Russia in Europe – Russia and Europe is the title of May’s Debate on Europe, which took place at the Anna Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum in Saint Petersburg from 15 to 18 May. The event is intended as a platform for communication about the forms and prospects of neighbourhood between Russia and Europe today.
Throughout Europe, parliamentary politics has become increasingly intertwined with the politics of street protest, writes Mateusz Falkowski. And as recent events in Poland and Hungary show, a new dynamic of protest has emerged from the clash in central and eastern Europe between populist and liberal visions of democracy.
Commons are a form of resistance against self-exploitation, isolation and the reduction of people to consumers, writes Brigitte Kratzwald. But this resistance isn’t about destroying what already exists: it’s about creative production geared to meeting people’s real needs.
Received notions of artistic and social practices belonging to separate spheres of society are fading away, writes Agnieszka Winiewska of Krytyka Polityczna (Poland). The commons is where cultural and social activists meet with the broader public and, together, create a genuinely participatory culture.
Commoning strategies are often improvised even in the liminal spaces that emerge in the cracks of Fortress Europe, says urban anthropologist Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. In a text based on her September 2015 talk at the ECF’s annual Idea Camp, Ifekwunigwe calls for a new commons that embraces both the mobile and the settled.
There are a raft of major challenges that complicate the creation of the commons today. The researcher and writer Charlie Tims considers some of the most pressing of these challenges – in combination with landmark efforts to regain control over domestic and international modes of governance, as well as to reclaim resources, public space and housing. The following text is based on his September 2015 talk at the ECF’s annual Idea Camp.
Bottom-up cooperation between the independent cultural sector and domestic and European institutions can lead to both the decentralization of cultural production and the democratization of culture. So says Katarina Pavi of the Croatian cultural hub organization Culture 2 Commons.
Students of journalism and journalists alike are determined to build upon the plurality of voices that came out of Maidan and were propelled into the media. But this is not necessarily to suggest that Maidan was the cradle of the new Ukrainian journalism. A reportage from Kyiv.
Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi is probably the biggest star among Ukrainian directors. At the Cannes film festival in 2014, his film The Tribe won three Critics’ Week prizes and was nominated for the Caméra d’Or, and the magazine Rolling Stone called it the most intense film of 2015.
Slaboshpytskyi’s next project is Luxembourg, an art film about life in today’s Chernobyl zone. Screening rights to the film have already been acquired in a number of European countries.
Myroslav talks about his plans for the future, his early works, the problems of Ukrainian culture and the Chernobyl zone.
A typical Mediterranean island, poor but charming – to the tourists, at least. At the same time though, Lampedusa is of course a symbol of the refugee crisis and a microcosm of the militarization of the Mediterranean. Fear and misconceptions abound in equal measure. Olaf Haagensen reports.
Theatre makers in Kosovo and Serbia decided to put on an ambitious, dual-language production of “Romeo and Juliet” to tackle themes of feuding and reconciliation. Shakespeare scholar Preti Taneja travelled to see the top-secret rehearsals and premiere.
In dialogue with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kathleen McAfee considers the grounds on which a politics of broader solidarity can and must emerge in the face of an unprecedented ecological turning point; a turning point that is simultaneously a crisis of subsistence for billions of people, albeit to different degrees and in different ways.
The unnatural power of human society and technology has grown so great that it has, ironically, come full circle to become natural again, writes Timothy J. LeCain. Responding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four theses”, LeCain considers the resulting breach in what once seemed like an impregnable wall of separation between natural history and human history.
The urgency of global challenges such as climate change and the need for collective action might be expected to reduce the importance of identity politics and questions of difference. Yet it remains the case that there is no neutral conception of humanity for us all to belong to. Roshi Naidoo considers the options for fashioning new languages of solidarity.
A majority of almost two-thirds opposed the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine in a referendum in the Netherlands on 6 April. As the public debate surrounding the referendum gained pace, the Ukrainian independent TV channel Hromadske became an important forum for associated discussion. Now that the results are in, Hromadske journalist Volodymyr Yermolenko assesses the implications for EU-Ukraine relations, and European politics in general.
It seems that, subsequent to the “hybrid war” between Ukraine and Russia, reconciliation efforts have ensued – but only at first glance. In fact, what we witness is a continuation of war by other means, writes Tatiana Zhurzhenko. Mapping the growing alienation between the two nations, she asks: under what conditions is dialogue possible?