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    LECTURE at MACBA Seminar in Barcelona

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    Marina Grzinić, Memory and History and the act of remembering

    February 16, 2018

    at Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA),16-17.2.2018, Seminar, The Boundary Condition. About the archive and its limits

    Lecture Summary

    In the time of neoliberal global necrocapitalism we are increasingly confronted with a political and social amnesia that profits without the past, producing more and more processes of de-historicization and de-politicisation. Central to these processes is the logic of (neoliberal) repetition that produces at least two different procedures of (de)historicization. On one side we have the logic of the neoliberal Western world that works as a pure trans-historical machine, and on the other, in the East and in the South of Europe, we detect forced techniques of embracing historicization as totalization. In both cases the result is a suspension of history that works with a primary intention to dispose of any alternative within it! My idea is to provide some examples, and, more, to try to define these processes on a much wider scale in order to see their political, social and cultural consequences.

    The presentation is based on the new insights provided by the research project I am in charge of at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, with the title “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” (funded through the Programme for Arts-based Research PEEK, by the FWF, Austrian Science Fund, in the period from 2018 to 2020).

    Book chapter: “Racialized violence in Europe: The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees?” (by Marina Gržinić)

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    Marina GRŽINIĆ:  Racialized violence in Europe: The Genealogy of Amnesia Project and the immobilization of refugees? In: PERERA, Suvendrini (ed.), PUGLIESE, Joseph (ed.). Mapping deathscapes : digital geographies of racial and border violence. London; New York: Routledge, 2022. Pp. 148-162, ilustr. Routledge research in digital humanities. ISBN 978-1-032-05657-9. DOI: 10.4324/9781003200611-15. 

    Book Description

    This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres.

    An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site.

    This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law.

    https://www.routledge.com/Mapping-Deathscapes-Digital-Geographies-of-Racial-and-Border-Violence/Perera-Pugliese/p/book/9781032056579

    GoA SYMPOSIUM in Vienna: Genealogy of Amnesia – Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories

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    (image: Christina Jauernik)

    November 8-10, 2018

    A symposium on the silencing of colonialism, anti-Semitism, and contemporary turbo-fascist nationalism in Belgium, Austria, and former Yugoslavia.

    The international and interdisciplinary symposium, open to public audiences, is built as a podium for research and exchange, dissemination of knowledge, and discussion.

    The two-day-long symposium hosted invited speakers that cover the central topics of our research in the three respective territories: memory and history, archives, and the axis of power and knowledge. The general objective of the symposium was to denote gaps between processes of institutionalized silencing, hegemonic processes of oblivion and amnesia, and processes of instituting power through building counter-memory and counter-history projects, interventions, and resistance. The aim was to demonstrate how processes for the establishment of counter-memory and counter-history can open up spaces for new ways of forming radicalized constituent politics. Collective struggles and oppositionality were investigated as the basis of a possible dismantling of neoliberal and necrocapitalist societies by means of re-empowering history that crushes silences.

    For full symposium program and details click here

    Gallery

    CATALOGUE: Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism

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    Edited by Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz, and Christina Jauernik

    Hatje Cantz, Berlin, Germany; Weltmuseum Wien, Austria; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020, ISBN 978-3-7757-4884-1, 204pp.

    Published on the occasion of the exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories, at Weltmuseum Wienfrom 8 October 2020 to 3 April 2021.

    About the catalogue

    Belgian colonialism in the Congo. Antisemitism in Austria. Turbo-nationalism in former Yugoslavia. Over the last two centuries, these three historic lines of violence and annihilation (re)enforced a process of oblivion that to this day prevents a processing of the genocides they caused. Today involuntary or performed amnesia again threatens to destroy what has already come to a point of possible coexistence.

    ­We go back to these traumatic events in history and the recent past, which had such a violent impact on communities and people, states and territories, and confront them with a system of interventions. The scars that remain after atrocities, although hidden and obliterated, are recovered through artistic, scientific, and political reflections.

    Book review by Saša Kesić: Towards Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality

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    A book review on the edited volume “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism” was published on May 9, 2021 by Saša Kesić in the Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture journal.

    Read the full review here.

    Saša Kesić is an art teacher and independent researcher from Belgrade. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Department of Theory of Arts and Media, University of Arts in Belgrade. In 2020, he published the book That’s How the Queer Grew… in Contemporary Eastern European Art and Culture, in which he connected queerness, performativity and presentation.

    “This volume provides a very comprehensive analysis of what was going on in former Yugoslavia, before the 1990s, in the time of the Balkan war, and after the 1990s. This is a very brave and difficult task as it is not possible to rely solely on the historical distance, as well as on the archives and documents of the past. This is the first time that such an analysis is put in parallel with the two other genocides. Furthermore, a very detailed analysis is presented regarding the changes in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall and then in the 1990s until today. The post-Srebrenica genocide time showed an even more bestial situation: that the Serbian society and “the Republika Srpska,”5 instead of reflecting on what happened, pushed a new dimension of amnesia. What we learn is that in Serbia oblivion changed into the glorification of the genocide. This is supported by hyper-populist and monstrous political’ nomenclature all the way to our present day when this volume is published. In the meantime, the same glorification is central for the imperial global capitalist forces – Trump is a very good case. Former Yugoslavia, in its belatedness, is another case, as it repeats on a smaller scale the Trump model. The politicians from Serbia to Slovenia (Aleksandar Vučić and Janez Janša) are such two cases.”

    Excerpt from the conclusion of Saša Kesić’ review of “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality” (Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), 2020); https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/sasakesic.

    The review was published on May 9, 2021.

    PUBLICATION: Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality, published in 2020

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    Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality
    Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (editors),
    578 pp., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2020

    Book cover Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality,  2020. Cover design © Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020

    The volume is an outcome of the art- and theory-based research project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality. It is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through its Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK). The research is developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. The volume focuses on collective amnesia in regards to traumatic events of the European past and the ways in which memory and history are presented for the future. It gathers together reflections on racism and nationalism, empowerment and futurity. As the subtitle indicates, ultimately this volume is about achieving a future conviviality. On this festive occasion, the editors of the book will present its content, structure and contributors.

    Contributors:
    Jamika Ajalon, Ruth Beckermann, Elisabeth Brainin, Véronique Clette-Gakuba, CMCLD/Collectif Mémoire Coloniale et Lutte contre les Discriminations, Nejra Nuna Čengić, Matthias De Groof, Nicole Grégoire, Marina Gržinić, Adla Isanović, Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur, Geneviève Kaninda, Hikmet Karčić, Kasereka Kavwahirehi, Sophie Lillie, Michael Loebenstein, Nikita Mazurov, Berthold Molden, Pedro Monaville, Sir Geoffrey Nice, Jovita Pristovšek, Markus Rheindorf, Drehli Robnik, Tony Kokou Sampson, Birgit Sauer, Max Silverman, Kalvin Soiresse Njall, Shirley Anne Tate, Šefik Tatlić, Claudia Tazreiter, Nevenka Tromp, Hedvig Turai, Sophie Uitz, Tanya Ury, Gloria Wekker, Renée Winter, and Ruth Wodak.

    Book Review by Saša Kesić in Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture (May 2021)

     

    PUBLICATION: Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia

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    Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia, edited by Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić (in collaboration with Valerija Zabret, Jovita Pristovšek, Tjaša Kancler, and Sophie Uitz), Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria; Peek Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, 2020, ISBN 978-86-88001-19-9 (CZKD), 312pp.

    Download free ebook version here

    The book Dialogues for the Future: Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia arose from the research carried out by the PEEK Project No. AR 439-G24/IBK, whose full title is “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality.” This is an interdisciplinary arts-and-theory-based research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and developed at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, from 2018 to 2020. During this time, we created an online video archive entitled “Countering the Genealogy of Amnesia.” It consists of seventy hours comprising eighty-two interviews/positions as well as the recordings of the symposium “GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA: Crushing Silences, Constructing Histories” held at the mumok in 2018, Vienna, thus tying together the three sites that constitute the “Genealogy of Amnesia”: Belgium, Austria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska.”

    This book comprises sixty-six interviews in the form of deep reflections concerning territories and histories of genocides, dispossession, racism, antisemitism, turbo-nationalism, discrimination, silencing, oblivion: Belgium, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina/Croatia/Serbia and “Republika Srpska,” Slovenia and Spain.

    We hope this book will contribute to establishing links between the antagonization of racism/fascism and the critique of (neoliberal) global necrocapitalism as a colonial, racial system of dominance. It means that we are calling for the severing of ties between Eurocentric epistemology and its monopoly on the definition of class-sensitive, as well as feminist and LGBT*QI discourses.

    Centre for Cultural Decontamination CZKD, Belgrade, Serbia
    Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR439
    Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

    Online book launch at Centre for Cultural Decontamination / Belgrade, 20.9.2020

    LECTURE at East-Central European Art Forum Conference in Poznań

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    Marina Gržinić, The Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions as Features of a Conceptualization of a “New” Geography

    October 27, 2018

    at East-Central European Art Forum, 26-27.10.2018,
    Conference: Theorizing the Geography of East-Central European Art

    organized by Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art

    Lecture Summary

    The postsocialist and postcolonial conditions as features of a conceptualization of a “new” geography

    The proposal is to rethink geography as a process that comes out  from the post-1989. Why?  At that moment we have the appearance of two conditions, of two posts that coincide largely speaking geographically in Europe and that can subsumed, according to David Harvey writings in the 1980s,  as “urbanization of capital and urbanization of consciousness.” This double process is vital to capitalism’s survival as a dominant mode of production and consumption. Let’s state that this urbanization is a perverse cosmopitanism that Piotr Piotrowski (Piotrowski, “From the international to the Cosmopolitan” (2012)), sees as the possible approach to East and Central Europe today.  Therefore my proposal claims that geography can better be captured as the joint process of these two conditions postsocialist and postcolonial than divisions we used for the last decades in the former Eastern European context: East-West, center-periphery, etc. As well the question that we will enter is how the postcolonial enters the post-socialist of the East-Central Europe geography of today. My question is how these traumatic nodal points produced, executed and governed by and within Europe transform the perception of art, geography, topography, memory and history in the present moment. The elaboration is based on the new insights provided by the research project I am in charge at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with the title “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality” (funded through the Programme for Arts-based Research (PEEK), inside the FWF, Austrian Science Fund, in the period from 2018 to 2020).

    GoA WORKSHOP in Belgrade on Post-war Nationalism, Memory and History

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    Nebojša Milikić, Ana Isaković, Aleksandra Sekulić, Sefik Tatlić and Marin Grzinić

    May 20, 2018 Belgrade Workshop:
    Post-war Nationalism, Memory and History

    Workshop with Ana Isaković, Nebojša Milikić and Aleksandra Sekulić, at Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade

    Nebojša Milikić, Ana Isaković, Aleksandra Sekulić, Sefik Tatlić and Marina Grzinić

    Belgrade Workshop PDF

    This workshop is envisioned as a conversation that leads toward consultation and education on the proposed topic. It unites a selected group of theorists, researchers and activists in order to exchange different positions of knowledge and interpretations on the proposed topic. The workshop will elaborate on issues of the construction of national identity in Serbia and “Republika Srpska” in the post-socialist era. These issues are based on several relations: the past and present negation of war crimes committed by the regime of Slobodan Milošević’s; the wider effect of historical revisionism; the link(s) between these processes and the suppression of social struggle based on the class issues in the region. Additionally, the workshop focuses on the analysis of the correlation between these and similar processes that are at work in Western Europe in relation to the negation of the colonial past and the lack of confrontation with the Nazi past. The workshop therefore aims to detect and/or decode those common denominators that are forming institutional, ideological and epistemic paradigms in order to halt or suspend thinking on the future of conviviality in the region and Europe.

    Ana Isaković has been the archive editor, project coordinator and theatre production organizer at the Center for Cultural Decontamination since April 2011. She used to work as project coordinator and theatre production organizer of the Heartefact Foundation. She wrote for the web portal e-Novine (articles, theatre and art critique, interviews), she worked as a translator, correspondent and sales manager for the company “Dragačevac promet,” she was assistant project coordinator for the NGO CEDEUM (Center for Drama in Education and Art); from February 2006 until June 2007 she worked as an English teacher at the foreign language school INTRANET. She worked as a theatre critic for the monthly magazine “MAGAZIN 011,” organizer at the puppet theatre “Pinocchio,” secretary of directing in the play „Kuku Todore“ by Dragoslav Todorović; assistant organizer of the Meeting of Professional Puppet Theatres of Serbia. She was also a journalist for the cultural section of the magazine “Beorama.”

    Nebojša Milikić is cultural worker and producer, researcher and activist, lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. Studied and worked at the Institute for Regional Geology and Paleontology in Belgrade, attended The School of History and Theory of Image of the Centre for Contemporary Art Belgrade) and The Queer Studies at The Center for Queer Studies, Belgrade. Since 1995, he is involved in political activism, organizational, artistic and curatorial practice in visual and relational arts. Initiated, realized or co-realized many cultural and artistic programs and projects, in Serbia and abroad. He participated in a number of independent research projects and activist campaigns. Milikić writes about cultural and artistic production, political and ideological topics. From 1999 onward works in Cultural Center Rex in Belgrade, as the initiator and coordinator of the debate programs and the programs of democratization and decentralization of culture. One of the founders of the non-governmental cultural organization ReEX, dedicated to struggle against historical revisionism and negationism.

    Aleksandra Sekulić—PhD candidate at Faculty of Media and Communication at the department of Theory of Art and Media. MA in Cultural management and cultural policy in the Balkans, UNESCO Chair, University of Arts, Belgrade and Universite Lumiere Lyon 2. Graduated in General Literature and Theory of Literature in Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. Program director at the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) in Belgrade since 2010. Initiator and co-editor (with Lazar Bodroza and Radovan Popović) of the project The Invisible Comics in cooperation with National Library of Serbia and Metaklinika Studio, consisting of the digital archive of alternative comics in Serbia, the publication The Invisible Comics – Alternative comics in Serbia 1980-2010 and the exhibition at Leipzig Book Fair in the Pavillion of Serbia. Together with Branka Benčić, she curated exhibitions “Video, Television, Anticipation” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2013) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2014). Since 2006, she is member of the archive and program platform Media Archaeology. Since 2001 member of Kosmoplovci group (digital arts, music, film, alternative comics), and with whom she established the online platform Altarchive.org, online archive of alternative film and video. Editor of books: Performing The Museum—A Reader (2016). Co-ed. with Dušan Grlja, Videography of the Region (2009), Media Archaeology: The Nineties (2009), and more.

    WORKSHOP on Hannah Arendt’s political thinking, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

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    March 11, 2019 – March 26, 2019 Vienna Workshop:
    on Hannah Arendt’s political thinking

    Workshop with Ruth Kager and the students of the Art Studio for Post-conceptual Art Practices (PCAP) and the students in general of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at AkBild, Vienna.

    Hannah Arendt’s political thought centers around a political space that draws on common action. Starting from this insight, each session of the workshop is dedicated to one of Arendt’s basic notions: the public realm, the societal and the private, action, power and judging. Building on these notions, the workshop investigates the constraints and potentialities of politics as thought by Arendt.

    The contents are elaborated interactively, based on the sources below. The following questions will guide, amongst others, plenary discussions and group activities.

    11/3/2019 // INTRODUCTION // THE PUBLIC REALM
    What is the public realm?
    Sources:
    Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 50-57.
    Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 62-73.

    12/3/2019 // THE SOCIETAL AND THE PRIVATE
    What are the relations between the social, the private and the public realm?
    Sources:
    Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 68-72.
    Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 81-89.

    18/3/2019 // ACTION
    What are the characteristics of action?
    How is action connected to politics?
    Sources:
    Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 175-180.
    Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 213-222.

    19/3/2019 // POWER
    What is the difference between power and violence?
    How is power connected to different forms of government?
    Sources:
    Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 199-206.
    Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 251-262.

    26/3/2019 // THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL POWER // JUDGING
    How is political power destructed?
    What is judging?
    Sources:
    Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace), 123-134.
    Arendt, Hannah (2014) [1955], Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft (München: Piper) 286-307.
    Arendt, Hannah (1961), “The Crisis in Culture. Its Social and Its Political Significance”, in: ibid., Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking), 217-226.
    Arendt, Hannah (2012) [1960], “Kultur und Politik”, in: dies., Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Übungen im politischen Denken I, herausgegeben von Ursula Ludz (München: Piper), 296-302.

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