As part of the programme of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture, Kontrapunkt invites you to an evening featuring two lecture performances that revisit the 1990s and the post-socialist transition through two distinct personal and political perspectives. Panna Adorjáni, in co-production with HELLERAU – European Centre of the Arts, returns to her childhood in Romania in Chaos, Capitalism, Charity, looking at it through the prism of money, inequality, and the new capitalist order, while Karol Filo, in Non-Violent Bodies, returns to Slovakia in the 1990s, exploring far-right violence, anti-fascist resistance, and the contradictions of the European fantasy of non-violence.
📍 Faculty of Dramatic Arts – Skopje / FDA
📅 23.09.2026
🕖 19:00
🎙️ 20:30
The 1990s in Eastern Europe were marked by the promise that the fall of socialism would bring democracy, the free market, and a new European future. Yet behind the language of transition, far messier processes were unfolding: economic insecurity and new inequalities, nationalism and ethnic conflicts, violence, political disorientation, and a radical reorganisation of everyday life.
It is precisely these contradictions that Adorjáni and Filo return to. Rather than treating the 1990s as a closed historical chapter, they draw on their own biographies, memories, and positions to ask what from that decade still lives on in our present. How do major political and economic transformations become inscribed in intimate histories? What does it mean to live “well” in a society organised around capital and inequality? And what does non-violence mean when violence is already part of political and social reality?
🔴 “Chaos, Capitalism, Charity” – Panna Adorjáni & HELLERAU – European Centre of the Arts
Born at the end of 1990, Panna Adorjáni spent the first decade of her life as Romania attempted to navigate the chaotic reality following the fall of Communism. While Panna was passing through the milestones of her own childhood – crossing multiple borders without a visa on her way to France at nine months old, learning to read before starting primary school, and writing her first poems – Romania was going through ethnic conflicts, debilitating pyramid schemes, violent confrontations, and the return of former Communists to power.
These two timelines, seemingly with little in common, begin to intertwine in unexpected ways in Chaos, Capitalism, Charity. The transition towards democracy is simultaneously a transition towards globalism and capitalism, and Adorjáni looks at this transformation through money – something that makes the world around her turn, but at times also brings it to a halt.
By lingering on precisely this uncomfortable subject, the performance reflects on inequality, philanthropy, and eudaimonia – the idea of living and doing well, and what it means to live a good life.
Co-produced by: Panna Adorjáni & HELLERAU – European Centre of the Arts
Duration: 30 minutes
Language: English
🔴 About Panna Adorjáni
Panna Adorjáni is an artist originally from Cluj, Romania, currently based in Berlin. Her work moves across literature, music, and performance, with the boundaries between genres constantly shifting. In her multilingual and interdisciplinary artistic practice, she often explores social and political topics through a personal lens.
Her interest in form, genre, and conceptual work also stems from her many years of classical music training, while in collaborative work she prefers horizontal, laboratory-style processes. Adorjáni is also completing a doctoral dissertation examining patterns of collective creation in Romanian theatre between 1945 and 1989.
🔴 “Non-Violent Bodies” – Karol Filo
In Non-Violent Bodies, Karol Filo takes us to Slovakia in the 1990s – a period in which part of society believed that the political nature of everyday life had disappeared into the neoliberal dream of the free market and individual competition.
At the same time, members of the anti-fascist movement closely observed the activities of right-wing and neo-Nazi skinhead groups, often choosing to respond with counter-violence. In the tension between the European fantasy of non-violence and the lived reality of physical confrontation, Filo explores what it means to defend oneself, but also what it means to defend marginalised groups.
Author/Performer: Karol Filo
Text Co-Author: Radek Wollmann
Dramaturgical Support: Viktor Prokop, Orin Rodrigues
Artistic Advisors: Gosia Wdowick, Ira Brand, Robert Smolík
Production: Unkulunkulu, KLAS CREW
Special thanks: Janka Dold, Tobiáš Nevřiva, Sodja Lotker
🔴 About Karol Filo
Karol Filo is a Slovak-born interdisciplinary artist and performer based in Prague. His work explores the intersections of documentary performance, social imagination, and personal narrative. He studied Alternative and Puppet Theatre at DAMU in Prague and completed internships at HKU in Utrecht and AVU in Prague.
His documentary performances language barrier equal and The Good Times Are Over won the “Project of the Year” award at the Příští vlna/Next Wave Festival in 2022 and 2025. He also presented The Good Times Are Over at HELLERAU, where he subsequently took part in the Dreaming 90 residency and presented Non-Violent Bodies as part of the cultural forum Transformation Forever.
In his work, he deals with topics such as closeness, polarisation, violence, morality, resistance, power hierarchies, propaganda, and colonialism. He combines documentary, theatrical, film, conceptual, and ethnographic approaches, using research as a way of understanding and actively engaging with reality.
🔴 The performances will be followed by a conversation with Manja Velichkovska
Manja Velichkovska (b. 1995) is a researcher, editor, and cultural worker whose practice brings together critical thought and writing in an engagement aimed at creating more inclusive, solidaristic, and politically vibrant cultural content and spaces. She holds a BA from the Department of General and Comparative Literature at the “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology and an MA in Aesthetics from the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
Since 2022, she has worked as a researcher and project coordinator at Coalition MARGINS, where her work focuses on gender, sexuality, anti-gender mobilisations, human rights, and independent culture. She is also part of the team of Skopje Pride Weekend – Festival of Queer Arts, Theory and Culture.
Since 2023, she has been a member of the Global Fund for Women Grantmaking Committee supporting gender justice movements in the Balkans, and since 2026, she has served as regional coordinator of the literary selection “Štefica Cvek,” organised by the Pobunjene čitateljke collective, of which she has been a member since 2017. She is also actively involved in the independent cultural scene as a member of JADRO – Association of the Independent Cultural Scene.
She is the author and co-author of several studies, publications, and reports in the fields of gender equality, human rights, and anti-gender politics, and also works as an editor and translator of publications in queer and feminist theory. Her practice is committed to slow and patient work that opens up critical questions and creates possibilities for new forms of connection, resistance, and collective imagination.
The motto of CRIC continues to be grounded in the thought of Alain Badiou:
“A community based on a political culture of critical action and confrontation is a community of freedom, reciprocity, and courageous navigation towards new horizons of society, with sails propelled by the winds of creative artistic confrontation and political imagination.”
Programme Editor and Organiser of CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture: Iskra Geshoska
Programme Consultants and Organisers:
Tijana Ana Spasovska and Artan Sadiku
Collaborating Team:
Petar Milat, Zorica Zafirovska, Aleksandra Bubevska, Stefan Bogeski, Koma Design Studio.
📍 For more information:
Kontrapunkt
CRIC – Instagram
Kontrapunkt – YouTube
📍 Partnerships and support:
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported within the framework of the “Culture for Development” project of the Government of Switzerland, implemented by the Heartefact Fund. The content/opinions expressed can under no circumstances be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Government of Switzerland or the Heartefact Fund.
CRIC – Festival for Critical Culture is supported by ProPIS North Macedonia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Skopje, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Future Bright Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Skopje, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia.
Споделено на: September 15, 2026 во 3:32 pm