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).
May 27, 2019 Zagreb Workshop: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
Workshop with Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, and the participants of the module Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism at Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Centre for Women’s Studies Zagreb is the first non-institutional educational center in Croatia. It was founded by a group of feminists, theorists, and scholars, peace activists, and artists in 1995. The Centre provides an interdisciplinary program and expert knowledge on women’s issues and is a meeting point for academic discourse, artistic practice, activist engagement. The Centre’s publishing program is focused on publishing the results of Croatian feminist research and theory, as well as translations of selected key feminist texts. Until today they have published more than 50 titles. The Centre’s feminist theoretical journal Treća – [The Third] was launched in 1998 and has been published annually ever since.
The main quality of the Women’s Studies educational program is its interdisciplinarity and integrality. The program offers an insight into the diverse themes of feminism and gender studies, women’s culture and history, women’s rights and gender equality. During its 20 years of work, the Centre has seen more than 600 participants complete the educational program, and more than 1000 participants involved in various specialized programs.
Module: Feminism Between Nation-states and Capitalism
It is clear that what global capitalism brings in front of us is a necessity to revisit globally racist, homophobic, and discriminatory processes, not as simple identity differences but as processes that are entangled with capital, new media technology and with the change of the mode of life under capital’s brutal modes of racialization and exploitation.
Lectures:
Marina Gržinić
State nation, feminism, capitalism, memory, history
Feminist perspective: from former Yugoslavia turbo fascism to neoliberal postmodern fascist Europe
Šefik Tatlić
Nation-state, feminisms, capitalism
Political analysis of memory and history in the space of former Yugoslavia
at Weltmuseum Wien October 8th, 2020 to April 3rd, 2021
Curated by Marina Gržinić, Christina Jauernik and Sophie Uitz
Trailer-teaser of the exhibition in Weltmuseum Wien
The exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories focuses on three European regions, their stories, and their current experiences of collective amnesia in relation to traumatic events from the past: Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, Austria after the “Anschluss” in 1938, and the denial of war crimes since 1990 after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Participating artists Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Monique Mbeka Phoba Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang
Posters and works developed by students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (workshop with Arye Wachsmuth): Negra Bernhard Henrie Dennis Iklim Doğan Robert Jolly Lars* Kollros Shaya Safaisini Hiba Shammout Sophie Anna Stadler Pia S. Weissinger Ondrej Zoricak
The digital archive: COUNTERING THE GENEALOGY OF AMNESIA
7.10.2020 Opening speeches and performance (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Speeches: C. Schicklgruber (director Weltmuseum Wien), J. Hartle (rector Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), S. Uitz and M. Gržinić (curators). Opening performance by Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe and Mani Obeya.
8.10.2020 Symposium (closed for public due to Covid-19)
Taking part in situ or via zoom:
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe Lana Čmajčanin Bojan Djordjev Dani Gal Siniša Ilić Adela Jušić Martin Krenn Nicolas Pommier Anja Salomonowitz Joëlle Sambi Nzeba Arye Wachsmuth Valerie Wolf Gang Lars* Kollros Mika Maruyama Shaya Safaisini Pia Weissinger
Moderation by Marina Gržinić Organisation by Sophie Uitz
A series of three lectures by Marina Grzinic and Sophie Uitz is held during the summer term 2018 at the Post-Conceptual Art Practices study programme (Vienna Academy of Fine Arts). Each of the lecture includes a screening of documentary film and introduces one of the three research territories of the “Genealogy of Amnesa” to the students.
Part I Belgian Colonialism in the Congo
23 April 2018, 4-7 PM
Presentation of the research project “Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality”, by Marina Grzinic and Sophie Uitz.
Introduction, screening and discussion of “King Leopold’s Ghost” (2006, 108min, documentary) by Pippa Scott and Oreet Rees – a documentary about the exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, based on the book by Adam Hochschild King Leopold Ghost from 1998.
Part II The Yugoslavian War
14 May 2018, 4-7 PM
Introduction, screening and discussion of Valentini Areh’s documentary “Radovan Karadzic’s Secret Plans” (2016, 51min, documentary for television).
The TV film shows newly retrieved materials and accounts obtained at the trial of Radovan Daradzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Hague Tribunal. The documentary was premiered two days before the final sentence to Karadzic at the Haag Tribunal, 24 March 2016. Karadzic was sentenced to fourty years for Srebrenica genocide in BiH, Amont other criminal acts.
Valentin Areh is a Slovenian journalist, war correspondent and writer. He participated in 1991 as a soldier in the short Slovenian war for independence. He subsequently attended Ljubljana University, studying history and sociology. Areh has fiftenn years of experience as a war correspondent in places such as Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was one of the few journalists to remain in Kosovo during the Kosovo War of 1999 and he survived a tortuous escape out of the country during NATO’s war to expel Serbian forces.
Part III Remembrance and oblivion of Nazi crimes in Austria
4 June 2018, 4-7 PM
Screening of “Night and Fog” (French original title: Nuit et brouillard; 1956, 32min, documentary short film). Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The title is taken from the notorious “Nacht und Nebel” (German for “Night and Fog”) program of abductions and disappearances decreed by the Nazis on 7 December 1941.
Screening of “East of War” (German original title: Jenseits des Krieges; 1996), a film by Ruth Beckermann (cinematography Peter Roehsler, editing Gertraud Luschützky).
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting; on the walls black and white photographs documenting the atrocities committed by the German Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in WW2. Against this background former soldiers talk about their experiences beyond the bounds of “normal” warfare. An uncompromising film on remembrance and oblivion. Ruth Beckermann’s film doesn’t duplicate the exhibition, but begins where it ends: in a commentary. Its subject-matter is less about history than remembering, less about the past than the present.
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).
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.
Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.
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).
Venues: Schillerplatz Park in front of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz, 1010 Vienna Studio for Post-conceptual Art /IBK (Atelierhaus, Lehargasse 8, 1060 Wien, 1. OG Atelier Süd) Performative Lab “Smashing Wor(l)ds–Summercamp”
Project by the Studio for Post-conceptual Art /IBK, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in collaboration with “Conviviality as Potentiality,” funded by Austrian Science Fund FWF (AR 679), and the project “Smashing Wor(l)ds” supported by Creative Europe and led by kulturen in bewegung/VIDC, Vienna.
Participants: Asma Aiad, Rawan Almohamad, Arabina Amedoska, Rui Bai, Victoria Eliseykina, Arno Gitschthaler, Felix Huber, Robert Jolly, Munar Khalid Biiq, Ali Kianmehr, Aaron Kimmig, Nathalie Köbli, Cathérine Lehnerer, Mika Maruyama, Lieber Michael, Mirjana Mustra, Mohammad Numan, Valentin Pfenniger, Jovita Pristovšek, Sisanmi Schuller, Timotheus Ueberall, Imrich Veber, Kyra Sophie Wilhelmseder, Ju Yoo, Tino Zimmermann
EXHIBITION: DIE SICHTBARKEIT DES UNSICHTBAREN // THE VISIBILITY OF THE INVISIBLE //
Date: 23.06.2021 – 28.06.2021
Venues: Schillerplatz Park in front of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz, 1010 Vienna Studio for Post-conceptual Art /IBK (Atelierhaus, Lehargasse 8, 1060 Wien, 1. OG Atelier Süd)
Exhibition and perfomative lab from students of the studio for Post-conceptual Art at the Institute of Fine Arts in cooperation with the“Smashing Wor(l)ds” project.
Participants: Asma Aiad, Rui Bai, Victoria Eliseykina, Arno Gitschthaler, Felix Huber, Robert Jolly, Ali Kianmehr, Aaron Kimmig, Nathalie Köbli, Valentin Pfenniger, Timotheus Ueberall, Imrich Veber, Kyra Sophie Wilhelmseder, Ju Yoo, Tino Zimmermann
1 Opening by Marina Grzinic, Marissa Lobo, The Visibility of the Invisible, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
2 Opening by Marina Grzinic, Marissa Lobo, The Visibility of the Invisible, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
3 Asma Aiad, report at the police station, Vienna 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
4 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
5 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
6 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Because I am the Thunder, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
7 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
8 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
9 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo R. Bai
10 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
11 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Invisible Women, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
13 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Because I am the Thunder, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
14 Ju Yoo, Asma Aiad, Because I am the Thunder, Schillerplatz 25 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
Venues: Schillerplatz Park in front of theAcademy of Fine Arts Vienna, Schillerplatz, 1010 Vienna Studio for Post-conceptual Art /IBK (Atelierhaus, Lehargasse 8, 1060 Wien, 1. OG Atelier Süd) Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser, Naufahrtweg 14a, 1220 Vienna
“Smashing Wor(l)ds–Summercamp” is a
gathering of the Austrian partner organizations with Afro Rainbow Austria
[ARA], Queer Base, Silent University Graz and the Students of the Studio for
Post-conceptual Art Practices [PCAP] at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Performative Labs & Artistic
Research
In a multi-format event with workshops and lecture
performances, the results of the artistic research within the project “Smashing
Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning
Vocabularies” will be presented. The focus is on artistic work with
vocabularies of resistance, from queer and anti-racist perspectives – revolving
around language, fashion, translation and much more.
Participants: Afro Rainbow Austria [ARA], Asma Aiad, Rawan Almohamad, Arabina Amedoska, Rui Bai, Victoria Eliseykina, Arno Gitschthaler, Felix Huber, Robert Jolly, Munar Khalid Biiq, Ali Kianmehr, Aaron Kimmig, Nathalie Köbli, Cathérine Lehnerer, Mika Maruyama, Lieber Michael, Mirjana Mustra, Mohammad Numan, Valentin Pfenniger, Jovita Pristovšek, Queer Base, Joëlle Sambi Nzeba, Silent University Graz, Sisanmi Schuller, Timotheus Ueberall, Imrich Veber, Kyra Sophie Wilhelmseder, Ju Yoo, Tino Zimmermann
1 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
2 Opening by Marissa Lobo, Marina Grzinic, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo R. Bai
3 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
4 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
5 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
6 Speech by Vivi, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
7 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
8 Asma Aiad, Ju Yoo, Statement_Invisible Women, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo R. Bai
9 Asma Aiad, Ju Yoo, Statement_Invisible Women, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
10 Mohammad Numan, Intervention_Push-Backs and Realities of Refugee Life, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo J. Pristovsek
11 Mohammad Numan, Intervention_Push-Backs and Realities of Refugee Life, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo R. Bai
12 Mika Maruyama, Jovita Pristovsek, Statement_Editing Wor(l)ds, Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp 26 06 2021 Photo R. Bai
13 Smashing Wor(l)ds Summercamp, Kleine Stadtfarm am Schillerwasser 26 06 2021 Photo M. Grzinic
