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).
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, Sophie Uitz, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
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.
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
Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen, Mirjam Zadoff (2021)
Tell me about yesterday tomorrow: About the Future of the Past
Historical events and our knowledge of them mould our understanding of today’s world. The interdisciplinary authorship of this volume focuses on the connection between past and future. A bold and unusual publication whose approaches and themes extend from biographical experiences via intergenerational exchange to the discussion of current social phenomena.
With contributions by M. Czollek, C. Deliss, S. Denny, G. Diez, B. Draney, L. Gillick, M. Gržinić, A. Huyssen, I. Küpeli, D. Lesage, C. Lorch, S. Lütticken, K. Müller, V.J. Müller, A. Pető, M. Rinck, D. Rupnow, P. Rypson, Ph. Sands, N. Schafhausen, D. Schöne, G. Schwarz, N. Sternfeld, N. Wahl, M. Zadoff.
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).
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.
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.
Images with violent content are always historical, as what is seen as violent is constructed and is violently managed; therefore nothing is natural in relation to violence. What will be defined as violent is always an outcome of violent hegemonic processes. Seeing images of killings can provoke our rebellion and our insurgencies, unless we are paralyzed by our normativized occidental lives. Europe and the global neoliberal capitalist system in general are well attuned to the hierarchization, control, and management processes of the present neoliberal capitalist states. Especially under attack are migrants and all those not considered to be “natural” parts of the neoliberal capitalist national body in the West: asylum-seekers and refugees escaping war-torn parts of the global world (the Middle East, Africa), from conflicts induced by capital and imperial management.
On the other side and at the same time, we can see, for example, the last election campaign in Austria, with posters by the Freedom Party (FPÖ) containing blatantly racist and fascist slogans and images. My interest is to connect racism with visual narratives, “trophy” artifacts, and culture. I will look at racism from a historical perspective, showing a horrifying trajectory of structural racism that reproduces itself almost always circularly from a pseudoscientific (biological) racism, “progressing” toward “cultural racism” to “return” again to “scientific racism,” though then coined “intellectual racism.”
October 12, 2019 Linz Workshop: 25 years anniversary of maiz
WORKSHOP, PART OF 25 YEARS ANNIVERSARY OF MAIZ
Where: Altes Rathaus, Linz
Date: 12.10.2019
Taking part in the discussion: Rodrigo Cesar Benedetti, Chiara Benedetti, Michaela Lehofer, Nadja Meisterhans, Ursula M. Lücke, and Rubia Salgado
WORKSHOP TITLE: Fighting racism, deconstructing white privilege-cultural interventions, artistic projects, political strategies
Marina Gržinić in collaboration with Tjaša Kancler trans*activist, researcher
In the workshop, we depart from the research we did, Tjaša Kancler trans*activists and me, on questions of knowledge resistance and trans*. Therefore in the first part of the workshop, I presented artistic projects that have contributed historically and currently to the production of discourses, activities, politics, labor, education in order to combat racism and structures of power. In the second part of the workshop, we discussed formats of racism, the processes of enduring racialization and modes of empowerment.
Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician, and artist. Since 2003, she is Professor for Post-Conceptual Art Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She did a series of collaborative projects with Tjaša Kancler, trans* activist, artist, researcher, and associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Kancler is a co-editor of the journal Desde el margen (www.desde-elmargen.net).
The images and chronologies in these displayed materials are coming from the catalogue/publication Words Precede Actions with the subtitle The Context of Language, Racism, Economy and Power by Marika Schmiedt published in 2018 that displays racist genealogies of discrimination and the ghettoization of the Roma people in the West and East of Europe.
One part of her analysis consists of the research of racism, linking them to histories of the relationship between race and physical anthropology. As “racist scientific results” are used in sorting and exposing bones and crania collections in the museum. This takes us via Schmiedt to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna that has one of the biggest crania collections, assembled by the Austrian anthropologist Augustin Weisbach (1837–1914) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna includes 40,000 objects, human remains, including skulls, bones, hair, and body drains. The collection mostly contains relics from historical and prehistoric times, but also problematic chapters of human remains that mark colonial and National Socialist times.
The other part presents a gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but they are all anti-Semites:
Albert Geßmann (1852–1920)
Karl Lueger (1844–1910),
Josef Weinheber (1892–1945)
Taras Borodajkewycz (1902‒1984)
Josef Weinheber (1892 – 1945) a “respected” Austrian man, poet and essayist, who was largely under the literary influences of Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Wildgans and Karl Kraus, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1931 until 1933 and from 1944 on. He committed at the time of the advance of the Red Army, leaving behind a clear-sighted parting letter. He was buried in the village of Kirchstetten, Austria, where he had lived since 1936. The municipality and the citizens of Kirchstetten, have honored for years the “great poet” Weinheber by transforming his house into a museum, dedicating a street, a square and a highway bridge in his name, decided to name a kindergarten in his honor. (From the text by Marina Grzinic in Words Precede Actions, 2018).
Lecture and introduction to Marika Schmiedt’s catalogue
by Marina Grzinic
[…] Words precede actions: language, words, and discourses have a powerful impact on concrete social issues, political decisions, media content, knowledge institutions, labor markets, the shaping of histories, memories, and subjectivities and defining of citizenship. Through mass media, public opinions, and widespread anti-Roma graffiti in public space, words have set in motion actions of constant dehumanization of the Roma, leading their conditions of poverty, segregation, and seclusion to become part of another rhetoric – the rhetoric of naturalization of these conditions. We can find at least three forms of displaying these processes of racialization in Schmiedt’s work. The second form that is as well central to the research Genealogies of amnesia displays mechanisms that I will label the gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men, we are soon to learn, almost dumbstruck, are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but are all anti-Semites. Reviewing this frightening collection of men, which is by no means exclusively historical, but instead, reverberates persistently in present times, identified by generations of critical positions in Austria as the nation’s post-Nazi times. This past is preoccupying as hyper right wing neoliberal necrocapitalism is at its full power here and now.
The catalogue presentation at the VBKÖ was contextualized by an exhibition of Marika Schmiedt’s recent investigations on the Nazi-past of the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ).
