 Good afternoon. I know from my little academic experience how great it is to deliver the speech to the group right after lunch. I've been asked to host this event which will be limited actually to three things. The first which I should say at the very end, but I will say it at the very beginning, after this meeting everyone is invited to move on the other side of the street to the Arta again for a coffee and the keynote in the evening. This is the first. The second and most important I would like to welcome Igor Stix, a politics researcher from University of Belgrade, among many other things. And then the third, as I understand my hosting position should be here limited to stop Igor when he will start preaching us too much and also encourage you guys if you will not be willing to jump into the discussion after Igor's presentation. But I think I don't need neither of that. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you all. I'll see if I'll be using this chair and as my role here is to present you some of my work that corresponds quite well with the reshape project. It's on art and citizenship and social movements and protest movements or how art becomes part of say activism or activist citizenship. It is also not only about art. This is why it's called activist aesthetics. We could discuss this theoretically if you want. What does it mean? You all know from your experience that protest or certain public action always have certain types of aesthetics but generally speaking I will concentrate on certain artistic forms of art but also art understood quite largely within these movements within what is happening over the last 10 years in the post-Yugoslav space. So this is the regional limitation. I will be speaking about this space and the last last 10 years. Why am I speaking about last 10 years? It is the period when we faced when we faced when we experienced something unusual for the post socialist countries which is the rebirth of the left. The rebirth of the left. And especially our friends from Eastern Europe I think it will be an interesting point of comparison to see what's happening in their countries and why in certain countries it's easier to reanimate some tenets of socialist ideology and why it's not possible in other places or why the post-Yugoslav space correspond more with what's happening mostly capitalist west when it comes to the left and not so much with the Eastern Europe. Of course needless to say you all know that the historical experience of Yugoslavia has been different and that historical experience will play a role. It's a surprising role. It's a surprising rebirth of the left. When I say rebirth of the left I'm thinking about modern 21st century left that is equally critical of capitalism as a system, as an unequal system but also of liberal democratic model as non-represent. And so this is the left that wants to see alternatives to capitalism and wants to see alternative democratic models. And I'll show you the examples and you'll see what they have in mind. This had a huge echo among artists, a huge echo among cultural workers and also resulted in a number of series of what we would call cultural artistic products such as films, such as books, such as contemporary art, such as performances, such as theater. I'll try to show as much as I can. It's a sample, it's not exhaustive overview of what was going on and it will be interesting to hear your responses. So I wouldn't go for an hour, I would go maybe for 30, 40 minutes and then of course it will be interesting to hear the questions and I'm sure that the discussion will will enrich or I'll be able through discussion to explain certain parts or you yourself will react to the material presented. Now how I approach this issue? Sometimes magical thinking doesn't work. All right, we'll keep it like this. It's been behaving in a strange way. I did a lot to work on citizenship. So I published a book on 100 years of citizenship in the former Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav states. I work a lot on a legal political perspective. What does it happen when countries change and they change how they define what citizen is and who can be citizen? I'm sure people here in Cluj know a lot about this, about moving borders, minorities, about a lot of bad historical experiences and we leave it as you know in the space that used to be Yugoslavia. We leave it multiple times and that provided the good case study to understand what citizenship is in under the changing regimes. At that point when I was finishing my PhD thesis on this topic, something important happened for some people who are now here in the room. At least it was extremely important for me. There was something you might call a minor incident but it's been called the student occupation of the University of Zagreb and I happened to be there waiting for my UK visa going to work in Edinburgh. I happened just to be in Zagreb at that point and I went to join the students to see what is really going on. It turned out to be of utmost importance for the rebirth of the left. It wasn't just another student occupation or student protest. It was a student occupation to fight for free education against the commercialization of higher education but two important things happened. It was how it was done that mattered. So one thing is to occupy university, close the university, it's a student strike, it happens everywhere. But then there was something very important that the students started some sort of an assembly, a citizen's assembly, all the plenum as they call it, the plenary assembly. That's also not that unusual, it happens all the time. What was unusual was to invite outsiders to join them and it turned out into an agora of every night of around 1,000 citizens who started discussing issues that are not only related to the university such as why it happened that we have commercialized higher education, why everything is privatized, why we are living under neoliberal norms. So the whole process started through the form of horizontal democracy. And the critique of the system developed quite powerfully on that spot there in April 2009. And then it spread around and I'll show you how it spread. And that had a huge influence on me. I started working more on these movements, on the protest movements, on the leftist movements in the Balkans that were in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis starting suddenly to appear in the public sphere, especially in the media sphere. It was possible again to say, well, maybe capitalism is not the best of all systems. It was possible again to say, well, let's see what we had before. So there was this kind of a new push among the academics, among activists or journalists or writers and so on to talk about alternative models. And that corresponded well, of course, as you know, with the movements that were happening everywhere else, occupied Wall Street movement, Puerto Del Sol, Indignados and so on. It just happened that somehow there was this synchronicity that in Eastern Europe, in this space of the former Yugoslavia, similar movements were also developed. We'll come again to the, this was the rise and then there was stagnation and then fall. And we'll come to that maybe in the discussion, where are we right now after this glorious decade? But, of course, academically, how I'm going now to approach these issues. So I found the solution, and this is now I'm going to the heart of the matter, in Hans-Tis Lehmann, maybe some of you know, of course, post-Dromatic theater, short lecture, half an hour. He was talking about aesthetics of resistance and aesthetics of rebellion in new movements. Funny enough, you can find the YouTube lecture and then his text curiously was published in Croatia, in German and in Croatian translation. There was some kind of obvious correspondence with the questions we asked at that time. And what he is proposing with this concept of aesthetics of resistance, aesthetics of rebellion. Of course, he took aesthetics of resistance from Peter Weiss, his novel, aesthetics of resistance, which is a huge novel. Hopefully, some people will manage to read at least part of it. It's beautifully written, but it speaks about the resistance of German workers, German anti-fascist workers under the Nazi regime. So the idea Lehmann gets out of that is that this is a work of art that is trying to understand the potentialities of historical struggles. Also in the novel, there's a lot of discussion about how art presents the history. And what were the past resistances? What can we learn from that? What were the potentialities of that moment that didn't happen or happen in a different way? So exploration of this becomes for him aesthetics of resistance. Aesthetics of rebellion, on the other hand, for him is the works of art that are in the moment, that are part of the movement, that are part of political action, that want to support political action, but also, and this is an important point, to articulate that political action. And we all know here that art has these capacities, sometimes, to give you words or images to express what you actually want to achieve political. Now, I have a couple of additions to what Lehmann suggested, and I'll show you the examples. One is that sometimes we could find the works of art, and I'll show you some examples that do combine aesthetics of both resistance and rebellion, that do reflect on what happened before, but are in the service of the new movement. Second thing is what happens with what I would call here aestheticization of resistances, of past resistances. Where is this Che Guevara social club? Typical thing, Che Guevara t-shirt and so on. When we were hosting Che Guevara's daughter Adela Guevara in Zagreb and Suburban Film Festival, she was so furious because she was constantly finding the images of her father everywhere, but then ended up on panties. And then she was like, this is the end of it, absolutely, and the most horrible thing that could happen. So this is a bit of an aestheticization of past resistances, something we find glorious, something that's cool to have on your t-shirt, something that is maybe just a fashion night. But of course here comes the difference, that in a various contexts this same Che Guevara shirt will clearly put a different message. If it's a swimming pool, party at Hotel Belvedere with Che Guevara t-shirt, all right. But if it's in a protest and it depends on what kind of protest movement, Che Guevara's image will get another meaning. So I think we have to kind of keep this as well in mind. And the question is how you move from aestheticization to resistance. How something that is maybe just there for a consumer consumption becomes cultural consumption becomes actually subversive or becomes part of resistance. Here are also our friends. We have this who did something very interesting, which is actually to set up choirs. And in Formigo Slevo, we have this whole phenomenon of choirs who are singing revolutionary songs. I think there are 10 of them, even one outpost in Vienna of the former Yugoslavs getting together and singing songs from socialist period. It is a true phenomenon. And at first when people show up, it was so funny to hear again these songs that you somehow remember. There was always a bit of ironic distance, a bit of smile when you mentioned socialism and when you sing partisan songs. But that was 10 years ago, seven or eight years ago. And then suddenly this has become more important. So that many choirs joined the movement and were singing at the protest. And there was no irony there. What's that? Some of our friends went, were, ended up arrested because they were singing partisan songs at the Kosovo Monument, which is a monument to the partisans themselves. But they've been completely captured by nationalist forces in that part of Bosnia. So they came there to sing partisan songs in honor of the partisans, because the movement monument is in honor of the partisans who died for freedom and they were arrested by police. Which song was it? I don't know. A couple of them, but related to that area. So then it became quite serious that even singing these songs in public could get you in jail. And of course, to oppose these songs to the nationalist anthems that were sang there. So this is how we could see this movement, how we could recapture symbols for the existing movements. And of course, the question I'm asking, is this something like aesthetics of emancipation? And how to understand it? We'll come to the conclusion. I don't have an answer, but maybe we'll come to this answer. But I'll go now to the examples, just to illustrate what I just said, and to talk first about the aesthetics of resistance. So what you are seeing here is a theater performance in Belgrade, entirely based on partisan, early socialist revolutionary poems. 45 minutes, 50 minutes of reciting these heroic verses, usually from the 30s, from the 40s, then the verses written during the socialist reconstruction after the Second World War and so on. What was curious about that? I recited these same poems when I was a child in Sarajevo in elementary school. I knew them by heart. We would come and then we would say, oh, and then he died for the camps, blah, blah, blah, blah, and our parents will come there and everyone was like, okay, and another school show, and that's it. We couldn't understand it at the end of 80s. We couldn't understand any of that. It was just an empty ritual of a dying system. When we heard that in 2000 and what was in 2014, like everyone was silent in Belgrade. Curiously enough, one woman who was sitting next to me, she is famous in Belgrade as a liberal, anti-communist, she was sitting there, she said, what used to be a regime, now it's a subversion. Sometimes liberals could get to the point. She said it directly next to me. This is a mural painted by a course collective in Belgrade and you would ask yourself why someone needs to paint the mural about the liberation of Belgrade in 1944 today. The reason is, of course, that this anti-fascist heritage being sidelined or marginalized or questioned, that what we consider as a liberation for some right-wing conservative forces was yet another occupation or the beginning of the communist dictatorship and so on and so on. So the course collective decided to put this mural on a building in Belgrade celebrating this event by showing what kind of momentous event that was when the Belgrade was liberated from the Nazi occupation. They did another thing as well. Again, in Belgrade, it is called Struggle Knowledge Equality. What you see here is their take on a student magazine from 1934. And it is their take to understand the student struggles in 1934 were exactly the same as today. They were also protesting against the fact that not they were protesting for more democracy, they were also radical. So the course collective went back a bit in history to understand what was that struggle, that and how actually we could connect with it. Then you will see something that some of you might know, Igor Grubic, a traditional artist, did something simple. He put the red scar on monuments dedicated to heroes of anti-fascist struggles and of communist revolution, of course. So now you can see how it actually looks like and trans. All right. So see this classical monument to a hero of revolutionary struggle. Now when he has the red scar, he looks like one of us, like some of the artists, some of us contemporary, and that was of course intended. There is a sense of kind of trying to get back to the ideals that used to be official, as I'm referring here to Badiou, who contrasted the official art with militant art. Almost as if, you know, like he would say official art is the art of the results or what has been victoriously decided, okay, we want it, and then we build monuments like we did in Yugoslavia. But the militant art is an art of the contradiction between affirmative nature of principles and the dubious results of struggle. The principles are clear, they are affirmative. We want better society. We want paradise on earth. But the dubious results of struggles, as you know, are quite, quite, quite complex, and not always according to the script. But this is what he would call militant art. It comes very well to explain what I'm, what I'm saying here, how we came to this situation, that the former official art, officially sanctioned art, officially sponsored art, meaning socialist art, could become a militant art today. And there is an entire movement of kind of saving the socialist monuments from decay, from destruction. In the 90s, most of these monuments were bombed and dynamited and destroyed. This especially happened in Croatia during the war. And now, people are trying to save them, but also to understand what was their meaning. So again, the same situation. What used to be a regime is suddenly becoming radical, radical again. We are getting the story behind the fact that so many people died to defeat Nazism, that so many people died for a better society, that people invested so much energy into this modernizing socialist project that was Yugoslav self management. Now, here's an example of what I mentioned when the aesthetics of resistance comes together with the aesthetics of rebellion. During 2014, now you remember this, I mentioned the plenums and the horizontal democracy of Zagreb students 2009. It exploded in Bosnia, of all places, in 2014, with protest movement that is quite similar to what is happening today in Lebanon. So in a divided country, when there is no public space, when you can't enter official institutions without being labeled as Serb, Croat or Bosniak, people just came on the street, they burned the government building in Tuzla, then they did the same thing in Sarajevo and in other places. And in a matter of days, some 20 regional governments resigned. There was a moment that something is happening. It was an ethnic movement. It was a movement that was calling for social justice. Social justice, just that. And that surprised everyone, international observers, international aid workers, politicians were frightened for a couple of days, then they figure out that it will pass. And that we probably, and I say we, I say because I also participate in that, we're not that powerful that we are not going to go further. One thing we did remains controversial. We basically invited people to the plenums to citizens assemblies instead of streets. Even today, I meet some people who tell me, you tricked us. We should have continued burning things. If you burn, they see. If you go somewhere and discuss, and discuss, and discuss, nobody cares. They might be right. I'm not going to say it totally. There's something there. And this was a two Sarajevo, Sarajevo artists did this little poster. Now, now I'll tell you why it connects directly to this, to this monument in Cyrillic, which was a monument to Gabriella Prince. Everybody know here, Gabriella Prince, the guy who killed Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, yeah? First World War. And this was an interesting monument in 1949, 1949, just keep it in mind, where socialist artists, you know, socialist realism and so on. It's a Sarajevo artist was commissioned to make a monument to Gabriella Prince. So what he did was, as we say now, conceptual art before conceptual art. He just put his footsteps onto the concrete and put it on the paper. And with this little description that says, from this place on 28th of June, 1914, Gabriella Prince with his gunshots expressed, so he didn't kill anyone. He expressed, he expressed the people's protest against tyranny and centuries old desire of our peoples for freedom. And that was it. That was the entire monument. So as a kid, we would all stand in these footsteps. Yeah, people were coming as in the footsteps there. Then the war. And then you see what happens with historical heroes. So Gabriella Prince died in Theresienstadt in 1918. He didn't live to see Yugoslavia. And in Yugoslavia he was greeted as a hero, who literally killed the oppressor. In socialist, communist had a bit of a problem with that, but wanted to include his legacy into the new narrative. And this was the way to include the Gabriella Prince into the new narrative. Gabriella Prince did it for all of us. He wasn't just some kind of Serb terrorist. He wanted to fight for the freedom of all peoples. The war starts. You have Sarajevo Besiege. You have Serb extremist on the on the mountain tops claiming that Gabriella Prince indeed was only Serb and nothing but a Serb who was fighting for the freedom only of one people, Serb people. The response of those who stay in the city was to dig his footsteps and throw them into the nearby river. And start saying Gabriella Prince was what? A Serb terrorist who destroyed the beautiful Austria, Austria-Hungary. That was so multicultural and so on. So different interpretations, obviously. Until 2014, and when this poster was done, again footsteps, and it says what? From this place on the 7th of February 2014, an anonymous person with the throne stone expressed the people's protest against tyranny and centuries-old desire of our people for freedom. This was an interesting new leftist re-appropriation of Prince. And a month later there was a century of the First World War and some of our comrades went there and did another performance. I don't have a photo. When they put the faces of Prince on their face saying we are again, you know, we are again occupied and we are again going to remel. So it's an interesting way, way how to deal with the past. But here clearly you see that the reference is directly to the official art. And how you can re-appropriate that new context to become a militant. Another example, very close to my heart that I pick it up for my book on citizenship, is this another work by Igor Grubic. This what you can see is the faculty of philosophy in Zagreb where the rebellion I told you about started in 2000 occupation. So Igor went there as the true artist looking around figured out that there is a monument next to it that most of us didn't know what it was. And he pulled these red, thin red threads. Thin red threads between the building and that monument. Very in mind at that point many people, including myself, did not give a leftist spin to what was happening. It was clear that this is something progressive and so on but no one was entirely sure what's going on. Somehow with this color red and with these threads getting to the to this monument Igor was on the right track. Although he said in his book that color, the choice of color has nothing to do with the ideology. All right. What is that monument? Again a monument from the 60s to a poet. To a poet, 19th century poet who was similar to Princip against Austrian rule for the freedom of South Slavs. And it was done as a of course five-point star. That's an interesting thing. Although that man wasn't communist, wasn't even so. Had some socialist ideas at the end of 19th century but wasn't communist. It was a way how official art tried to recuperate the heroes from the past into the new narrative. Interestingly enough what Igor Grubic did put this red thread to the monument and then did a little tag below the monument with the verses from the same point which says you will die that day when you betray the ideals of your youth. Nice. Nice message to students and so on to all of us. So interesting way how he managed to actually capture this kind of resistance part that history that was somewhere that now it's suddenly coming to life with the new rebellion. The artist himself who did this monument as many artists is now doing big crosses. Everything is about Jesus. So the guys who was getting a lot of money has been producing official socialist art. Figure out that the times have changed and the money is now somewhere else. So you see some people indeed betrayed the ideals of their youth they ever had. Again the course collective doing now a bit more of a direct action. Going to a factory in North Croatia that was occupied by workers in a similar thing like in Argentina occupied resist produce so they occupied because the boss of course destroyed the factory in that factory was a huge debt. They were all licensed so they pretty much said we are taking it over. They took it over organized a new production in a self-managed way and they're still working. So the course collective guys from Belgrade went to Croatia to do this mural in honor of the workers. And what does the mural says? It says factories to the workers. The old, old slogan factories to the worker. Here they are with the workers of debt. That factory. So this is clearly the step into the struggle with the direct reference to self-management as a system of workers ownership that we can do in this line. With all its fault and all successes that needs to be said this is the system we had that was based on the idea that workers own their factories. Now going directly into the protest over last years many people in Zagreb remember this so now it's almost 10 years. Typical protest against the devastation of urban environment. What does it mean? I think people in Romania would also understand that everywhere else is that the private interests are taking over public interest in capturing the space of the city turning them into real estate and so on and so on you know how it goes how the story goes. So this is a street in Zagreb that used to be pedestrian but for the development of a nearby real estate project they needed a garage for their luxury car so they took half of the street for the garage and that's how it goes but there were huge spark was that kind of fighting the corruption and fighting for the commons on behalf of the right to the city movement many of you we know that sounds right that David Harris building on the left favor the right to the city movement developed in many places in the west but also in Zagreb and later on in belgrade as i will show so what you see here is an artistic performance was called Burial of the public interest in that garage so they throw the coffin here is the coffin with the flag of the city of Zagreb and sadly the public interest died and was thrown there in the parking. Another curious example was this Trojan horse Trojan horse what was the message of this Trojan horse was that this is only beginning this is a Trojan horse this project is only Trojan horse of the hugely corrupted scheme to take over public sources urban resources and so on it's a bit of abstract i mean in a way you want to have a clear of things but they build this nice Trojan horse and curious enough police understood the thing or people immediately destroy it why do you need to be there who cares they immediately destroy it then there was an interesting action on behalf of the city corrupt city mayor of the city of Zagreb who is still mayor of the city of Zagreb of course you get this for life they build flowering horse flowering horse as opposed to Trojan horse there will be flowering horse and then they put a little mailbox there for the suggestions of citizens because we are all for participation brilliant ideas that's how it ended people understood it fire bombing and it happened like some four times the city was building and then bombing bombing and so on but that's how sometimes you know discussion stops and you have to use the homie fire and this is the don't roam belgrade a similar movement that developed in belgrade uh also called from the organization also called the right to the city surprising unsurprisingly all these people are people are friends no zagreb belgrade don't get into the idea that those are different countries and so on maybe they are they're all hang out together go to the seaside together exchange ideas and then of course in belgrade there is an even bigger project called belgrade waterfront people from lebanon would know what is about solitaire was mentioned yesterday it is exactly the same scheme captured a large chunk of the city territory build from build bring bogus investor from emirati to build luxury apartments there and so on and it's still going on the protestant didn't make a thing now if there was a trojan horse there here is a duck became a symbol why because the movement is called don't roam belgrade belgrade waterfront on the riverbank of sava and the duck this rubber duck became a symbol of the movement of opposition that of course didn't do only aesthetic things there were huge protests as you can see on the streets of belgrade against this what is this book four for freedom for freedom or because of and the problem of course with all of these that those were big massive moments that couldn't stop what is happening very often they will do this playful things anyone who is interested in social moments or participating in them knows that there is this carnival less thing about sometimes social moments and it is very important that through the play through carnival through street theaters through through artistic interventions you are giving a dynamic to the movement one of these was the so-called duck mobile and they duck mobile and going around the city because they wanted to move their struggle from the streets to the elections using the example of their friend desire who managed to get elected into the city parliament and again they were losing a lot of these aesthetic aesthetic kind of interventions in order to mobilize they failed to mobilize people they failed to enter the city assembly and now they're they're plotting their next move in a way out to organize better but it's been going on already for 10 years so it's a story of resistance and resilience but also a bitter story that you can that you can see your city transform regardless of the issues of people who live there regardless of practice movement that there is not much you can do now this is an example again i'm going to show off a cultural workers in korea who organized under the name of kulturniazia people who do culture in 2016 the immediate motive was the right wing very right wing government coming into power in creation 2016 and nominated often a neo-nazi person as cultural minister of course that's what you do so what that neo-nazi person did was of course something that we are we are afraid to do he immediately cut funds for all progressive and leftist organizations kick out people for their ministry in a matter of days and before we understood anything they were just taking control over the the entire space the left would never do this because it's afraid of having the right wing demonstrations the left would keep on giving money to to extremist organizations and their things and never dare to do things of course this guy did because he has an agenda but the resistance also happened people finally understood oh my god we have to do something so they organized and this was one of their performances called the the eclipsed sun so what they did this is a sculpture in the center of belgium by a famous creation sculpture called the the the sun on earth or the sun the earthed sun and they basically bring this black cloth and did this the eclipsed sun as their kind of performance saying this is the end of it this is the darkest period you're getting now and i'll get back to this occupation in 2009 in order to to show you a bit the atmosphere and what it was all about and here you see some of the picture classical picture of citizens assembly of the plenums it resulted in a documentary very important of actually in two documentaries called blockade blockada and interesting thing is and i'm keeping of course on the track not to only talk about the events but also of artistic response to it that so many people going around with cameras basically documenting this truck so that's the aesthetics of resistance as it happens of course then there is editing process you do after that and we got an extraordinary extraordinary documentary i will show you a trailer if you're okay with it simply to get a bit of atmosphere so that what i'm saying not sound too dry and for me to to get a bit of water but how do we how do we do that control control aha you give internet i'll continue talking about about about this and also getting into the problems related to to these wonderful things such as people coming together actually making decisions surprisingly the movement was very effective in doing this usually they will tell you no this cannot work because there are too many people and and direct democracy does not work anyhow in many cases this is the case that that happens in this case it did work maybe it worked because those were students who anyhow you know spend their time there and also many other citizens were coming who shared the beliefs but there was a there was a sense of responsibility in discussing and of course the sense of what i would later on call aesthetics of emancipation these these events are usually very personal very theatrical you feel you're part of something else and now you'll see you'll see a bit of it at least one minute it's a long trailer four minutes but at least let's see i'm a little confused and that's why i have to say no to the technicization and to the bureaucratization and to the study i have to say no to the graduation of the faculty and the students of the creative department for the production of so-called knowledge and i have to say no to the graduation of the professors of the engineering department and the students of the university and the other thing i have to say to you is that i live in a philosophical faculty i'm sorry but i have to support the method which is carried out because those methods are needed to make a goal a bit of atmosphere here one has to say something that this happened in 2009 and again it speaks to porosity of newly imposed borders in the post-tugal slot space that this was inspired by a failed occupation of belgrade university in 2006 it was smaller not much media attention but had a similar similar form which is a assembly yeah the plenary form and their zagreb colleagues heard about it read about and perfected the method that will result in this now let us see what happens when artists occupy when artists decide to occupy spaces maybe this will be very useful for wishy this is the occupation of a cinema called zvezda the star in the center of belgrade the background of course some of you might know is a series of occupations especially in italy of cultural venues teatro lale and so on a lot of cinemas occupied and run by artists on an inclusive basis after all teatro lale movement was the beginning of the movement for the urban commons in italy and developed the whole strategy from that point on the cinema zvezda was destroyed or closed down with a classical corrupt scheme which went like this you simply say that these these cinematographers are not not profitable enough you sell them to some shady businessman who of course vote 14 prime time real estate assets for next to nothing licensed the people who work there and then speculated with it on the market what happened in that that businessman also failed and was in bankruptcy so this is how belgrade lost its cinemas and this is how these buildings went into into a continuous decay until one day some film people some directors and actors together with people from the right to the city movement decided to enter into the building and occupy to clean it to open it up to start running the program program again and the movement was matched with a lot of enthusiasm immediately people jump and like like in zagro with the with the faculty they were going every day there participating in discussion a lot of things were happening many important people showed up including the former prime minister of Greece Tsipras so there was a there was a big event around him michel gondry did a film dedicated to the cinema zvezda new york times was writing about it the situation of course was far from rosy and you will see this in this trailer another very interesting documentary called occupied cinema was produced in 2018 and you will see the track this cannot be true uh this so the problems that arise once you occupy the place it's even it's very easy to please maybe it's not that easy but sometimes your inside you have to decide what you're going to do out of that what is the meaning of what you did and clearly two groups went into conflict that will eventually lead to the marginalization of the movement and also to its deep politicization one group was presented by filmmakers who believed as they say who actually is here 24 hours has the right to speak first yeah and the other people believe that what is been occupied it's not only cinema it's not about only film workers and their films it's also about commons it's also about urban commons it's also about the struggle against new liberalism and so this is why i love but you was there as i mentioned you saw cipras and some other famous people who are showing up for a month and after that people figure out that this is not going to be a very radical experiment many people within the movement rejected labels especially the label of the left and wanted to talk with the state directly so that the state gives more money for the filmmaking this is a good lesson about what what actually might happen and how you want to how you want to run your struggle now and i'll finish in a couple of minutes now this question of emancipation this is the sarajevo plan for 2014 so not artists not only students but actually citizens from all walks of life even a more difficult thing to manage especially if you have a horizontal principle of horizontality especially if you are talking about society that been traumatized by war and the post war and when people got for the first time the right to speak it was an enormous success for for a month everyone was writing about it everyone was totally thrilled about it that people are taking hands taking matters into their own hands that the true democracy grounds for people that does not want to be divided anymore and that cry for social justice again the question this is the tuzla plenum and there was many of these plenums and indeed was a beautiful site the problem is that you can't you cannot come every day to make getting into a very difficult decision-making process that doesn't lead anywhere protests movement come and go you also have to have a wider strategy which is very difficult when you get so many different different actors what happened is of course this kind of aesthetics of being together and then talking about you know thinking about Rancier it's an experience of something of an order that is different of a different distribution of the sensible is as he was saying his aesthetics or politics that the things could be said differently understood differently and this of course is beautiful one of the last examples of this we have from Skopje Macedonia so to see that that the entire region is covered by this movement i forgot to mention Slovenian uprising in 2012 or 2013 not enough space for for all this but this happened in Skopje when again the the the university was occupied and the plenum was established and you can see there is a free university and said autonomous zone so the direct references to autonomous zones the question everyone would say that this does this changes you this changes your perception of the world we create a space is for prefigurative politics for politics that is yet to come spaces for a different experience of doing anything together and this is i would say claims some kind of aesthetics of emancipation where you can feel a taste of emancipation at least for a for a little bit at least for a limited period of time within the limited space that would be a positive assessment of all these moments not only these moments of occupied world trade of our other practice movements everywhere slightly less optimistic assessment would be that these moments cannot challenge power that they know they can't change the power relations that the system calculates you already that calculates your place within the whole story that you'll always have a place for these kind of things there's a co-optation mechanisms that are very very powerful and they've been tested especially in the Netherlands or Denmark or other places where finally if someone occupies some building then just legalize the squad co-opt them into the whole story turn it into gentrification success story doesn't matter there are ways to do things so you got you got between radicality almost insurrectional moment towards co-optation and neutralization of these experiences and then its business as usual is politics as usual maybe our role as artists as activists or combination of all these are stinkers as people as writers is kind of to keep this moment alive the moment of all possibilities that sometimes it is important to to taste it to taste a bit of emancipation in order to to keep on fighting thank you done from blotada and from Zagreb as a model here in in bed yeah yeah it spreads and it had this idea that's uh i'm sorry uh do we have yeah so this was my job here to present you these cases as i said not all are there they're different they have different messages but speak about possibilities and limits of artistic of artistic interventions and of course i'll be happy to hear your thoughts comments criticism last conclusion and i would like to say also that i'm very proud that i'm very proud to be part of all of these struggles that was happening in Zagreb so both blokada and varshivska and i have to say that although it it might seem that things got back to to the business that it's business as usual i would say that nothing was the same nothing was same again after these struggles okay the education is being commercialized the the shopping mall that we fought against is there standing the ministry of culture well we don't have a fascist for a minister anymore but the ministry of culture is still not doing the the the job as we would want it to be but on the other hand the way how people talk about public space in zagreb the people how people talk about culture or how they talk about education is so drastically changed that that it is like it shifted completely when you speak about public space in zagreb people are i mean people not only us who were there not only people from our circle but when you mention public space people are so empowered to act and there there are many small struggles completely not connected to us happening on the municipal or neighborhood level people fighting for their parks for the better infrastructure in a way understanding that it's up to them to come together to organize and to fight for so i think that things are not changing on the on the level of the of the politics or policy but i think that what you are mentioning this this sense of liberation and msc patient is something that you remember for a long time and that keeps you going into new struggles and i think that this is something very valuable that we get from uh from these moments of being together i have to make a i would like to make a reflection which is also uh like a symptom a sphere of representation in a symbolic in the they are not like entering the the way how the they are not operating not uh in uh not interfering in the way how like societies produce how it's working not entering the social relations but they operate only in a representative field so where we also place the field of culture normally but i don't think it has to be like this because also art and culture are produced and there are certain uh relations of its production and it's never perceived like this so we have to look at the culture and art as a work that is produced and it has its uh as any other work and it also seems dramatic that it's happening in the politics in the cultural institutional universities spheres which are like normally all the cases are like the like higher interface uh are uh happening a concern like how to say like middle and higher classes they are not only that one example with the course but it's also i would say because i know them i know the work so they are coming as artists to do some work uh with uh in the context of work uh of a workers collective and there is actually not much interference with this artist world doesn't come from workers but it's somehow artists come to instruct a little bit the you know there is this relation we have to say i mean in the uh if you look the production the from the side of the production how the artists produce this artwork and and i think there is actually some more and all these uh like protests they're not genuinely coming from a Yugoslav they're like part of bigger like social movements and these are spectacularity and performativity is part of like other protests and movements something that is very easily we know like appropriated from the like capitalist way of you know like this model so but there is some other movement that i think it's maybe more interesting i mean in the meanwhile there is a lot of protests in this area in Serbia you know coming from the workers protest and it would be interesting to look at this like what is the culture what is the art what is the way of doing when it's more coming from the workers movement side and also in the terms of culture that it produces and and also uh sorry just i want to say about the housing movement that is super interesting because it's the direct actually very like uh having lots of force now taking lots of force a very interesting movement uh which is uh going throughout belgrade mainly Serbia i don't know if also in other parts of former Yugoslavia but where there is this uh really collaboration with the lower classes that are affected and it's based on like a direct action that i think is important because it's like very concrete actions in involved it's not just the representative it has like a real effect like in like depending and solidarity with like certain people which are like belonging to different kind classes but this was very short i just wanted to say shortly that uh at least in Croatia or Zagreb out of which i think all Croatian examples were taken this whole process of empowering not only intellectuals or artists or cultural workers but other exclamation marks ordinary people has only just begun and i think that although there is definitely uh an influence in this area from this movement from the last 10 years i think it will pass some more substantial time before this grassroots activism by citizens can really alter the decision-making process on the institutional level and right now Zagreb is also facing a similar threat uh Elz Belgrade as this corrupted mayor now 20 years in power he has begun to collaborate with the same company from Arab Emirates Tegel Hills in order to do a similar thing in Croatia and it will be interesting to see if this grassroots left-wing politics which different from Belgrade did want a certain amount of delegates in the city council will be strong or influential enough to to block to block this thing and then again to really empower citizens when it comes to daily daily decision-making about this public space uh so many people intentionally care about i just wanted to say um thank you for this uh for me it was really emotional uh i'm here there was like this the same kind of history we started the occupation with the Zagreb model in uh in in our heads we put the blockada documentary to start the occupation we were not allowed because they knew about it and we did it one week later uh our occupation was uh re a reoccupation of something that was one year before and did not really make it and did not have any force and we said we will do it next year with more force and um like the topics the things are almost like the same the the way it spilled into the society is the same the inclusion from not from that not only from that moment but from that moment on um this kind of uh where i also see it is towards the public space uh there were some fights for the public space the most notable one was with city hall trying to make a new lane uh and to like cover the so much the river area and to put a new car lane and the people fought against that and to not happen and the city hall uh renounced that plan that was like a huge win for people who wanted a common greener nicer city and um the reference with uh like a lot of things uh circulated in this uh in this uh area in the Balkans let's say or whatever and that was uh really cool but i was um curious uh about um what she said uh with this more kind of representational work or not uh i we for example tried very hard not only to get involved uh obviously our plenaries got together everybody they were open to everybody but they were not we did not target only the teachers in the university we target what we called the tessa which is like the auxiliary personnel in the university the cleaning ladies the people who our guards whatever and we also tried to make contact with the union of the tessa workers and we called them at the plenary to make like this huge working class student yes but what happened is like the union guy came so drunk that he was not allowed to come into the university so that was the failure of the student workers solidarity in that moment so yeah i was curious if this happened also in uh in Zagreb because yeah maybe just a just a short comment on on all all all questions of course here i focused on our artistic products of that uh therefore therefore this does not cover all struggles there's a lot of struggles happening where let's say artists do not play such an important role or the artistic play with these activist aesthetics is not that present um uh it is uh uh what is interesting is that there is an enormous cultural production around these issues around these left-wing progressive struggles and with problems attached problems that this is not only nice and great and fantastic it is there there are problems related to political struggle when you leviate between aestheticization and making an interesting cultural products for the market yeah for other people and supporting the movements that are there so it is it's not an easy thing and uh uh uh what reshape does i think that corresponds fully to this ambiguous position of artists within social movements the second thing is uh of course activist aesthetics is not only uh aesthetics of nice beautiful progressive left-wing people the right-wing has also aesthetics and they have their aesthetics of protest of organization of movement it's it's enough just to look at a at italian neo-fascist movement that does exactly what we do occupy public spaces opening up for people handing out food opening up boxing centers place to hang around and then you do occasionally a little fascist march through Rome what else you could do in Rome than that and that's how you socialize people and they've been run kaza pound i'm talking about kaza pound uh they've been run by a former metal singer very cool guy you know for a lot of people and also in Croatia this kind of anti eviction movement was started by the right-wing because we failed to do it so they just enter into the into that space luckily in belgrade this is not the case it's mostly left-wingers but they just enter into the empty space but who gets evicted people get evicted because they they don't pay loans and the people like kicked out for not paying one loan or two loans so they're not Roma people they could but it's not only Roma people it's just like everyone else in these societies that of course had to get the loan to buy a flat and so on so the this space was occupied in Croatia by right-wingers who then enter into parliament are quite popular because they fight for the people of course the right-wingers gonna re-appropriate our language they are not stupid our problem is that very often we can't go a step further we have discussions about political organizations we don't want to be part of organizations that do not correspond to our ideals and then there are various problems with that and also we live in a hostile environment where the space for such progressive movements is very limited and in many spaces in many places what what Mariana just said it is entirely true that this encouraged so many people to step out to now talk about public space about commons without being afraid of being accused of socialism or or or being accused of you being as we call you go nostalgic I mean for 30 years people you know couldn't speak up their mind being afraid to be accused of being commies you know so the left is only now coming back and it has to be the 21st century left clearly but it also is the left that will certainly especially in the former Yugoslav area will have to look back in in 20th century and now now just to to give a bit of historical difference with the places like Czech Republic Romania Poland and so on there is a certain heritage that cannot be just brushed aside as dictatorship or totalitarianism or something like that there's a heritage of anti-fascist struggle which is still relevant there's a heritage of self-management as a system only in Yugoslavia it existed as such where literally there was something called social ownership so people own their factories if we want to make different economic system we'll have to democratize the workplace and then we're going to go back to the models that been already tried in Yugoslavia to try the state level for 30 years and that system presided over the modernization of the country so of course you're going to go back again to this there's also the non-alignment movement that was led by by Yugoslavia, Egypt, India and other countries that again is becoming very important in the in the new world war we are actually facing now but just the question is how when we're going to declare it as a world war I mean what's happening in the Middle East it is a world war but it's not happening to us so that there is a way between various powers of organizing and the network of solidarity that used to exist during the non-aligned movement so there's a lot of things you have to think again reevaluate what was your your past and your heritage of course without not with idealization only of the ideals but also to reevaluate the reality of these regimes that were not always as nice and rosy as we tend to believe or on the left so there's a lot of I was giving a lecture in in in iubiana and I dare to say that Yugoslavia was the most successful socialist project of the 20th century here it is up there no romano so you see maybe you'll start competing maybe it was maybe it was and then of course one but you want but you and a philosopher came and say no no no we cannot but you said all right but you said that everything was a disaster everything was a disaster forget about 20th century 90th century only the future only the future just go to the future said okay but you said so but if you want to do things in this world lowering inequalities democratizing politics democratizing workplace you want to reshape international relations you'll have to go back to this heritage you'll have to rethink it it's not the clean slate and all of these contradictions of this process and even a frustration of this process with all this difficult heritage we have heritage of the failed socialism heritage of failed Yugoslav heritage of the serious or wars with 130 000 dead people and 10 000 still missing is something that's it's put on the shoulder of an entirely new left movement and of course sometimes it's very difficult to to bear this weight thank you it was absolutely insane i want to just touch upon your reference to kind of historical cleansing and most physically of the statues oh sorry we're just doing the historical cleansing and wherever we live in the world generally there are statues and you're not being say who is he because it's generally is a he and very few statues to women anywhere other than religious figures and it's i live on a tiny island called Great Britain that's slowly drifting as we speak close and close her physically to the states we're going out and feel and take unfortunately and we have our own conversations there about statues particularly about those related to slavery as as in the united states and but here a very short story she lived to my left here about just two or three years ago working with a group of really courageous and passionate changemakers working in arts cultural cleansing in Sofia and you may know it there's a kind of graveyard for all communist-era statues in Sofia a little bit out of the city centre and the museum of communist art and it's fascinating and they were saying that most of these sculptures which a large number of my women all trained in Moscow returning but having a very Bulgarian language and so as outsiders who haven't been through this experience it was absolutely extraordinary to experience and then we going back to the people we were working with who largely in their 20s a few in their own 30s we asked had you ever been there and there's almost a physical kind of shut up saying we will never go there we you know we couldn't imagine it so there's this having gone through this period of privatization of the communists are going up the big M for McDonald's going up people were turning their back on what was a really rich story and and I'm just interested to know whether you think there should be removed or how if they are still there and I seem as oppressive you might begin to see them as a valuable part of a conversation about where we've been and where we might go to because they're everywhere in our cities that represent only winners in our society and the oppressors but you're suggesting I think something else because it's really interesting as an outsider to the story you are getting to something extraordinary important not only for this art but actually for narratives political communities speak about themselves and what is the dominant narrative what is silence narrative what you can say what you cannot say symbolic violence that happened to us after the fall of socialism is enormous and it affected all spheres of life including language and what words do you use how do you approach things what you can say what you cannot say for at least 20 years until the crisis of 2008 we were silenced we were in a little ghetto so where you know we would be interesting books the only one who managed to get out of this was Slavoj Žižek and basically having this kind of possibility to say things that other people cannot say but in public discourse it was almost impossible and what happened to people and this is still not understood in lot of parts of Eastern Europe it's when your life has a cutting point that devaluates completely de legitimized your entire life before and that's enormous violence the way how to deal with that for people was simply not to talk about it not to talk about the fact that they actually lived okay people live under various regimes some are not nice many socialist regimes were not nice in many periods of their existence that's another story the story of people is that you know people did fall in love that did make love now the book is out that actually sex was better under socialism the answer is simple people had more time exactly yes and we're younger back then could do your own but now it's there is something in that and the problem was that of course this did not only affect and I want to underline now what I'm going to say this did not only had consequences in the east the fall of Berlin wall and the fall of socialism happened to the west as well it's a little known fact that affected the west enormously and turn into the destruction of social protections and social welfare it was the end of an era so it didn't happen only to us actually for us in Yugoslavia it didn't happen at all we could travel freely so we didn't care it was very nice to see the the wall gone because it was we were seen as a barbaric thing that soviets do but didn't happen to us what what what is that for us but actually it did happen to us because of the domino effect that happened after that and it actually fell on our heads so you have a lot of untold stories of kind of yes people did live and did progress under socialism and also some people suffered under socialism that's absolutely true that people that then some other people suffer immediately after this glorious end of socialism which is us in the former Yugoslavia the war that happened in heart of europe but it was easy to do a cordon sanitaire and the media cordon around it and simply say we don't want to look at that huh we don't want to look at that the fact that an hour from you know hour and a half from paris things are happening that are absolutely barbaric absolutely barbaric that is something we still didn't haven't discussed and then we are thrown into this world which is which is being completely modelled according to neoliberal agenda in which we have to find some kind of answers to the current situation and nobody has it nobody has it and there there we see this confusion and contradictions that are part of who we are this is this is where we live it's a contradictory system we are all contradictory to ourselves to the life we live this is what capitalism is and then you can you can have the various strategies of coping coping with that situation but that you can go off the grid that you can escape it that you can kind of do some moral gestures that will make you feel good well that won't change anything again it's already calculated yeah we were talking about carbon footprint now there's a whole economy based on the fact that people will travel less of course and there is no way out of that by moral gestures and this is where we are getting to this point which i think is dramatic uh regardless of the current wave of protests that are inspiring but not so inspiring such as in bolivia but inspiring in lebanon or iraq or chile where the defeat of of european left was confirmed at the last european elections where this cycle of 10 years ended in in a rather unfavorable position of what we call the left that the shift that was happening during these 10 years towards a more radical left is over the shift towards the mainstream is there with a bit of green things the the fact that the left also went back into identity politics fully which of course has to be be there it is a part of the struggle of the left to fight for the oppressed to fight against patriarchy to fight against the oppression of marginalized communities be it by race or ethnicity it's part it's a dna of the left but curiously the class kind of is now again out of fashion and uh uh uh this is where we're going to face a lot of problems into constructing the left for the 21st century that could effectively effectively make some change and the question is whether we are ready to to engage into into this type of struggles that is not nice it's not nice put any one of us in the position to govern and you're gonna face a lot of moral problems and then you're gonna face an ugly world out there and we don't want to do it we want to be writers and artists and intellectuals we want someone else to do the job for us and of course we can criticize and say oh you sold out to the system and i'm still great and so on but please get me that grant so that i could go and meet my friends and continue criticizing the system and so on so this is how we have to accept it this is our contradiction i mean we are all part of that and then see how we could actually work around yes yes i mean actuation is is is an important of course it's it's also theoretical debate but it's also something about how do we change yeah so we think about action but actually how do we change my hope is in what i mentioned these examples of actuation of emancipation but it's not it does matter what is what kind of process it's not the crude action getting to that point because if it's crude action that we need a serious revolution organization hierarchical that does the things that uses violence because without that it doesn't work that other people are gonna use violence against you so you want to win or not and you might lose your soul in the process but that's what revolutions used to be that we often invoke in our thinking in the magicka but i think also it's identity politics where left is nowadays based somehow i think it's identity politics came to replace the class like a order so when this is moved now like it's logically that also the left being placed in identity politics is completely lost it's possibility since the 70s this is the process of course but we have just to have a notion that really identity politics came to replace the class under understanding the class structure system so as in as a part of the new liberal agenda and also just to mention the european resolution of totalitarian totalitarianism where in the 90s first the proposal was made i think 96 from the european parliament to equal the victims or like there was first a concern how to deal with the heritage communist heritage of now when lots of eastern european countries are entering the european union and well then after it was a bit left in the inside but then when the protest started around the big crisis in 2008 when the protest started there was a Prague declaration of european parliament then now bringing this resolution about equaling the victims of totalitarian regimes like equaling the nazis victims from the second world war not the victims the regimes sorry they were equating the regimes not the big the victims it's exactly related to the victims of the regimes but look at the declaration i think a proud declaration from 2008 and the victims of nazism with the victims of communism but now like the communism wasn't new like thing like after 40 years there was this like urge to like condemn the communists and then the effect of this at that particular moment was to disqualify the left movement that were like rising at the time in Greece in like a lot of south european countries Spain and so so this was a like a political tool to disqualify socialism as a progressive like a movement i'm so tired so i'll try to be clear and my aim of sharing is to know if how you see it not if you agree or not but do you see a problematic perspective to it and it's about the aesthetic perspective more than the activism perspective in what you've been presenting and i come from the region where you described living a world war and i totally agree i i think the aesthetic question between east west south north no no no does not apply only in theaters but also in activism and it affects a lot the level of solidarity that we as activists and there is a term in the region called archivist i don't know but we lose it a lot to combine artists and activists i think that the standard of aesthetic affects a lot the solidarity that we live globally and here i i refer to the liganese revolution for example it's very easy for us as a group here i think to communicate and to sense the aesthetic of what's happening in the streets of verudu but it's not that easy to connect with what's happening in sudan for example or what happened in syria before and i think we need to challenge ourselves a little bit in that area and to try to accept the diversity of aesthetics that we ask for in theaters and movie theaters although also in streets and in activity as you say it's not a matter of agreeing or not agreeing it is like that it's true that we could connect of course with the Lebanese because they look like everybody else and and it's and they speak like anybody else perfect english perfect french perfectly educated oh my god so it's uh then you connect easily then with sudan because that enter into our iconography which very often you have interesting and some people already wrote about it the protest and the figure of women such as in gezi park protest and so on or in macedonia protest at women that were doing lipstick thing and there's already the entire people love it media love it they love to explore this the problem is in in in more difficult cases like i think there are cases where we know what is our site yeah we know on what side what happens in the cases such as maydan in Ukraine you know what happens in the game even now with what's happening in bolivia it's like a lot of different voices coming what's was what kept in syria after after all where people are looking for a pure moment which is the beginning of syrian revolution and then it wasn't pure any longer so people didn't want to look at this and also our fascinations with with certain places i talk with many greek friends we were absolutely thrilled with syriza it is a was the hope i mean after all c-plus was there in this film and then there was a disappointment and the thing is that many many people just turn to another cool thing a corbin you know then there will be another cool thing somewhere else especially if you know the message is good and then we forget about people forgot about this you know that they don't follow what happened after that because that was the moment when you expected someone else to do the job of your dreams to create a place that would be perfect and by the seaside that was that was part and then suddenly none of this funny thing i when i ask and i'll stop with that unless there are other comments when i ask a friend so i was there in 2015 and we were all crazy and then 2016 depression so i was going so so what happened and he said well you know for c-plus we thought he was antigony but he turned out to be a creon of course it could be a great way the situation but there's something in that we would all like antigonese but there there's also someone has to be a creon or when you come to power you get to be creamed you get to rule and that's not that nice and the question is what can you do and what you betray what you cement and what will be the legacy of a failed failed attempt at the democratic kind of change and unfortunately that legacy for all of us is demoralized but maybe not to stop on this demoralizing note i try to show you a lot of examples of people really struggling under very difficult condition very difficult condition it really is difficult to develop a progressive let's call it socialist politics in the post-socialist space extraordinary difficult and it will be difficult for many for many years to come and then maybe at one point people will feel liberated and and simply say no we want this type of society and we want to build it differently than the one we have now which of course many of us perceive as unjust one more question the center and i was wondering about the initiatives making and creating some margins just for the sake of the margin i mean uh uh being trying to get a community somewhere not out of the system because it's not possible but just as far as possible from the system is it useless are we playing the role of the system not fighting against it because each time we make a big demonstration and when our demonstration is failing in attempting uh we give some more power to the center and that's what happened in france there had there's been at a moment there were a lot of people demonstrating and uh the government didn't say didn't accept it to change what they had tried to implement and this was said to be the moment when the power understood that in fact even if people demonstrate they don't have to change so in fact those movements have given more power to the centers and because there are some people trying to make some communities in the carpats or a herd of people and what do you think about that's kind this kind of uh aesthetics community aesthetics i have to say of course it's never useless it's never useless and and people should keep on doing this but after a while after years you get you get a bit of a burnout and sometimes it's you ask yourself is it worth all this energy uh i think yellow west movement brought all the contradictions of the anti-systemic movement the enemy is not stupid you know it might be less artistic less cool less charming but it's not stupid so basically what they they they anyhow they gave us culture to play with a little bit and they kept them and you know they know what they are doing and they knew what they were doing even in 1968 when million people were on million people's were on the street some people of course fed up with everything we decide to make communes and just simply step out of everything and be surrounding people they want to see and it's been some wonderful experiments like that and we need these spaces call them safe spaces for our politics but they are marginal and they're going to remain marginal what we all hope for are some concrete changes after all radical left being reduced to social democratic politics true radical what we want is the welfare state no one on the radical left in saying we want to destroy capitalism completely as a system and then build something else or in some very marginal marginal places and this is a rhetoric nothing else we all want welfare state so this is how less radical we are than people in Italy in the 70s or in the 60s not to mention before the revolutionaries that really wanted to make a big shift and for this we need concrete decisions someone has to take power and bring laws into place and and and we need something which is not that sexy which is a budget redistribution that's definitely not sexy and the system might figure out that you know with a bit of money that they're going to give for culture and education and so on they might get to the position of the us where universities are playgrounds for the leftist so go there and say what everyone and you can say you can say to the students who are paid a lot of money you get a lot of money for that they are paying for that to listen how the system is bad okay that's good that's a good deal for everyone and everyone's clean and nobody can do can do absolutely but again not to get into this bit of cynical position that nothing could be done i think things could be done and at least it's worth doing them for the sake maybe of our personal change you know what i'm buffet said that there is class war and we are winning we are crushing it look the other side doesn't even accept there is class with their degree is it the class war no it's okay don't use the term because it's very bad