Teodor Celakoski

Teodor Celakoski (1971) is a cultural worker, right to the city activist and politician from Zagreb. He has been involved in cultural policy and institutional innovation in culture since the early 2000s - he is a co-founder of the Multimedia Institute and the socio-cultural centre Mama; he initiated Clubture - a network for cooperation and exchange among actors of independent culture based on the principles of participatory budgeting; the Zagreb Centre for Independent Culture and Youth Pogon - an institution founded as a civil-public partnership; and the Kultura Nova Foundation - a public institution supporting civil society organisations in the field of contemporary arts and culture. As coordinator of the Right to the City initiative, he has been involved for over a decade in campaigns with local citizens' initiatives and trade unions against the privatisation of public space and infrastructure. The most prominent and successful campaign mobilised the whole of Croatia - the petition for a referendum against the fifty-year concession of motorways gathered more than half a million signatures in two weeks, forcing the government of the day to abandon its attempts to privatise the motorways. In 2014 he received the Princess Margriet Award of the European Cultural Foundation. In 2017 he participated in the initiation of the municipal political platform Zagreb je NAŠ! and in 2019 of the national political platform Možemo!, where he serves as a coordinator. In the 2021 local elections in Zagreb, he was elected to the City Assembly, where he currently serves as vice-president. (2022)