Morana Miljanović: The Ship Community and the World to Come
Friday, 23 January
17:00 - 19:00
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Sala Noua Galerie)
Entrance from Str. Monetăriei 3
The conversations in the Living Thought series continues througout January to May 2026, part of the programme Cultivators of Life (2025-2026) organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
Coordinated by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, the conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
Morana Miljanović: The Ship Community and the World to Come.
Drawing on her double background as human rights lawyer and ship captain/skipper, including on refugee search and rescue missions as well as the Sumud Flotila, Morana Miljanović shares her reflections on the daily lived solidarity as a source of political reinvention. Could the ship community be a prefiguration of the possible world to come, beyond the violences of empires and nation-states? What spaces could still host a politics based on promises made by the people to the people, and what projects of organization are able to rely on joy as a political category? What are the current challenges and what was achieved in the counter-pedagogy of the Global Sumud Flotila?
Short bio
Morana Miljanovic is a rebel with many enmeshed and intersecting causes, with eco-social justice at heart. She is currently active as a sailboat captain and sailing teacher, sea rescue activist and Grassroots Advocacy department lead in Louise Michel—a queer-feminist collective sailing a ship in solidarity with people on the move and in resistance to border regimes—captain of a sailboat in the Global Sumud flotilla, novelist and poet, dancer and performer, and grassroots organiser. She used to work in strategic litigation in asylum cases as a human rights lawyer in the Croatian Law Centre, investigated corporate digital surveillance of persons and communities as a researcher at Tactical Technology Collective in Berlin, and is member of the Coordination Committee to the Pirate Care project. In 2020 she has published the novel Invisible Islands/Islas Invisibiles in Mexico.
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
