Aleksandr Bogdanov
Reading Seminar /
Friday, 21st of November – 6 pm.
tranzit. ro/Cluj, Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
On November 21st from 18:00 at tranzit.ro/Cluj we are starting a new series of reading seminars focusing on Aleksandr Bogdanov. The seminar continues the project started with last year’s Reading Ilyenkov: a critical-philosophical examination of the origins and later developments of Eastern Marxism. A prolific and original thinker, Bogdanov opened multiple paths for critical inquiry—ranging from organizational theory and proto-cybernetics to science-fiction and Proletkult—while grounding his project in a distinctive, idealist rereading of Kant. Today, Bogdanov is experiencing a renewed international interest. The seminar will explore the reasons for this resurgence and critically examine his contributions through a series of monthly reading sessions.
The conveners of the seminars are Siyaveș Azeri and Alex Cistelecan, and events will be held in English.
These seminars are part of the project "Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis" (PNRR-C9-I8-CF104/15.11.2022).
read more /
Kicsi kozmosz by Zsuzsa Selyem
Reading workshop /
Wednesday, 19th of November 2025, 6 pm.
tranzit. ro/Cluj, Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
On November 19th from 18:00 at tranzit.ro/Cluj we are organizing in collaboration with Fecske Cooperative a literary reading workshop centred around Zsuzsa Selyem’s newly published Kicsi kozmosz (Little Cosmos), with the author present and moderation by Árpád Kulcsár. Fecske Cooperative is a youth initiative based on horizontality, aiming for the creation of a cultural space with democratic organizational spirit in a solidarity economy framework. The event will aim to go beyond traditional, frontal author/reader gatherings and through reading collectively fragments from the text will seek to put into discussion various aspects of our shared world, such as women’s experiences, their oppression and their many ways of resistance, how war shapes both human and non-human beings and in what ways we are connected to the non-human world in general.
The event will be held in Hungarian.
read more /
A World in Common(s)
From Marxist Feminism to Solidarity Economy /
18–24 August 2025,
Vármező/Câmpu Cetății (Romania)
Deadline for applications: 30 June
The purpose of this summer school is, first, to introduce theoretical frameworks such as Marxist feminism, world-systems analysis, and global labour studies to show how social reproduction is subordinated to endless capital accumulation in the capitalist world system. Second, it aims to explore what alternatives exist to this, i.e., how it is possible to engage in economic activities directly aimed at satisfying human needs.
read more /
Upcoming: The fifth edition of Ecologies of Emancipation – Imminent horizon: fascism or imperialism?
Organizational work of the fifth edition of the Ecologies of Emancipation summer school has begun. The school will take place at the hypha_etc campsite in Câmpu Cetății, between 10-16 August 2025.
The latest political and geopolitical developments, local and global, seem to confront us with a threatening double horizon: an accelerated slide towards fascism, or an equally precipitous retreat into imperialism - with all the overlaps, complicities and continuities between them. On the one side, then, a European democratic establishment that can only articulate its immediate future by renouncing the last remnants of a distributist state and democratic appearances, in a general arms race that promises nothing but authoritarianism and austerity at home, and devastating inter-imperialist conflicts on a global scale. On the other side, a populist insurgent bloc with deep roots and complicity in the very systems and apparatuses of Euro-Atlantic democracies, which is no longer shy in displaying its assumed fascism, and which promises, just as grimly, a harsh regime of austerity and authoritarianism at home, coupled with an equally provocative and bellicose attitude abroad, only in the name of a different set of values.
read more /
City of Glass – exhibition by Andreas Fogarasi followed by roundtable discussion
A project initiated by Desire Foundation and the Căși Sociale ACUM!/Social Housing NOW! movement from Cluj, and implemented in collaboration with tranzit.ro/Cluj and hosted by Aluvial Exhibition Space and tranzit.ro/Cluj.
opening June 20th, 6pm
Address: Aluvial
Str. Napoca no. 16
Cluj, Romania
Exhibition can be visited in the period 20 of June until 29 of August 2025, Monday to Friday, between 10 AM - 6 PM.
For his exhibition City of Glass at tranzit.ro/Cluj, Andreas Fogarasi is continuing the series “Nine Buildings, Stripped”, a project first presented in his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Vienna in 2019.
“Nine Buildings, Stripped”, follows a selection of buildings that are to be demolished or stripped for refurbishment. Fogarasi’s work consists in collecting and presenting materials and surfaces from these buildings, creating sculptural portraits of specific places through time. For his exhibition in Cluj, Fogarasi and the members of the research project focused on three industrial sites of that have ceased or are about to cease production (and will soon be developed into commercial and apartment complexes): Sanex/Cesarom, Armătura and the Combinatul de Utilaj Greu. Fogarasi collected fragments, surfaces, and design elements from these sites, which will be or have been abandoned by industrial production and demolished to give way to new real estate investment projects which will reshape the city’s structure and life. City of Glass will feature the artworks created by Fogarasi from these materials, which condense the transformations that take place at the urban scale. The title suggests a particular sensitivity to the frailness of cities and could be read not just as remembrance of the once sparkling, now broken glass of the industrial city, but also a warning to the new and shining reflective façades of the developments that take their place. This frailty is also one of reflection: what do we see in the broken or cloudy surfaces of old industrial architecture, and how are we to appear in the seamless reflections that are produced by shopping malls and luxury apartments?
Andreas Fogarasi is an artist based in Vienna/Austria. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions internationally, among others at MUMOK, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; New Museum, New York; Ludwig Museum, Aachen/Germany; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as well as the 52. Biennale di Venezia, where he was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation.
read more /
Marxism in the Sciences: Toward an International Critical Knowledge Network
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION /
Marxism & Sciences Journal, in collaboration with tranzit.ro/cluj, organises its second symposium at the hypha_etc campsite in Câmpu Cetății (Romania) between 1–6 September, which attempts to foster a forum for discussing the chances for collectively building up an international network of projects in particular pertaining to Radical Science and Art activism, Socialist Heritage Studies and Critical Contemporary Research.
In today’s situation, when Marxist thought seems ‘undead’ and has retreated to the academic realm, all we offer, it seems, are attempts at dissemination of ideas and publication projects (book series, journals etc.). We want to discuss what can be done about it and how that ‘retreat’ is not fortuitous, since Marxist terminology seems indispensable especially in the realm of ‘knowledge production’ and ‘knowledge economy’. We would like to discuss the possibility of building up a platform of exchange, education and information that goes beyond a collection of papers, pamphlets, and books that describe the situation, but to actively connect local grassroots activism and global academic and artistic research. The split of the realms seems to be a major obstacle to us nowadays. This aim in mind we should start in the fields we already work in.
read more /
Reading Evald Ilyenkov
Friday, 22th of November 2024
tranzit. ro/Cluj,
Napoca str, no 16, 1st floor, Cluj Napoca
Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979) is the most important Soviet Marxist philosopher of the postwar. He has written on a large gamut of subjects, from problems of theoretical philosophy, theory of knowledge, the concepts of the “abstract” and the “concrete”, the “ideal”, and the universal, to Marx’s materialist dialectical method in Capital, problems of cybernetics, automation, machine-thinking, to problems of pedagogy, theory of education, psychology, human mind, and ethics and aesthetics. Ilyenkov can be considered the philosophical originator of what is known as “activity theory” in the Soviet Union, which in its turn precedes what is known as Cultural-Historical Activity Theory internationally nowadays. The concepts, ideas and theories of Ilyenkov have influenced generations of younger philosophers from the 1950s to present in Eastern Europe, while recently enjoying an increased attention in the anglophone world.
The aim of these monthly reading seminars is to closely familiarize the participants with the key concepts and theories developed by Ilyenkov with the hope of utilizing them in the face of contemporary polycrisis.
read more /
POLYCRISES ACROSS DIVIDES
29 - 31 August 2024
Historical Materialism Cluj/Kolozsvár 2024
The first edition of Historical Materialism Cluj/Kolozsvár will take place between 29-31of August 2024, in Cluj-Napoca:
https://hmcluj2024.conference.ubbcluj.ro/
Open call for participation
1st of February - 1st of April 2024
The conference is organized by the Babeș-Bolyai University in partnership with Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and tranzit.ro/Cluj.
read more /
Marxism & Ecology Summer School
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION now open until the 15th of May /
Câmpu Cetății, Mureș County, Romania
𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟐𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟗𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒
With 𝐓𝐫𝐨𝐲 𝐕𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐞, 𝐊𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝, 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐚 𝐒𝐳𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐢 and 𝐠𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬
Call for Participants open until the 𝟏𝟓𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒.
It is easy to grow numb to the litany of environmental devastation in recent years. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic killed thirty million people; atmospheric CO2 stands fifty per cent higher than two centuries ago (currently 423.6 ppm); wildfires rage in Chile and Argentina, while 11,300 people were killed by an overnight flood in Derna; less than a tenth of the world’s plastic is recycled; over 75 billion livestock animals are killed every year; the number of coastal ‘dead zones’ increased from 10 in 1960 to 415 in 2023; the US government declared twenty-one species formerly found in its territory extinct in 2023. One can go on, and on, and on.
At the same time, the last thirty years has seen the development of sophisticated radical critiques of environmental degradation and the ‘capitalocene’, the need for struggle to achieve transformation in response to the continued failure of centrists to achieve meaningful reform.
read more /
Summer school: GREEN LINE: decentralisation, decoupling, degrowth
CALL for PARTICIPATION
open until the 30th of June 2024.
The summer school take place in the period:
29 July - 4 August 2024
hypha_etc, Câmpu Cetății, Mures county
The Green Line Summer School is aimed at students interested in the video essay as a form of argumentation and communication on the one hand, and the green transition as a subject on the other. The school is open to students regardless of field of study and previous experience.
We expect students from both STEM and socio-humanities backgrounds, as well as high school seniors, to attend the school. There is no registration fee. We offer free accommodation in 4-6 bedded rooms, up to a maximum of 24 beds, plus free camping space. Travel expenses (train or bus) can be covered up to 130 RON.
Those wishing to participate are asked to send a letter of motivation by 30 June to telefonulfarafir2023@gmail.com.
read more /
ANTIDOXA_7 – Reading group GMT
13 May2024, 6 p.m
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 13th of May, we will discuss "On solidarity". This time the discussion is led by Erőss Réka.
read more /
REVISITING STATE SOCIALISM VIII
Thursday, 11th of April, 2024, 7 p.m
"Lucian Blaga" University Library from Sibiu/ Str. Lucian Blaga, no. 2A
tranzit. ro/Cluj in partnership with Babes Bolyai University 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
„Reframing Sovereign Power in Late Socialist Romania: Crisis, Militarism and the Nationalist Turn”.
The meeting is moderated by Ștefan Baghiu.
read more /
ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit:
