“I looked and looked but I didn't see God.”
Yuri Gagarin

[1961, speaking about becoming the first human to enter space]

Two fantasies are building up the collective unconsciousness of the West today. One is the fantasy of the ultimate recovery of the planet – a fantasy of a return to Paradise. The other is the fantasy of Noah's Ark - the beginning of space imperialism. Perhaps, these two fantasies point to the emerging class division of the 21st Century: the few who can count on the space asylum, and the rest who cannot – earthlings and spacemen.

Nowadays, we are witnessing an accelerated digitbiotech re-positioning of the socio-economic relations structuring the world. It seems that because their power is already materially instituted in possession of physical and digital space, energy, food and health supplies, technology, and arms, the security wall of the new elites is soon going to reach the point of impenetrability, immunizing the contra-power of the masses (which are now still having some strength with strikes, consumption boycotts, protests, and uprisings). In a radical dystopia, this transformation tiles the shift of digital capitalism into an indentured servitude based on debt bondage and into some form of digital manorialism. Is such a posture a well-founded fear or a paranoia? We do not need to answer this question. What is important now is to set the protocols of emancipation within this new constellation. It is important to dismantle the current fantasies, resist the immunizing biopolitics of eco-liberalism, and begin to create a different social reality. How? We will discuss this in the park.

Radical talks take place in a public space and aim to circulate among people. Several invited speakers will present their thoughts on the topics, while the audience will be invited to actively participate in a discussion. Over a glass of wine.

Curator of the Festival of Radical Talks: Bara Kolenc, PhD. 
Guests: PhD. Rachel Aumiller, PhD. Niklas Toivakainen, Miha Turšič, Zack Sievers, PhD. Alfie Bown

With the support of the Embassy of Finland Budapest

“Now, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Nietzsche

The gaze is not in the eye of an individual, the gaze is outside. It is the gaze of the other. The perception of the world as I see it, and the idea of conscious individuality based on this perception is a huge falsification. The subject has no firm ground, no identity – it is founded on a lack. In the moment of self-recognition and alienation through speech, the subject loses what she never possessed: the thing. What the subject lacks is the object and it is this lost object that she desires evermore. But because she desires the object that is by definition a lost object, desire, unlike need, cannot be satisfied. As such, is the driving force of subjectivity. When she speaks, desire speaks through her utterance: che vuoi?

The other is taking the place of the object: the other is the other of the other. Alienation forms inter-subjectivity as something pre-existent, as the fundamental social tissue. In this sense, inter-subjectivity preconditions individuality.

Erik Swyngedouw recently pushed this Lacanian proposition further, posing a question of whether practicing otherness, the social bond founded not on possession (of the goods, of identity) but lack, is capable of breaking the neoliberal ideology of individualization as privatization? Following this, we want to ask what does it mean to fully recognize the lack as something that installs the social bond? What does it mean to practice it? What is sharing a lack in view of social metabolism and environmental issues, from the perspective of de-growth and the ideas of sustainability, autonomy, and equality? To grasp this proposition, is there something we can learn from the juxtaposition of the Yugoslavian and European realities in the past? Is there something we can learn out of the radicalization of the conditions of life that we have been recently faced with?

Radical talks take place in a public space and aim to circulate among people. Several invited speakers will present their thoughts on the topics, while the audience will be invited to actively participate in a discussion. Over a glass of wine.  

Curator of the Festival of Radical Talks: Bara Kolenc, PhD. 
Guests: Mag. Ajda Pistotnik, Mag. Dino Manzoni, PhD. Magdalena Germek, PhD. Gal Kirn (TBA), Mag. Saša Hajzler

Bara Kolenc is a philosopher (PhD in Philosophy) and artist from Ljubljana. She is a researcher at the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a lecturer at the Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, University of Ljubljana. She is the author of Ponavljanje in uprizoritev: Kierkegaard, psihoanaliza, gledališče (Repetition and Enactment: Kirkegaard, Psychoanalysis, Theatre, DTP, Analecta, 2014). She publishes articles in Problemi, Filozofski vestnik, Maska, S Journal and elsewhere and features in monographs (most recently in The Language of Touch, Bloomsbury, 2019 and A Touch of Doubt, De Gruyter, 2021). Shaped by extensive training in classical and contemporary dance, receiving also the DanceWEB scholarship at ImpulsTanz in 2003, she has thus far created twelve evening-length performances, eight youth performances and numerous short performances, performative acts, installations, lectures, and lecture-performances. For her work at the intersection of performing arts, visual arts and film, she has received several awards, most recently the prominent award Theatertreffen Stückemarkt Comission of Work 2016 and the Award for Important Works of Art of the University of Ljubljana in 2018. Her new work Brina: A Kinaesthetic Monument, created in collaboration with Leja Jurišić, Peter Kutin, Patrick Lechner and Mathias Lenz will premiere this year at Spider festival and ImPulsTanz festival in Vienna.

www.barakolenc.com