be a more successful formula for developing free tools (FLOSS tools) for art & culture, learning & teaching. This also implies examining the motivation of active producers and making room for the aspect of “unpaid work”.
Hannes Weingartner, the technical aficionado of Meta-D.O.N. will do a presentation on METANET at the LiWoLi “Artist & Developers” – block on April 17th.
METANET is a distributed platform-independent service for creating, managing and exploring complex knowledge networks build for social and artistic researches. The software architecture involves multiple distributed components responsible for different aspects of maintaining and representing related semantic and topographic information. A main focus of this project is to enable access to a dynamically growing and large knowledge database with intuitive and sophisticated user interfaces on multiple information levels.
Report from the lecture: “Does emancipation belong to the past?”
Ljubljana, Klub Gromka at Metelkova Saturday, 03.04.2010, 17.00h
French philosopher Jacques Rancière visited Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia from March 29 to April 04, 2010.
Rancière, who started as a structuralist Marxist in the 1960s is still probably best known in the English speaking world as one of the co-authors with Louis Althusser (and Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet) of Lire le capital (1967). Rancière broke with Althusser and structuralist Marxism after ‘the events’ of 1968. He criticised Althusser’s philosophy for its elitism and rejected the rigid and hierarchical distinction between science and ideology which it presupposed. He accused it of distrusting the spontaneous popular movements which had emerged in 1968 and of supporting a `politics of order’. He began to develop an oppositional and radical political philosophy which aims to give voice to an egalitarian politics of democratic emancipation.
In Belgrade, Zagreb, Rijeka and Ljubljana Rancière held three lectures and participated in two discussions. In Belgrade he spoke on “The Method of Equality: Politics and Poetics” at the Narodni univerzitet „Božidar Adžija” and there was a discussion on his book “The emancipated spectator” at the Jugoslavensko dramsko pozorište. In Zagreb he held a lecture on “The Method of Equality: Politics and Poetics” and in Rijeka there was a meeting with the author.
On emancipation
Nina Bandi and Michael Kraft of meta-D.O.N. visited his lecture in Ljubljana, which was organized by the Workers’ and Punks’ University (http://dpu.mirovni-institut.si/). Workers’-Punks’ University has from its very start participated in inventing an alternative form of education. The focus of the 2010 lectures is to join the struggles against neoliberal reforms and struggles for new forms of solidarity, inclusive politics, free thinking and education.
Within this framework Rancière reflected on the present state and possibility of emancipation. He presented his concept of “living in several times at once”, living as equals in a world of inequality, opposing against the dominant form of temporality in a world of reassembled grand narratives and the widening of the power of temporary interruptions.
“The Old School of Capitalism” by Želimir Žilnik- film review of Ljubomir Bratic
Revolutionary politics is a deconstruction of the old! Yes, but which revolution?…
Vienna based philosopher Ljubomir Bratic takes a closer look at the new film of the Serbian film-maker Zelimir Žilnik in which he poses the question of a common struggle of workers and precarized anarchist intellectuals.
Published in Kulturrisse 0110, Journal for radical-democratic cultural politics.
“The Old School of Capitalism”Film Screening and Discussion with Želimir Žilnik and Boris Buden:
Imagining cool: Dance music and club culture in Belgrade
Wrestling between the rock of the “urbanities” and the neofolk of “peasant urbanities”: Belgrade’s club culture is an ongoing identity crisis.
by Vukša Veličković
Originally published in IWM Post, issue No 99. The article was written during “Milena Jesenska” fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
“Belgrade rocks!” states a recent New York Times article [1], just one in a series of many describing the buzzing atmosphere of Serbia’s capital. Almost a decade after it was bombed by NATO, the recent Western military target is now labeled the new Eastern European “capital of cool” [2], as stories are written about its vibrant nightlife, “the electric energy of youth and a nonstop music scene.” [3]
“The Day of Fighting against Turbo Folk” – Do we listen to music or do we watch it? (Foto by “blandm”)
However, despite the occasional odd journalist impression that every once in a while rear from this corner of Europe, things get a little more complex. Underneath the casual hipness seen by Westerners, there are teeming and contested social forces that are not new, but have expressed themselves over decades of Serbia’s cultural life. As any protagonist of the local scene would acknowledge, the case of Serbia’s pop-culture is as problematic as it were during the 90’s authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Only the circumstances have changed. Alongside various political and economic strains that have grasped the country since the October 2000. “democratic revolution”, the issue of its “non stop music scene” remains somewhat unresolved.
Auf der Suche nach Alternativen zur neoliberalen Weltordnung
Veranstaltet vom Komitee “Solidarität mit den Arbeitskämpfen in eXYugo”
Seit Beginn der 90er Jahre erleben die Menschen in Serbien zuerst durch Krieg und Embargo und anschließend durch die neoliberale und neokoloniale Privatisierungspolitik eine beispiellose Deindustrialisierung des Landes und damit die Vernichtung der Existenzgrundlage unzähliger ArbeiterInnen.
Bereits 2007, nach einer Welle von Auseinandersetzungen, endete der Kampf der Belegschaft des pharmazeutischen Betriebes „Jugoremedija“ in Zrenjanin als einer der wenigen Kämpfe erfolgreich. Nach der Besetzung des Betriebs und der Errichtung der Selbstverwaltung ging die Belegschaftsvertetung im Jahr 2009 im Zuge der weltweiten Verschärfung der Wirtschaftskrise daran, den Aufbau einer neuen, unabhängigen ArbeiterInnenbewegung mitzugestalten.
Grenzdenken und die dekoloniale Option – Über das Projekt Modernität/Kolonialität/Dekolonialität
by Walter D. Mignolo
Das Projekt Modernität/ Kolonialität/Dekolonialität begann sich als kollektives Projekt 1998 zu entwickeln.[1] Die konzeptuelle Grundlage, die zur Formulierung dieses Projektes 1998 führte, geht auf den Anfang der 1990er Jahre zurück, d.h. auf das Ende des Kalten Krieges, den Kollaps des so genannten „realen“ Sozialismus und die Desorientierung der Linken. Heute könnte man sagen, dass es zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre war, als die dekoloniale Option […] sich zu entwickeln begann, auch wenn sie noch nicht als dekoloniale Option konzeptualisiert war. Die Schlüsselkonzepte, die in dieser Situation aufkamen, waren das der Kolonialität, eingeführt vom peruanischen Soziologen Aníbal Quijano, und das der Transmodernität, eingeführt von dem deutschstämmigen argentinischen Philosophen Enrique Dussel.
