About Us

: : To exist means not to obey an imposed, mass model, and even if that is a model of justice and truth … Existence is geography, an atlas of peculiarities, of different emotional and intellectual landscapes and toponyms … We are individual maps that can penetrate a community transcending the unifying patterns of life, love, thought, utopias, politics. But still, is there any other meaning than this – to continue to create solidarity and empathic communities that will stand against the injustice, sorrow, and pain that life brings : : Gilles Deleuze

KONTRAPUNKT is an association focused on encouraging, developing, and promoting new artistic and cultural practices, with the aim of generating a critical culture through intersectoral cooperation and establishing relations between culture and all social strata. Kontrapunkt advocates for self-organized forms of action, and counter-knowledge production, which will contribute to the creation of a platform for development and encouragement of a critical culture.
Kontrapunkt promotes the principles of decentralization, de-monopolization, democratization, distribution, and diffusion in the area of culture, cultural policy and the wider socio-cultural context. Kontrapunkt aims to develop democratic models of self-organization, production of knowledge, promotion of dialogue and critical and proactive re-thinking of  society and the institutional models in culture. At the same time, Kontrapunkt advocates for the democratization of the accumulation and transfer of knowledge, which should enable the development of the cultural scene according to modern cultural policies.

Goals:

– to promote open, innovative, collaborative, cross-cultural and cross- disciplinary formats of socio-cultural and political practices through critical reflection on society and wider, political and economic reading of the culture;

– to offer the study of new and hybrid fields of contemporary sociocultural dynamics and eco-social systems

– to facilitate the sharing of critical knowledge among different micro and marginalised communities, which will develop capillary movements all over society;

– to reconsider the conceptual and infrastructural system of cultural institutions;

– to create a new infrastructure for the independent cultural scene and stimulate its development;

– to stimulate networking within the independent cultural scene and other social and political movements, locally, nationally and regionally;

– to create actions in the field of culture and society that are based on autonomous cooperation between actors;

History

Kontrapunkt is an organization established in 2001 in Skopje, with main focus on critical theory, political philosophy, critical activism, and the relationship between art and politics. Since its beginning, Kontrapunkt has been committed to the idea of dissemination of culture and cultural production. In the ambient of hermetic ideas of how the culture should be presented, Kontrapunkt tried to develop a shift consisting in promoting new tools and activities that stimulated and motivated artists, independent groups and individuals that were trying to express themselves in the field of culture. By the course of time, the idea of support developed in an idea of stimulating self-organization as a need of urgent necessity for further development of the independent cultural scene, and of the cultural ambient in general.

Kontrapunkt influenced several groups of people to organize themselves in independent structured organizations, and they are working now in several cities quite successfully. As informal group has been active since the early 1990s in the field of culture – amongst other by running the Independent space Cultural center Tocka in Skopje, (2002 – 2010) closed by political decision of the authorities, a place suited to organize public debates, cultural and art events (especially those connected to the social involvement of art). The program focus of Kontrapunkt has been mostly focused on the emancipatory, self-educational practices and big community involvement in their projects. This helped Kontrapunkt to acquire capacities for organizing informal educational processes through which will be provided knowledge that should function efficiently in the micro context.

Since it’s foundation, Kontrapunkt organized and co-organized numerous regional and local events and projects. In collaboration with the publishing house Templum, Kontrapunkt has raised its publishing activities, concerning the contemporary theory in culture, arts and humanities, by translating works of: Julia Kristeva, Zigmunt Bauman, Terry Eagleton, Jean-François Lyotard, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Derrida, etc. Throughout the years, Kontrapunkt has also been host to numerous lecturers among which: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gerald Raunig, Marina Grzinik, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Chto Delat, Suzana Milevska, Boris Buden, etc.

Kontrapunkt is co-initiator of the national Association of the independent cultural scene JADRO, and among the founding organizations of the regional network KOOPERATIVA.

Cultural Center Tochka (2002 – 2010)

Cultural Center Tochka (2002 – 2010) was the first self-organized, independent socio-cultural center in Skopje, which was envisioned and functioned as a “refuge”, a “port” for open initiatives that corresponded to contemporary trends in theory and art, but also in the practice of social living which promotes a democratized and decentralized political concept. Tochka promoted culture as dynamic, heterogeneous, changing, something that does not exist as an isolated area, independent of the dynamics of people’s social, political, emotional and imaginary life. Tochka’s team actively and critically reacted to complex processes in society, reading contemporary cultural and artistic practices in a wider social context. Most importantly, Tochka was a space in which more than a hundred young artists from the field of visual and performative arts, as well as writers and theorists who would probably never get a chance to promote their creative work, made their first public presentations. In Tochka we collaborated, lived, and re-thinked the world together with many friends and partners.