Second Thoughts: We Need New Utopias w/ Ksenia Robbe
Remembering and re-mapping languages of resistance across Eastern Europe and the Global SouthOrganised by Second Thoughts
Today, we find ourselves in a world, in which the worst dystopias have come true. But the sense that the future – in light of the pressing economic, environmental, and political crises – is characterized by dystopian scenarios is not new; it has been with us for at least two decades, since the beginning of rapid globalization in the wake of the 1980-90s political ‘transitions.’ Looking back at this moment, we are compelled to ask: what has gone wrong – what has been overlooked by both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on globalization, and how have insidious imperial and colonial attitudes survived and expanded in the wake of decolonization? Most importantly for our conversation, what role do art practices have to play in this context? Ksenia Robbe’s talk will approach these questions by considering what artists and intellectuals from Eastern Europe and the Global South learn from each other, looking at the sites of experience where new languages of resistance can develop.
Ksenia Robbe is a Senior lecturer in European Culture and Literature (Russian) at the University of Groningen. She works at the interfaces of postcolonial and postsocialist, memory and time, and gender and feminist studies. Her current research engages with memories of the 1980-90s ‘transitions’ in Russian and South African literature, film and visual art. Her work as the principal investigator of the Constructive Advanced Thinking project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions” involves collaborations with NGOs and museums in Poland and Germany.
Second Thoughts — a collective exploration on Eastern Europeanness, is a social setting, an informal kitchen conversation, a reading club, a political cafe, a community. We are here to be lost and found, to learn from and with each other. We want to learn about our hidden histories, similarities, and differences, to make unrepresented identities visible and expose the complexity of understanding the ‘Second World’.