Dispatch: ‘I don't believe in revolution, but sometimes I get in the spirit.’

On our last night in Ljubljana, I sat around a table with other participants in the ‘Our Many Easts’ summer school program, and, rather anachronistically, we drank red wine in the summer heat. While others were inside dancing to a playlist composed by the program participants, I was absorbed in a sprawling conversation on non-alignment, imagination, structural racism, and the (im)possibilities of collective formation under EU neoliberal regimes. I recounted a phrase from a button I had seen once in a satirical social media post by the Belgo-Dutch grassroots media collective Black Speaks Back: ‘We were going to fight for liberation, but we didn’t get the grant.’ We all laughed — it was that slightly pained and nervous laughter that couches grief in a veneer of self-protective scepticism.

For all of the tensions and internal conflicts held together in a capacious title like ‘Our Many Easts’ (which East? whose East? imaginary Easts? And what of European state socialist ‘friendship cooperations’ with the South? who was aligning with whom? when and why?), the six days of the summer school also held space for this kind of charged laughter. It is not so often that space gets held open for this, that time can be made to feel our way towards what else might be within that laughter alongside the grief, even as we cannot yet see what might come after it. It is a privilege and a respite to be in such a space, and it is one which is always lined with the barely imaginable depths of state violence. This space outside the Research Centre for the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in late August was no different. As we gathered in Ljubljana, the ongoing genocide in Gaza approaches one year with the active support of the United States and its NATO bloc (and the Bosnian genocide loomed large in our workshop discussions); the full scale Russian war in Ukraine continues for over two years (and the living spectres of Soviet colonialism loomed large in our workshop discussions too); and deep infrastructural violence at the bloody intersections of the state and global capital grips places all over the world, from Haiti to Sudan, the DRC and Bangladesh, as well as along EU borders and their ever-extending zones of policing. One need only remember that the Slovenian forests are part of the Balkan refugee route, and here is only the ‘last step’ of the treacherous journey – Jošt Franko’s contribution to the 2024 U3 triennial exhibition, The Feeling of Europe; A Memory Without Evidence, Until I Become Home, is devoted to the stories of migrants and their experiences here. Hope in any of the political imaginaries from transnational socialist pasts seems further than ever when it comes to confronting the material conditions on the ground today. Hence the pained, nervous laughter around the table.

As the conversation continued, another colleague offered words that are still reverberating in my ears: ‘I don't believe in revolution, but sometimes I get in the spirit.’ (Ava Zevop, 30 August 2024) The words were shared with a smile and a wink. Another shared some thoughts from a recent article she’d written entitled ‘The Role You Made Me Play’. Art museums talk to geographies, talk to teachers, talk to time. I thought of all of the characters in Ala Younis’s Plan for Greater Baghdad. I thought of the work on character development that we do in a collective to which I belong and our newest characters - the political art power couple from hell. The laughter erupted from deep in my belly. Rising up alongside the grief was a certain joy in remembering (like Walter Benjamin’s flashes) all the fleeting moments, like this one, of getting in the spirit — of being in spirit — with others (peers, elders, and ancestors) across times and spaces.

For this dispatch, I’ve assembled a sampling of citations, phrases, and a few images from other fleeting moments that “erupted” across the ten workshops and numerous presentations (performance-lectures, screenings, exhibition tours, moderated conversations, and so forth) in the summer school’s curriculum. Invoking my colleagues’ words, I try to keep them with me in spirit and to share with readers a glimpse into the spirit(s) of our six days together.

‘What it’s like to be faced with an archive and feel it’s expecting something from you.’
Mila Turajlić, introductory remarks for Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris lecture performance, 25 August 2024

‘Archives are usually boring things unless we make them interesting.’
Ala Younis in a Discussion Café presented within the frame of the Mladi Levi festival, 28 August 2024

‘History is facts which become lies in the end.’
Jean Cocteau quoted in David Crowley’s lecture 'Imagined East', 28 August 2024

‘equip the people with information…’
Bojana Piškur in the workshop 'Constellations from the South to the East and back again', 27 August 2024

‘regimes of interpretation’
Tanja Petrović in the workshop 'An Adventure in Collectivity: Revisiting the World of Yugoslav Comics', 30 August 2024

‘What of socialism remains in the post- ?’
Dasha Filippova, Part of self-introduction at the start of workshops, 26-28 August 2024

‘In general, we are more interested in the ethics than the politics at this moment.’
Zdenka Badovinac, in discussion during the workshop 'What is all this "East"?', 26 August 2024

‘You don’t need to be friends but perhaps a politics of friendship is needed to produce things differently.’
Mabel Tapia in the closing remarks for the workshop 'Collectiveness as method and as wish. Alliances and friendship as ways of intervening in the world', 28 August 2024

‘Cooking opens the space for poetry.’
Martin Pogačar in the workshop 'Matters of Memory: Tin Cans, Trains, and the Mediation of the Past Experience', 28 August 2024

‘If you are [I am] to go… please keep your [I will keep my] radio on, even when the pain of silence deafens, don’t lose hope one day beyond the frequencies you [I] will return.’
Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B), 2023; watched during the exhibition tour at +MSUM with Bojana Piškur during the workshop 'Constellations from the South to the East and back again', 27 August 2024