engleski

”Agoraphilia” in 1990's Croatia: the Beginnings of the Independent Cultural Scene

The Independent Cultural Scene is the name for non-profit, non-governmental organizations working in the cultural field in Croatia. The name has been in use from the beginning of the new millennium, when the structural properties and shared values of its members started having clear contours. Namely, the legal determination of these subjects as NGO’s is only one criterion which makes them a part of the Independent Scene – much more important are their esthetical and ideological preferences. These preferences – which also include criticality toward the socio-political context, as well as a moral responsibility for bottom-up political engagement – were determined during the 1990s, when the newly founded nation- state assumed an agoraphobic attitude toward critical political, media or artistic practice, and in which proponents of such critique were labeled as enemies of the state. In such a climate, a range of alternative, mostly political and media platforms emerged that demanded the recognition of civil rights, the most important representatives of which are the Anti-War Campaign (AWC) and its magazine Arkzin. By including a fair amount of artists and other cultural workers in their ranks, it was these initiatives that formed the core of new alternative culture in Croatia. The paper will demonstrate and analyze examples of artistic and curatorial engagement in the late 1990s, which emerged from the productive relationship of the cultural and the political within initiatives such as AWC and Arkzin, by way of highlighting their hybrid status between artistic and political practice.

1990's, activism, Arkzin, Igor Grubić, independent cultural scene, WHW

nije evidentirano