#2 Reading Workshop together with Riga Biennial

The second reading workshop "Crisis in the European vision. A view from Central and Eastern Europe" will take place on Wednesday, 20 June at 6 pm the Former Faculty of Biology of the University of Latvia (Kronvalda bulvāris 4, Rīga) or, in good weather conditions, next to James Beckett's installation "Palace ", located in Kronvalda Park.

Free admission.

The reading workshop will focus on change and our ability to adapt, the approach offered by transhumanism and posthumanism to what is and can be human, transformations of neoliberal capitalism and their effects in the lives of people and societies. The workshops will also address local, regional and global geopolitical relationships and their changes, which affect the perception of place and time as the current moment, within the flow of perpetual change, seems to take place “faster than history”. History, however, continues to affect the present and the visions of future, which requires radically new social, technological and economic models. The workshops will also focus on the role of contemporary art in understanding these experiences.  

After the end of the Cold War, the liberal democracy model seemed to be the only "normal" system: the West, which lacked any serious opponents, tried to reform the rest of the world. The "rest", on its part, imitated the West in its economic, social and everyday life. Yet the vision of western civilization as the natural order of the modern world is disintegrating before our very eyes: Brexit, the election of extreme nationalist and populist governments in several European countries are but a couple of examples that support this observation. The migration crisis has also damaged the European vision of the world whose borders are open: instead, we are experiencing a clash of solidarities and readiness to restore walls in the same places where they were dismantled three decades ago.

The content of the workshop will be based on texts as follows:

Ivan Krastev, “The Unraveling of the Post-1989 Order”. Journal of Democracy. October 2016, Volume 27, Number 4, pp. 5–15.

Magdalena Moskalewicz, “Vanguard of the Future: Mobility, Nationalism and the Postsocialist Condition”. The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe. Ed. M. Moskalewicz. 2018, pp. 132–164.

Participants are requested to show their interest by emailing to readingworkshop2018@gmail.com; after that, they will receive the texts for the upcoming sessions. Texts should be read before the workshop.

Reading workshops are curated and moderated by Ieva Astahovska (LCCA) and Zane Zajančkauska (RIBOCA)