Our two weeks in Split, Croatia began with a one-day session mini-conference on “Art & Resistance,” which was co-sponsored by the International Alternative Culture Center, Perpetuum Mobile, OSA Archives (Budapest) and McMaster University (Canada). In addition to members of our own group, we were lucky to have a number of guests involved: Konstantin Akinsha, Ben Halligan, Zlatko Kopljar, Suzana Milevska, Ana Peraica, Gerald Raunig, and Dmitri Vilensky. A transcript of the closing roundtable will be available on this site soon.

We had an extremely busy two weeks of lectures, seminars, small group meetings, curriculum workshops and reading workshops. Benjamin Halligan, Gerald Raunig and Sergey Chebanov provided us with guest lectures in the first week. In the second week, we were fortunate enough to be visited for three days by Antonio Negri and Judith Revel, who introduced us to excerpts from their new projects and graciously spent an afternoon taking our questions and talking with a group of us. We ended the two weeks with fantastic little presentations from each of the six small working groups around which our summer session was organized.

We are already planning for next year’s Summer meeting. The emphasis is likely to be on individual working groups on specific themes (some the same as those from this summer, some new ones), which participants will have a greater role in helping to establish and run. Details about the form of the seminar, as well as the location, will be announced in the near future. We will also need to talk about publishing some of the research and teaching ideas that have emerged out of this project. There will also be a number of intersession activities, including the upcoming meeting in Ekatarinburg and a workshop/conference at the beginning of April in Budapest on “Alternative Culture(s) and Urban Space.”

I hope you’re enjoying the autumn!

Imre