Once a year, through this traditional and atypical tour that you won’t find in the usual tourist guides, the spirit of revolutionary island is awakened. Behind every island and its romantic scenery, there lies a story about resistance and invention of various institutions. Behind every stone on the island of Vis, there is a forgotten or suppressed chapter about revolutionary history. Put on your shoes, take a bottle of water and join us for this collective walk through Komiža. We’re starting at the Church of St. Nicholas – Muster.

About Srećko Horvat

Welcome and introduction to the “October School”. We will present ourselves, the program and this year’s main topic “Reimagining Institutions”.

Contemporary conflicts between land-based movements and state power have reinvented ways of appropriating lived space and time that prove the centrality of the commune form to the making of a post-productionist world. In this talk I will discuss the unscheduled workings of political memory as they pertain to recent figurations of the form Kropotkin once called “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.

About Kristin Ross

ISSA’s architect Luka Vlahović will present where ISSA is at in terms of built and planned infrastructure, while Matko Šišak (ZMAG) will guide us through a sustainable and circular water collecting and distribution system combining traditional and modern technology.

About Luka Vlahović & Matko Šišak

How is learning to proceed when unlearning is required? Power structures have been exercising great destructive effects on the act of learning. This requires identifying opportunities and possibilities to counter and modify pedagogical methods and inspirations, in the tradition of Edward Said. To Said, while a relationship of domination can persist in reality, the opportunities for liberation are open and exist as well. For that, we may return to misbehaving, mistranslating and imagining all as a break away from the authority of others and their domination of understanding and knowing such reality.

About Adania Shibli

Museum of the Commons, four-year project of L’internationale federation of museums, art organizations and universities, seeks to re-imagine institutions through climate awareness, translocal cooperation, and artistic strategies of healing and repair.  L’Internationale federation was founded to offer an alternative model to globalizing art institutions that replicate the structures of multinational powers and their centralized distribution of knowledge. Four members of L’Internationale crew will give a short presentation of different reconstructive practices within and around institutions, and discuss how to make museums and public bodies more inclusive, democratic, solidal and resilient.

More about panelists

Robert Perišić, jedan od najznačajnijih domaćih prozaika, svoj književni svijet godinama je gradio oko veduta iz urbanog života velegrada, sumorne, ali i humorne tranzicijske svakodnevnice i pripadajuće plejade jednako tipskih i iznimnih likova. Romanom Brod za Issu autor nas, postupkom začudne, meditativne književne arheologije, vodi u vrijeme grčke kolonizacije Jadrana i osnivanja današnjeg Visa. Njegovi protagonisti onovremeni su ljudi, zatim životinje i kulture koje su s Grcima došle da ostanu, predstavljajući živu sponu između epoha, pa čak i prirodne pojave koje sve to – i sam antropocen – promatraju s visine koja relativizira i briše okvire koje smo navikli smatrati nepromjenjivima. Roman smješten u daleku prošlost, koji nam mnogo govori o sadašnjosti i nama samima.

Više o Robertu Perišiću i Marku Pogačaru

In the context of crumbling international institutions and post-war global order, the struggle for our living world, against dominant capitalo-fascist projects, is taking two distinctive directions. On the one hand, groupings of states, such as the Hague Group, are calling for a renewed commitment to international law and a new design of the international system. On the other, a plethora of self-organized social initiatives, from Sea Watch rescue operations to the Global Sumud Flotilla, take matters into their own hands, institutionalizing new practices and transnational solidarities on the go, sometimes even in direct confrontation with state policies and security apparatuses. What are the advantages, successes and failures of these strategies, and how to further think and organise disobedient institutions.

About Saša Savanović, David Adler, Morana Miljanović

Add your part to re-imagining our time together. If you have a wish to explore some themes in the context of the October School’s or ISSA’s scope – design your own sessions, offer them to everyone and self-organize regarding the time and space around the venue (ask Care Team if you need support). Use the Sharing Board in Pirkotova Lula to advertise the session details and get a sense of how many people would like to join, or communicate about it in the Signal group. For example, use themes that inspire and/or worry you personally – the personal is political, the “private” is public – it concerns us all.

The talk focuses on the conditions that affect the think:practice of peace in early 21st Century, marked by the escalating normalisation of violence in public life, politics, international relations and domestic political spheres, grafted on the legacies of atrocious: emancipatory 20th century. It departs from the present situation where large-scale “world-making” and “peace-keeping” institutional attempts, e.g. the EU and the UN, are systematically delegitimised and unable to contain wars and violence. Employing the maritime metaphor of the island and archipelago, and the sea as a medium, the talk draws on the broader background and implications of post-WWII drive towards a “better future” and Stanislaw Lem’s take on genocide in his work Provocation to probe into the changing terrains and tomorrows of human and other-than-human life. Exploring the mirage of democratic system through contemporary cases of “pragmatic betrayal of values”, the lecture attempts to situate the discussion on peace in a post-institutional setting and attempts to reassess the conditions of planetary connectivity.

About Martin Pogačar