Workshops…
24.11.2016
“Critical writing in arts and culture – building the critical socio-cultural thinking in public sphere”
Workshop by Ana Vujanovic
Critical writing in arts and culture today cannot avoid the issue of politicality of contemporary arts. However, it is an ambivalent topic: politics is one of the key issues of critical arts today, in the neoliberal capitalist context, where the politics as a specific social practice disappears from the public sphere and where the immaterial and post-Fordist production firmly tie praxis and poiesis on a macro-social scale. During the workshop I would like to examine this phenomenon, and also to clarify what politics in contemporary art means and might mean. The politics is here seen as an intervention of art practice or work into the public sphere, tending to re-distribution or contestation of its existing configuration and partitions. From my theoretical viewpoint the political aspects can be enacted and analyzed not only in the register (a) of the content of an artwork – which is a well-known traditional point of view – but also in the registers (b) of its medium or form – as post-structuralist theory teaches us – and (c) of its conditions and procedures of work – which is the aspect that is emerging from the actual political economy, and which is not theorized largely in the field of art. Therefore, my aim is not to advocate political art, neither to divide artworks to politically engaged and l’art-pour-l’art-istic ones. My proposal is to stress an urge to reflect a broad and complex spectrum of
politicality that characterizes each and every artwork as
a social event that takes place in the public sphere.Cases and examples: most of my examples will come from performing arts and artivism, while the central case to be discussed will be the exhibition Archives of violence.
25 – 26.11.2016
Digital Library/ My Archive: from user to librarian-amateur”
Workshop by Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak
How to digitize books, journals and archival documents? Where to find electronic books, journals and documents? What is the best way to manage an electronic archive collection? How to share your electronic archive? На кратко, како да се стане добар архивар и библиотекар? In short, how can one be a good digital archivist and librarian? How can one best use digital documents and publications in my research?
How to create a bibliography and aggregate citations? If you have these and similar practical concerns, we invite you to the workshop “A Digital Archive of My Own”. We’ll demonstrate the process of digitizing, creating and sharing of a digital collection, and help you to organize your research process with digital documents and archives. Bring your own computer and, if you use one, an e-book reader.
24.11.2016
symposium ”Public library/ Memory of the world”
a project by Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars (Multimedijalni Institut, Zagreb)
http://www.memoryoftheworld.org
When the dominant idea of freedom in an age is that of freedom regulated by the markets, the collective capacity to pursue autonomy, equality and development becomes reduced to the freedom of competition and the freedom of consumer choice. Under the coercion of the market, with its inability to harmonize the democratic equality with the global free commerce, the freedom of journalism transmogrifies into corrupt media acting as cronies of corporate or political interests; the freedom of expression into the officially condoned hate speech; while the freedom of research and education into sky-rocketing student-fees, precarious academic labour and intellectual self-censoring. When the dominant idea of freedom in a place in that age is that of self-assertion of ethnic domination, as is the case in the countries of former Yugoslavia, then the corrupt media, the normalized discrimination and the self-censorship look the other way when books are thrown out of the libraries, documents are disappeared from the archives and monuments are blasted into the air in an effort to wipe out the collective memory of emancipatory past and re-write the history anew.
Public library holds an ambivalent position amidst that domination of the market and the nation. Emerging from the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, the institution of public library gradually formed in the liminal zone of the process of capitalist development. 18. By providing de-commodified access to culture and knowledge, it limited the market’s ability to decide who will be denied edification and education – and will this knowledge be at the service of continued domination or transformation of the world.
From its early days public library held a utopian promise of all memory of the world becoming available to all members of the society, a promise that with the emergence of the internet seemed to have become reachable within a next step. And yet, the parallel rise of the digital capitalism and the reassertion of nationalism has severely limited the public library in the pursuit of its emancipatory mission and sometimes has driven overzealous librarians to commit systematic acts of ideological purge. This has led to a number of digital shadow archives and libraries being created by internet communities – often in the open disregard of the copyright law and the dominant ideology of nationalism – providing access to knowledge for all and preservation of collective memory where public institutions were denied or have failed to do so.
From The Memory of Violence to the Methods of Violent Oblivion”
Lecture by Sanja Horvatinčić”
The majority of the Second World War monuments built in the Socialist Yugoslavia have been dedicated to the fallen partisans – members of the People’s’ Liberation Army – and the civilian victims of the fascist terror, done by any of the several occupation and collaboration army formations on the territory of former Yugoslavia. The term itself – fascist terror, as opposed to a more general notion of fascism – indicates their reference to specific historical events and methods of violence thereby employed. Monuments have not only been accompanied with descriptions, epitaphs and long lists of names of the victims, but they often featured visual and/or symbolic representations of these events, with the aim of permanent and communicative transfer of the collective memory to future generations. These representations ranged from descriptive figurative compositions to symbolic forms derived from the belief in the universal, humanist message of modern art.
In the first part of the lecture, I will offer a brief overview of strategies employed in representing various traumatic memories of violence in the format of memorial sculpture and architecture, whereas in the second, I will try to outline most common methods of their destruction, obliteration and ideological „neutralisation“ in the post-socialist context – from the violent acts of direct physical destruction and removal, through the deconstruction of their complementary educational platforms (specialised PLM museums and collections), to the least visible yet most powerful methods of long-term institutional revisionism in field of the cultural heritage protection.
“Archiving Memory and Knowledge: War Crimes in Yugoslavia 1941-1945”
Lecture by Milan Radanović
The talk will be in two parts. The first and the more extensive part will look at the collections of archiving institutions across Yugoslavia that hold the documentation on war crimes committed in Yugoslav territories during the WWII. The goal is to explain how these collections were created, what were the institutions that have created them and what was the purpose of the collections. In short, in 1944 the Partisan resistance government set up commissions in all federal regions of the country with the mission of gathering information on war crimes committed by the occupying forces and their collaborators. The documentation aggregated by the federal and regional commissions encompasses several hundreds of thousands of documents and contain information on the majority of war crimes committed by those perpetrators. This documentation still has not been sufficiently researched. The most significant amongst those collections is the collection of the State Commissions for Crimes Committed by the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators deposited at the Archives of Yugoslavia (Belgrade), that holds information gathered from throughout Yugoslavia. Similar, though smaller are the collections of Regional Commissions deposited in the central state archives of all former Yugoslav federal republics. Given that I have researched mostly in the collection of the State Commission and the collection of the Regional Commission for Crimes Committed by the Occupying Forces and their Collaborators in the Archive of Serbia (Belgrade), I’ll spend most time speaking about those collections. However, I’ll also speak about two collections that are held at the Historical Archive in Belgrade: documents of Special Police and documents of Gestapo in Belgrade. These two collections hold around 17,000 files on persons who have been interned and subject to repression in Belgrade and around other places in Serbia. I will also look at to what degree is the information contained in the documentation of Armed Forces of the Independent Croatian State (NDH) and the Third Reich that are kept in the Military Archive in Belgrade relevant for investigating war crimes and their perpetrators.
In the second part of my talk I will look at the on-line repository at the website znaci.net: how that repository was created, how its structured and what was the intention of its creator in creating and structuring the collection. I’ll underscore that this website is the largest on-line repository of information on WWII crimes in the territory of Yugoslavia. The emphasis will be on information pertaining to war crimes.
Bio:
Marcell Mars (Nenad Romić) is a free software advocate, cultural explorer, and social instigator. He is one of the founders of Multimedial Institute – mi2 and net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb. He is a member of Creative Commons Team Croatia. Regularly runs workshops like ‘Programming for non-programmers’. Gives talks on topics like hacking, free software philosophy, gathering communities around good causes, slacking, doing nothing, stupid/smart business models of music industries, social software & semantic web. These days advocates for and works on Public library. He sings, dances, tells the stories and makes music as Nenad Romic za Novyi Byte.
Tomislav Medak earned a degree in Philosophy and German language and literature from the University of Zagreb/Croatia (1997). His theoretical interests are in contemporary political philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He has coordinated the theory program and publishing activities of the MaMa – Multimedia Institute, Zagreb since 2000. He is a »free software« advocate and project leader of the Croatian Creative Commons team. Since 2001 he has been working with the Zagreb-based experimental theatre collective BADco. as a performer, dramaturge and director.
Ana Vujanović is a freelance cultural worker in the fields of contemporary performing arts and culture. She holds Ph.D. in Theatre Studies. She is a member of the editorial collective of TkH [Walking Theory], a Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and editor-in-chief of the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory. She participates in art projects in the fields of performance, theatre, dance, and video/film, as a dramaturg and co-author. She has published a number of articles in journals and collections and authored four books, most recently Public Sphere by Performance, with B. Cvejić (Berlin: b_books, 2012 / 2015). Currently she is working on an independent research project Performing the Self in the 21st Century, with B. Cvejic and M. Popivoda of TkH.
Sanja Horvatinčićart historian, is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Zadar and works as a Research Assistant at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. She is the executive editor of the journal Život umjetnosti, and a team member of the scientific project ARTNET led by dr. sc. Ljiljana Kolešnik. She is the author of several scientific papers, and has given a number of scientific and popular public lectures on memorial sculpture/architecture in Yugoslavia and Europe after World War II.
Milan Radanovićgraduated from the History Department at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. In his research he’s working on topics related to the Second World War in Serbia and Yugoslavia, and the issues of revision of history. His main research focus are the war crimes committed by the Fascist occupying forces and their collaborators in the territory of Yugoslavia between 1941-1945. He has published several academic articles and three books: Sites of Suffering and Sites of Anti-fascist Struggle in Belgrade 1941-1944. A guide to Reading a City, (ed. Rena Radle, Milovan Pisarri), Belgrade, 2013 (co-authored); Liberation: Belgrade, October of 1944, Belgrade, 2014; Punishment and Crime: The Collaborationist Forces in Serbia: Responsibility for War Crimes (1941-1944) and Military Losses (1944-1945), Belgrade, 2015.
CRIC 01 – Kontrapunkt (kontrapunkt-mk.org)
Споделено на: јануари 25, 2021 во 3:33 pm