I’ve been looking for gold.

It’s within.

EASTERN (EUROPEAN) IMAGE STUDY GROUP

Image: Rūta Junevičiūtė, Solar, 2021, Veem House of Performance.

“It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other
half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightment.”

Extract from Inventing Eastern Europe:

The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightment by Larry Wolff, p.4

“[…] Eastern Europe after 1989 resembles a landscape of historical ruins that is
inhabited only by children, immature people unable to organize their lives
democratically without guidance from another. They see themselves neither as
subjects nor as authors of a democracy that they actually won through struggle and
created by themselves. It has been expropriated from them through the idea and
practice of the postcommunist transition, only to return now from the outside as a
foreign object that they must reappropriate in a long, hard and painful process. In
the strange world of postcommunism, democracy appears at once as a goal to be
reached and a lost object. It doesn’t give them free choice. The ‘children of
communism’ remain what they once already were, namely marionettes in a
historical process that takes place independently of their will and drags them with it
to a better future. So they are very familiar with this strange form of social life we
call ‘transition’. […] One does not expect the children of communism to have a
critically reflected memory of the communist past. It is precisely for this reason that
they have been made into children, namely in order not to remember this past. As
children, they don’t have one. Paradoxically, it is only in postcommunism that one
gets a dubious impression that communism actually never existed. […]It is not so
much the suppression of communism as a historical fact, the erasure of the
communist past with all its intellectual and political complexity from the historical
consciousness of postcommunism, […], but rather the immense ignorance with
which the postcommunist world refuses to wonder about this past and its afterlife,
or to ask: ‘Why did this all happen?’

Boris Buden, Boris Buden Children of Postcommunisim, 2010,

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/children-of-postcommunism#fn15

///

If we urgently need new ways of telling the future how do we deal with
stories of the past as they anyway shape our understanding of the present?

I would like to gather a research group focused on the notions of “Eastern

Europe” and “Global East” ( the latter category is proposed by Romanian scholar
Iulia Statica, more: https://vimeo.com/527761680 and
https://vimeo.com/527827864)

Some questions I’d like to share:

What is the embodied archive of former “Eastern block” inhabitants experiences

that are carried from one generation to another?
Is there certain common geography of collective imagination and affective relations
to the place, where, as some like to inconsiderately joke, the “progress” just comes
later?
What are psychophysical remains of wars of the XXth century (Second World War,
Cold War, Yugoslav Wars) in a diverse and complex area that is put under
ambiguous umbrella terms like Central, Eastern, Southern Eastern?
How are nuanced ways of silence inherited and reproduced as strategies of dissent,
adaptation and/or coping with mechanisms?
What are the optics of imagery that is being projected on subjects from this vague
ground, how it is incorporated and acts upon them?
How do feelings of “shame”, “inferiority” and submissiveness arise in relation to the
“Eastern (European)” identity? Does it affect you? In what context do you feel so?
According to what measures one evaluates emotional labor, politeness, proper
education or lack of it?
What did you want to leave and what was the direction of your desires?
How can experience of having “less” materially be seen not as a “lack” but a valuable
insight for imagining future of “de-growth” economy?
How can experience of non-Western collectivity be informative and generative in
imagining alternative to late-capitalism fatigue?
Are there different attitudes towards organization of time between where you come
from and where you are at now? Could you find aesthetic shapes of them and play
how you relate to them?

I would like to use performative tools to release and investigate some imagery that
is denied into my subconsciousness as irrelevant, oldschool, silly, stereotypical, but
nethertheless existing and creating inner toxins. I would like to gather a group with
the same curiosity and lived concern, where we could be witnesses and
conversation partners to sabotage projected ideas like “constant transition” by
enlarging, stylizing, dragging and otherwise sharing them. If you catch yourself
performing the image you are annoyed with in your head, here is the space to do so,
air it, let it move, - feel free to bring your props.

The research group is unfixed, might be short lived or repetitive in longer term. It is
aimed at SNDO community members, but is open for guests. Let’s just start with the
first gathering whomever can come, and see how it unfolds. Due to everyone’s busy
schedules within SNDO, I suggest several days, and ask you to PM me with the
timeframe that suits you for the meeting if you’re interested.

Days: Oct. 9 from 6 PM

Oct 10 from 12:00
Oct 11 flexible
Oct 12 from 12:00
Oct 13 flexible