Srđan Dvornik: Actors without Society – The Role of Civil Actors in the Postcommunist Transformation (2009)

Twenty years after the epoch-making change in 1989, which affected the post-Yugoslavian space in a way entirely different from other former “real-socialist” European countries, this study is an effort toward an analytical view on the past two decades of development of civil society in the western Balkans. The development there does not correspond to the theoretical outlines of the democratic transition or transformation. The primary reason lies in the fact that in socialist Yugoslavia, like in other societies of the “real socialism” in the East, the relation between state and society substantially differed from this relation in free capitalist societies. This difference in the relation between state and society, as the author of this study Srđan Dvornik points out, had a decisive impact on the emerging civil societies. The study shows: Without civic engagement, there will be no changes, and the engagement of seemingly marginal actors achieves more than would be expected on the basis of their “systemic” place.

A study by Srđan Dvornik
Edited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation
Publication series on democracy, Volume 15
Berlin, Nov. 2009, 156 pages
ISBN 978-3-86928-016-5

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Noro Farik (ed.): 1968 Revisited: 40 Years of Protest Movements (2008) [English, French]

Essays and Interviews with Protagonists of 1968.

Contents
* Preface by Nora Farik and Claude Weinber
* What is left? 1968 revisited introduction by Ralf Fücks
* 1968 – Again! Reference year for an age. The events in Brazil by Marcelo Ridenti
* Poland in 1968: „The freedom we needed so badly was so obvious elsewhere“ by Teresa Bogucka
* 1968: Czechoslovakia by Oldřich Tůma
* 1968 in Moscow – A Beginning by Alexander Daniel
* 1968 – An East German Perspective by Wolfgang Templin
* Germany 1968 – SDS, Urban Guerillas and Visions of Räterepublik interview with Klaus Meschkat
* Apartheid South Africa in 1968: Not quite business as usual by Bill Nasson
* Belgrade, June 1968 by Nebojša Popov
* May 1968 in Belgium: The crack bursts open by Benoît Lechat
* „Today the big political game is ‘bashing the 1960s’“ interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Publisher Heinrich Böll Foundation EU Regional Office Brussels, May 2008
Democracy series, Volume 7
68 pages

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Red Thread, 1-5 (2009-) [English/Turkish]

“The project Red Thread is envisioned as an active network and platform for exchange of knowledge and collaboration of artists, curators, social scientists, theorists and cultural operators from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, and beyond. It aims to create and widely disseminate new knowledge about paradigmatic socially engaged art practices in a wide geopolitical context, thus challenging the predominance of Western narratives in official art histories and exhibition making. Through initiating research, meetings, panel discussions and an active online site for exploring both historical and contemporary approaches that deepen and challenge broader relations of art and society, Red Thread intends to reopen the issues of joint modernist legacies and histories between various so-called “marginal” regions, and attempts to create new approaches to deal with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning and reinterpretation of art history.

The title of the project indicates a critical cultural and artistic engagement that has been present in the peripheral zones of the European modernistic project in different conceptual manifestations since the 1960s, when the crisis of the project of Western monolith high modernism in its relation to ideas of social progress became apparent. Metaphorical meaning of the expression ‘red thread’ suggests not only way out of labyrinth, but also a fragile, elastic link between different intellectual, social and artistic experimentations that share a desire for social change and the active role of culture and art in this process.

Red Thread is conceived as a possibility for starting a long-term communication and establishing new international platforms for artists and cultural workers from the regions considered to be part of supposedly shrinking but still corporeally very real geographical margins. Even if today one feels that there is no region excluded from the international art circuit, there still remains the issue of control, the unresolved and continuing play of inclusion and exclusion. In that respect, focusing primarily on regions of the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus and North Africa, the project is conceived as an active site for rethinking the questions of production, definition, and presentation of the artwork and the artists’ identity in the globalized (art)world. It will explore the rules of conduct established in the Western art system, and question how the circulation and reception of information is regulated and how we can (and can we really) challenge it.”

Editors in Chief: WHW/What, How & for Whom collective members Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović
Co-editors of the first issue: Prelom Kolektiv members Dušan Grlja, Vladimir Jerić and Jelena Vesić
Members of the Board: Meltem Ahıska, Ruben Arevshatyan, Erden Kosova
Managing Editor: Balca Ergener

Issue 1: HTML, PDF
Issue 2: “Sweet 60s”: HTML, PDF
Issue 3: HTML, PDF
Issue 4: HTML, PDF
Issue 5: Alt-Truths and Insta-Realities HTML, PDF