Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: podcast and discussion of the book Past: An Introduction to the Problem, Tuesday 12.11.2024. at 16h
An Introduction to the Problem Called the Past: Film, Communism, and Former Yugoslavia
Millennials Are Killing Capitalism Live!
Tuesday 12.11.2024. at 16h
This will be a book discussion of the book Past: An Introduction to the Problem which is distributed through our friends at Iskrabooks.org
We will be joined by Boris Buden, Olivera Jokić, Zoran Pantelic & Dubravka Sekulić to discuss the book, thinking with the Yugoslavian Socialist past, film including "The Black Wave," and filmmaker Želimir Žilnik's work and thought specifically.
"Who can know what is in the past? Is it what historians can tell us? Should we also trust what we can remember? Past: An Introduction to the Problem proposes that the problem of the past now concerns everyone. Visions of a different, brighter future defeated in the Cold War and its heated afterlives, we are being offered the past as the only horizon of possibility.
And what are we supposed to find in that past?
Philosopher Boris Buden considers these questions in a series of essays and conversations with filmmaker Želimir Žilnik, one of the most prominent filmmakers of the "Black Wave" of 1960s socialist Yugoslavia—a child of communists and an internationally successful artist using resources available to all in the socialist state, Žilnik remains a constant critic of political systems that seek to curb artists' reflections on the world being built. Treating Žilnik as a rare witness of a past for which his work is uncommon documentation, Past: An Introduction to the Problem asks crucial questions about ways we can know the past, how the past informs our experience, and how it defines our sense of possibility."
The book Past • An Introduction to the Problem is also a part of the research program of Center_kuda.org and associates that examines the social, cultural, and intellectual heritage of former Yugoslavia. This program is carried out through the projects “The Continuous Art Class,” “Media Ontology,” and “Political practices of (post-) Yugoslavian art.” These projects provide a new reading of the progressive practices of the Neo-Avant Garde for today, and open a new way of communication between these practices and contemporary art production. https://www.kuda.org/en
The book was produced by
Boris Buden, who wrote the essays and conducted conversations with Želimir Žilnik
Želimir Žilnik, who answered Boris Buden’s questions, orally and in writing
Hito Steyerl, who recorded conversations between BB and ŽŽ
Olivera Jokić, who translated the book into English, re-edited and significantly improved the text
kuda.org, the book’s initiators - who edited, redacted, and coordinated the work of book creation
Publishers: New Media Center_kuda.org, Novi Sad, Serbia, ISBN 978-86-88567-41-1
Multimedia Institute — MaMa, Zagreb, Croatia, ISBN 978-953-8469-13-8
Iskra Books, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, ISBN 979-8-8691-9071-0
Boris Buden is a writer, cultural theorist and translator based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s Buden publishes essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics and contemporary art in Croatian, German and English. He is permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna, and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published: Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989, Berlin 2020.
Olivera Jokić helped Past: An Introduction to the Problem appear in English with new appendices and orientation aids. She spends a lot of her days in New York City.
Dubravka Sekulić is an educator and spatial theorist. Focused on issues of solidarity and liberation, her work explores the connection between spatial literacy and collective political emancipation. She is currently writing a book under the tentative title City Against the City - Minor Planning for the Liberated Future. In 2009, with Gal Kirn and Žiga Testen, she initiated the project Surfing the Black - Yugoslav Black Cinema and its transgressive moments, which culminated with the book published in 2012 by Jan van Eyck Academie. The book can be found here. She works as a programme lead for MA City Design at Royal College Art.
Previous discussions on Yugoslavia:
Yugoslavia and Constructing Non-Alignment with Gal Kirn and Dubravka Sekulić
To support our work become a patron for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism