"Afterlife of communism. Some positions on political imagination"is a nomadic salon, a round table, at which we are exchanging views and ideas, a place for open discussion and public dissent on what used to be a shared ideal, a common history and is currently more and more a spectre that haunts us with the promise of not being completely dead and relative. We follow with our salon deep into the evening, evoking the spirit of never ending, night-long discussions at kitchen table.

Some of our questions could be formulated like this: Is it still possible to invest in communism as a universal vocabulary of political emancipation? Was the centralized, hierarchic and semi-capitalistic State one of the main problems of the malfunctions of communism? Are self-organized communities and self-representation really working on a long term? Are we functioning better in a state of resistance and opposition? What is next?

We have invited some international contributors to share their ideas with us, but in contrary to regular round table, in KNOT salon everybody is welcome to take a voice!

After our first discussion on the 30th of April, we have added more questions: How come all these cultural practitioners of different disciplines, who have in common a preoccupation with models which are alternative to capitalism are many times reunited within one frame not by politics or philosophy, but by art? If art is turning more and more from a specific discipline to a platform for meeting of multiple areas of knowledge, and in this sense, its discourse is infiltrating unsuspected directions, on the other hand, under the conditions in which art is financed by the very structures which it contests, isn’t this critique tolerated precisely because it is not taken seriously as an effective form of change? Aren’t we permitted to occupy this territory because we are not representing a real danger? At the same time, the fact of installing ourselves in a hostile and indifferent place and formulate there a series of beliefs and especially desires, isn’t it itself an agent of change more subtle and more important on a long term than the direct fight with the armored representatives of power in function? Why is it important to consider 1989 as an epistemic moment more than a historic one? How can we deal with our own past and re-evaluate it outside the dismissing labels of cultural identity?

You are welcome to join us on the 6th, 7th and 8th of May to answer these questions and many other urgent ones!

Participants: Joana Erbel, Vasile Ernu, Michal Kozlowski, Ewa Majewska, Vlad Morariu, Stefanie Peter, Simon Sheikh, Janek Sowa, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and Guests