Revisiting State Socialism VI. Dance music as a metaphor for socialist acceleration in Romania in the 1960s and 1980s.
On 15 March, at 19:00, the sixth edition of the project "Revisiting State Socialism" took place with the title "Dance music as a metaphor for socialist acceleration in Romania in the 60s and 80s". The guests were Paul Breazu and Mihai Lukács, and the meeting was moderated by Ștefan Baghiu.
Socialist time was perceived in the late 1960s as accelerated, no longer corresponding to a linear flow, the sound of factory production being associated with new music that was beginning to incorporate electronic sound. In the following decades, Romanian pop, light and electronic music grew in parallel with the new industrialization and development at speed, becoming a soundtrack of the new material conditions of late socialism. Romanian pop ("light") music branched out in new directions in the early 1970s, and its social character gained momentum for creators and the general public. Composer and music historian Laurențiu Profeta noted in 1976 the emergence of militant light music songs in the later years, many of which became slams, reaching a much wider audience. Seen as a result of the party's ideological programme, which left no artistic sector untouched, social-political light music songs became imposed themselves authoritatively. Socialism was not just an economic project, but a complex that encompassed political, social, cultural and artistic dimensions, so the systemic projection onto a pop sub-genre like dance music was not left to chance.
read more /
Fellowships for Curators and Artists at Salzburg Summer Academy 2024
CALL for APPLICATIONS now open until April 12 /
The Fellowships for Curators and Artists at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg are part of ERSTE Foundation’s educational program and its long-term endeavour to support and strengthen contemporary art especially in the region of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The fellowship program is realized together with ERSTE Foundation’s long-time cooperation partners from tranzit, Igor Zabel Association and Kontakt Collection. Kontakt Collection collaborates with the Zagreb based WHW Akademija.
read more /
MUSEUM OF REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT
4.03 – 15.11.2024
@tranzit. ro/Iași
For most of 2024, tranzitiasi has been and is involved in building a very ambitious project called the Museum of Real Estate Development, alongside a wide range of artists, thinkers, theorists and academics from the most diverse backgrounds and geographies. So far, a number of six online meetings have been held, meetings in which a group of sociologists - in dialogue with the rest of the guests - tried to expand, in a transdisciplinary framework, the multi-methodical empirical research from the theoretical framework of capitalist accumulation processes, as well as on the role of real estate development in these processes today. They considered the results of the REDURB project (and the 8 case studies from Romania: Cluj, Iasi, Brașov, Craiova, Bragadiru, Tg. Jiu, Reșita, Bârlad). Through these meetings was attempted to build a broad delimitation of the parameters in which the establishment of such a museum is possible and transferable in different, globalized geographies. The meetings were held in English and were followed by extensive discussions on how this body of knowledge can be translated into a multidisciplinary environment. The joint effort started online will take a more material form between August 1 and 5, 2024, when the whole group will meet, in person, in Iasi for a few intensive days where we will alternate presentation sessions, discussions, cooking, workshop situations or guided tours that will culminate with the vernissage of the Museum of Real Estate Development exhibition that will be opened in the transitiasi space.
read more /
András Vigvári: Zártkert-Magyarország
Book Launch in Cluj Napoca /
Thursday, 29th of February, 6 p.m.
Address: tranzit.ro/Cluj, Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
How do people address the housing crisis? András Vigvári's book deals with the grassroots responses to the housing crisis in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the settlement of suburban private agricultural areas. The book presents an ethnographic study of the settlement of a suburban garden area on the outskirts of a town near Budapest, once an agricultural and weekend housing area, and discusses the results of the fieldwork as part of global social and housing processes.
read more /
ANTIDOXA_5 – Reading group GMT
26th of February2024, 6 p.m
Address:tranzit. ro/Cluj,
Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
[The event is held in Hungarian]
„The desirable goal of politics can be defined in philosophical terms by reflecting on what is Evil, the root cause of human suffering.” (New Eastern European Left)
„Hippies, punks, antifas.
Feather merchants and shirkers.
Niggers. Lesbians. Anarchists. Jewish commies.”
(Dawn contemplation on communism and more)
There are many opinions about the thinking of Gáspár Miklós Tamás. Is there a political truth to be gleaned from his writings that goes beyond opinions? Once a month, we read a text from Gáspár Miklós Tamás' book „Antitézis” together, interpret it, discuss and debate it.
On the 26th of February, we will discuss a section of the text „Truth and Class”, entitled „Two kinds of socialism.”
read more /
Revisiting State Socialism (V)
February 22th in Bucharest, 7 p.m
Grădina ArtHub,
General Constantin Budișteanu Street, no 10
We invite you to join our series of conferences by tranzit.ro/Cluj and Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj under the PNRR project Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis.
Our Bucharest meeting is moderated by Adela Hîncu.
Our podcast series here:
https://soundcloud.com/rev-state-socialism
Our HMCluj 2024 conference here:
https://hmcluj2024.conference.ubbcluj.ro/
Socialism, Alternative Globalization, and Human Rights
talk by Raluca Grosescu & Bogdan Iacob
State socialism had a crucial role in post-war globalization and the subsequent crafting of international law. During the Cold War, Eastern Europe produced trans-regional circulations, epistemic networks, and institutional projects alternative to but interconnected with those generated in the West. Decolonization was the catalyst for socialist globalism in international organizations, at the level of inter-governmental relations and in terms of reconceptualizing norms and hierarchies.
read more /
Darwin Day 2024 – Citizen Science and Biodiversity
Monday, 12 February 2024, 6-8 p.m
tranzit. ro/Cluj,
Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
tranzit.ro/Cluj invites you to Darwin Day 2024 – Citizen Science and Biodiversity, the first event of a program series developed in partnership with NECC - Nature Education Community Center, hypha_etc [education, theory, culture], Milvus Group and the Hungarian Department of Biology and Ecology, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj.
read more /
Sophie Goltz.Building and Repairing Civic Life: call for public space.
Saturday, 10th of February 2024, 6 p.m.
tranzit.ro/ Iasi @ GreenHouse, Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, Iași
tranzitiasi is welcoming you on this Saturday, the 10th of February to join us for a public lecture with curator and art educator Sophie Goltz.
”Based on the repercussions of Documenta Fifteen and connected with the question of public (art) spaces, this lecture will present artistic and curatorial strategies around notions of remembering. Lately, what it was called "Versöhnungstheater" (spectacle of reconciliation, Czollek), the German Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) is questioned in these projects and its institutional manifestations be it a memorial site, museum, archive, walkabout, ritual, or gesture.
read more /
Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
tranzit. ro/București and The Last Archive present:
Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
21 December 2023, 4-7 p.m.
A temporary intervention at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Coordinates
Access: by car via DN1 or A3; by bus no. 446, departure from Piața Presei Libere, arrival at Pescari stop
Since 2012, when the Maya apocalypse did not exactly happen on a planetary scale as predicted, we have witnessed instead an agglomeration of gradual apocalypses, usually inflicted on those who don’t have back-up plans, with bunkers and rifles and know-it-all-scenarios, protect-your-family infrastructures. The world is falling apart, not only in its physical condition, but also in its very reason for existing as a space that allows breathing and thriving of the spirit, be it human or other. As we write these lines, we are watching the erasure of people, of humanity, of common sense, of any sense, of reason and empathy altogether, of the will to live, confronted as we are with the capitalist-colonial-military apparatus. Destruction and doom, repression and censorship, chemical weapons and threat of nuclear escalation, on top of the existing wars, and the countless disasters that the media only reports for a limited time, on the backdrop of lifestyle advice, with gym exercises and nutritional advice, cooking and gardening recipes, pictures of cats and babies, watch the apocalypse from the cosy, fireplace-heated living room.
With tranzit. ro/București, every year on the 21st of December we gather to celebrate we survived for one more year. What about those who didn’t survive? Not because they were old and their time on this earth was peacefully coming to an end, but because of so many other reasons that we find hard to come to terms with?
We cannot fight death, no matter who inflicts it. We can, however, remember those who tried to live.
read more /
Research Transformation
an autotheoretical lecture by Cătălin Gheorghe
based on a book mediation event
Saturday, December 16, 2023, at 5 p.m.
tranzit.ro/ Iasi
Address: Greenhouse, Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, Iași
Book mediation:
Catalin Gheorghe, Transformarea cercetării. Noi estetici aplicate în practica cercetării artistice critice (Research transformation. New aesthetics applied in the practice of critical artistic research), tranzit.ro/Iași, Iași, 2022, ISBN 978-606-94455-9-4
read more /
Revisiting State Socialism (IV)
Friday, December 15, 2023, 6:00 p.m
"Lucian Blaga" University Library from Sibiu/ Str. Lucian Blaga, no. 2A
tranzit. ro/Cluj in partnership with UBB Cluj-Napoca and "Lucian Blaga" University Library from Sibiu invites you to a lecture and discussion within the project "Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis" on the topic of the polycrisis of the 1970s -1980 with the title
„Varieties of Polycrisis: Escalations, Doomsdays and Historical History from the Long 1970s to Today”.
read more /
Situations and commitments
Specific Aspects of the Pedagogical Turn of the 1970s in Hungary / The work of Péter Forgács, István Sinkó & István Rév and the educational films of the Balázs Béla Studio
08 December 2023-14 January 2024
Opening: 7th of December 23, 7pm.
Curator: Virag Lődi
The exhibition focuses on specific creative engagements within public education by intellectuals of the late Kádár-era in Hungary, introducing democratic and critical attitudes and methods. The exploration of media artist Péter Forgács's complex experiment in aesthetic education between 1974 and 78 constitutes the axis of the exhibited material, but another semi-illegal school workshop led by economic historian István Rév and painter István Sinkó is also evoked. The political and social contexts of these pedagogical experiments are given more depth by the inclusion of a series of educational films made at the time in the Balázs Béla Studio, also highlighting the importance and educational aspects of the studio’s social film distribution program. The exhibition treats the above cultural practices within the intersection of pedagogy and art.
read more /
ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit:
