What has left since we left (2020) - book launch

so welcome to the online environment of the young fanatic academy today we're celebrating the launch of a beautiful book what has left since we left published by onomatopei and edited by young fanatic alumni julio la chiotti and beauty beautifully designed by attempt studio um it's wonderful to have you all here uh to celebrate this book and which articulates the fictional end of europe uh within the language of love and separation um it's also likening the political bonds that tie together the european countries and and scrutinizes the complexities and pitfalls inherent in the european ideal um and it touches upon several ideas such as identity collapse or migration conflict and hope um the contributions by the book are isa and it's an expansion on the script for a film um with the same title that has left since we left also directed by giulio and written with don millius and from the verve i would like to thank julio and all of the speakers and people who have worked on this beautiful project uh and a special thank you also to the care of milan uh who is present with us today uh the organization promoting the project in partnership with osteonfonac academy and um i would like to thank uh the generous support of the italian council uh 2019 edition and the foundation i thank you all for here being here tonight participants in public i will give now the stage to erica petrillo who created this event and she will introduce the speakers for tonight thank you very much thank you very much isham sorry i had a problem with my mic perhaps before taking the stage um i will give the word to martha from the from care of milan that also i would like to share a few words with us yes thank you thank you and yeah and just they will say two words about kirov i'm martha bianchi i'm the project manager and kiraf is a non-profit organization for contemporary art based in milano since 1987. we focus our activities mainly on education and on production of new artworks activating collaboration with italian and international institutions the collaboration with julius started long time ago in 2018 when he won the artificial prize we actually run with sky italia that supports the production of video artworks by italian artists under 40. so now we are really really glad to be here at this presentation and this launch of the book and last but not least we would like to thank giulio for sharing this journey with us we also would thank you thanks all the professional and the institution involved and the minister of benny culturally and foundation caripo whose support was essential thank you thank you erica thank you very much uh marita and uh thank you very much kieroff for supporting this project thank you also tuition and of course to the entire vanity for hosting us and also especially to anne for helping us orchestrating this and to have made for taking care so well of the technologies behind this meeting uh that you know are helping us connect despite the lack of proximity and talking about twitch this talk has been also broadcasted on youtube and on zoom uh at the end at the end of the panel there will be a q a with questions from the public so those who want to intervene can write their questions and comments on zoom or on youtube and we will address them at the end of the evening and so let's start really talking about this this project this wonderful project there are many things to say about what has left since we left which has every great project is a multi-layer project in many facets so perhaps the best way to introduce it is to go over its genealogy and to briefly speak about the key steps of its development the mastermind behind this project is who more than two years ago at the time when brexit was still very much part of their conversation um had uh the kind of first idea from which everything unfolded afterwards so when brexit again seemed to signal the beginning of the dismantling of europe and the end of europe seemed to be not too much of a far-fetched possibility julio came up with the idea of making a movie that as isham said before speculates on the current european dystopia by reenacting a fictional political meeting that breaks up takes place actually in the same venue where the treaty of masjid was signed in 1992 but in this place just three politicians are left julia will talk about the movie later and i don't want to steal his time but for the sake of this presentation is i think important to point out to a sentence that for me is crucial in the script it's a sentence that is that is mentioned by the interpreter who is one of the main character in the movie and the sentence is uh this is my last chance it asks for a different approach and this sentence for me is key because it brings us to the second iteration of the project which is the book that we are presenting this evening this book a book where together with julio i've been involved in the selection of the of the contents and when julio and i were really thinking about how to curate this book we didn't only want to translate the moving images of the book into an editorial product what we wanted instead was to expand and amplify some of the themes that the film explored and possibly really to apply a different approach to our understanding of political phenomenon so this necessity for a different approach was really our guiding star in the developing development of the book and i think crucially we thought it was important for us to move away from in understanding a political phenomena that only explains the behavior of countries in terms of competitions military competition and maximization of economical gains in other words what we wanted to do was to find the lens for which we can look and talk about politics while also including emotions and sentiments as part of the conversation so in other terms we wanted to find a way to make politics and emotions co-exist and so in that sense we wanted to propose an understanding of social political phenomena where the behavior of countries be resembled or can be interpreted as if it resembles the behavior of individuals and obviously individuals are not just moved by pragmatic considerations and by attempts to maximize their interest but on the contrary human behaviors is very much driven by emotions and sentiments such as fear rate pride shame resentment acceptance and so on so this is the intuition that really lies behind what is left since we left as a book a book in which we have asked to a number of people from different backgrounds and fields of expertise representing different sensibilities and geographic epistemology epistemologies to contribute and to reflect on this prompt how to think about europe through a metaphor which is a metaphor of the idea of being together love and separation as those trajectories also inform relationship among individuals and the result the result is a book which gathers an incredibly rich and diverse collection of contributions and i think one of the most remarkable feature is precisely the the the kind of vast array of different languages and styles that the authors have employed we have a text by an academic aisha zarakol who uh is of turkish origin she currently teaches international relationship at the university of cambridge and her text in a way is very academic in its nature but this is combined by for example a text which instead applies a more much more poetic almost philosophical style which is attacked by federico lodoli and we have other two texts by marwan and by varina that they will introduce later which applied the language of personal biography and in the case of marwan also the language of the myth to explore the topic and my contribution instead uses the language of sci-fi to talk about europe and i think this stylistic diversity and the difference in perspective is hopefully the first step towards the diversity of approaches that we were mentioning earlier and these bring me to the third iteration of the project which is tonight conference which is an occasion not just to present the book but also to expand on some of the conversation that the film and the book initiated and we have julio tonight of course we have three contributors to the book and a guest speaker princess beckering whose current research deal with the collective melancholia and the loss of the future uses using techno music as a lens uh and by bringing emotions close to politics of course the kind of circle is closed and her research also ties back to the broader project so after this this overview of the three different iterations of the project i guess i'll give the stage to julio who can speak about the film and the book thanks amelian erica and again i want to add myself to the tanks list for who made this possible for this project to be realized so of course the anfanik academy and kirov and all the funds that supported both the film and the publication of this book as well as this public program which of course was meant to be live and it was meant to be the first of a series of public problems uh related to the book launch of the publication um so i will briefly speak about the all concept behind this white project um [Music] which really positioned itself at the cross of uh fiction within an uh um an entangled reality with our daily lives in in in europe so the whole project started as erica mentioned like quite some time ago like nearly two years ago and while i was resident at the yanfenik academy and um given the fact that academy is in in maastricht i got the chance to visit the the venue where the maastricht treaty was signed in 1992 and um the hall in which was signed kind of resound and echoed uh those those very important moments for for european history but at the same time the idea that i had while walking through the corridors and through the main uh through the main hall were given me a feeling of kind of loneliness it was right the moment in which brexit was at the peak of its discussion and the future looked really uncertain and i kind of immediately thought about setting a film in that room in which way before any pandemic quarantined years uh had to feature just three politicians left alone in this in this room and uh these three politicians would have uh dealt among each others on the chances of closing the european project forever and in order to do so [Music] by paying them from three different european countries i wanted to have uh an interpreter so another character being there uh again this character would be alone as a as an interpreter being in a translation booth and i wanted this interpreter to be a kind of ghost from a very close europe uh close in terms of time which was uh the united kingdom so i wanted this interpreter uh to be speaking in a very thick british accent and i wanted the film to be somehow uh uh an in-between uh groundhog day in which if you remember the film the character wakes up every day uh to to to the same to the same situation which he finds in himself and he has to deal with his idea of change in the future so he interacts with his present with the idea of like changing the future at the same time i wanted uh the film to be a kind of reminiscence of uh somehow like the uh christmas carol in which these these three politicians would have been representing or embodying uh three different stages of europe so maybe a past the present and and and the future but in order uh to make uh um a kind of a an allegory of of the european complexity i didn't want of course to focus on on politics uh in a strict sense of the term but i wanted it to be really metaphorical so i thought about uh setting major european problems within their discourses uh by driving them into uh very personal uh issues related to kinship or to very basic human relationship or love affairs so these three characters are basically um in the end interpreted all by the same actress which is yannick remembers and this this this character uh uh is is uh basically talking to herself uh helped by this interpreter my idea was firstly like how decision makers interact among each others but i didn't want to go towards the reality of a real conversation i wanted it to be first of all a physically far away one from the other in a huge room just three people and given the fact that the actress is just one uh you would never see uh the entire uh group of the tree so uh the film basically is these three people talking among each other's in in an editing work um interacting with this interpreter and i wanted to kind of understand like or more than understand like i wanted to uh develop a narrative around this idea of the mediation so how uh language can be mediated uh in order to let people understand each other that's why the character of the interpreter and um i even was kind of curious in my like imagination towards this this future on the idea of what if what if an interpreter uh um takes over the words of these uh uh characters and puts them in the condition of talking for real uh about their personal issues um so this is a fiction film uh with all the uh features of uh you know the very classical cinema there's no kind of science fiction brought in the narrative and uh we developed the script with dan melius and van der verst over a period of a year which i found it like very challenging for a 20 minute and uh not happy with uh with the idea of just working on a film i was uh really willing to take a step forward and to set up this publication with erica which had to feature again um ideas around europe but from specific points of view that's why the the the five contributors which erica listed marwan marina which i said that i call herself each one of them should have dealt with the idea of writing within their discipline but with adding a over layer of uh not fiction but an overlayer of uh uh indication which would have been interpreting europe as a uh as an allegory of of uh those relationships based them on their personal opinions and basically that's it so the book collects these five they're called from the subtitle and in on the cover of the book they're called takes to play a bit with language with both to take as it is in cinema and to take as an opinion and um so do you have these five contributions you have uh the script itself from the film and i was really surprised by um reading the contributions when they uh were nearly done i was uh really surprised on how the the text that the five contributors wrote like kind of entangled with the script itself from the film so i realized that some of the things that the writers were saying in their text looked or sounded a lot like um things that the characters in the film are are talking about and of course uh nobody saw the film before and i haven't read their their texts so uh kind of as a closing circle i think that um that was really a huge satisfaction for me for uh when i was holding a book together and reading it then the book features like some of the pictures and images from the production of the film and uh at the end there is the only real thing which is a timeline of europe written by enrique de gasperus who's an historian and he underlines major happenings in europe from second world war up until brexit uh featuring like yeah major events like treaties but even uh relationships with uh neighbor uh neighbor king countries so close countries of europe um so that's that's basically it if erica no yeah if you want to keep on [Laughter] i suppose is now marina's turn to introduce uh to introduce our contribution to the book thank you julio so hello everyone i'm very glad to be part of this group and of this evening and very emotional actually to to be part of the very precious project of julius culato uh i wanted to first of all uh to spend a couple of minutes just of how come i'm taking part of of of a small contribution i must say from a large project or what has left since we left julia and me we know each other for many years but uh there was one particular moment that our our roads came across because uh my text is a kind of a summary of a very maybe larger project that i made in the world which was completely different comparing to the times we are currently living in and actually it's very emotional to think about the research uh and the ideas we had about the notion that we are tackling tonight in the world and a kind of a emergency uh state of emergency due to kobe that we are currently living in so going staying coming back a one-way ticket to the first two decades of the new millennium which would be the title of my text in the julius book edited by uh julio is the the same name of the project which uh actually had another form a radio form uh it was um it is uh um a journey made by five episodes of the podcast and the text somehow wanted to summarize i the idea of a a kind of a living balance that i lived last year just a couple of months before the start of the covet because last year was the moment when i spent exactly the same amount of time on the let's say european union territory which in my case regards the italian state and the same amount of time that i spent in the country where i was born and raised and which doesn't exist anymore or uh former yugoslavia so when i reached let's call this life balance uh very modestly uh saying i started to think uh about a very basic questions basic uh considering the complexity of what what might be considered the fragmented identity that i think we all reach when we detach from ourselves from the places of origin so i just uh started to ask myself where i'm from living your own country means lacking the broader sense of your life actions what are the advantages and disadvantages of your fragmented identity and what is the exact exact moment of time when you lose the sense of belonging not only from the country of your origin but also of the country you are actually spent the same amount of time so there are different layers of this journey and different layers of this decks the first maybe layer might be entitled evropane alternative which in serbian translated from serbian would be there are no alternative to europe actually this was the slogan that somehow uh follows me uh through the years because this was the very important slogan on the streets of belgrade when i left the country only one week before uh slobodan milosevic regime overthrown so i i tried to travel somehow through the time through by collecting the testimonies of the people who followed me uh through my uh tangible uh journey at the time and through the people who experienced the same uh decision as mine to leave the country at the time uh by asking whether europe still doesn't there are no there are still no alternatives uh to europe so this is the first layer which uh somehow is a kind of a flashback uh at a time the second layer might be the idea of europe and a different notions of europe within the european union which brought me closer to the study of bulgarian politologist stephen krastev in his book after europe actually this is something which might be very related uh to the current times of how do we uh consider the europe with the different notions and maybe different hierarchies he's tackling uh more specifically the question of what we do they call the visual countries and illiberal democracy and what is the notion of imitation imitate the west was the point of reference of all these let's call the other europe at the time and today how this let's call it imitation game uh changed through the time the third layer which uh i wanted to tackle and i uh hope it's a kind of a heart of of my research is um what is called a hugo sphere this is a notion that uh the name is given by the correspondent from the economies former correspondent from the common economies from the balkans team judah who defined this uh non-tangible territory that i very much feel part of yugosphere might be uh correlated to what we are calling today europe europe sphere or non-tangible territory of where the people are feeling at the part of the same territory of the shared values and same language and the same let's say uh notion of time and and and the places so hugo's fear is only possible in the territories that are out of the balkans in my case uh in italy but in france uh and in the whole european union there are small parts of these non-tangible examples of what is the what is life since we left from the former yugoslavia uh the last notion is uh um the the question of european uh european uh of the balkans or what we can uh call the balkanization of europe vulcanization stands for the very rough notion of what might uh mean today the dissolution so uh my study was uh how come uh uh the the most the most developed part of the eastern european glock at the time uh arrived and didn't arrive yet uh to be part of what is called the european union today so different notions of europe different layers of what is uh what is supposed to to feel like a european and the notion of identity how uh the notion of european identity is a kind of is the part also a yugoslavian identity what i mean by the yugoslavian identity is today uh consider who today i tried to explore who today is consider itself to be a yugoslavian and who is considering to to define itself to be serbian or from belgrade i started from my personal example as erica said before uh my journey is uh most of all the personal journey that try to reflect on the people uh and the people's identity from the balkans but i also try uh try to explore those who decided after many years as me living abroad to come back in the conflict zone uh in the particular case in celebrity it's a banana looking also and what does it mean uh to to choose to come back that's why the the last part of of the title of the text and uh last but not least the notion of peace for me it was very interesting to see not only how the the notion of europe is uh considered differently how the notion of identities is considered differently if you come in from this other part of europe but also the notion of peace i was very astonished through these years and this is just a small layer of thought uh maybe food for thought is um to see uh how um the european union is uh praising of course the uh the preservation of peace the 75 years of peace so i questioned all my um uh the fellow uh people from the journey how do they perceive peace and how come the the the the peace and the war are not perceived in the same time uh referring to the to the balkans considering that the war there uh finished just 20 years ago or or if we can say it lasted for one decade so the notion of peace the notion of identity the notion of this undoubted intangible territory of hugo's fear and starting from uh from the title and and the centers that follow me at the time from the journey of alternative there are no alternatives to europe were some kind of um feel rouge uh to all my research but uh i must admit that um considering that covet times uh nowadays and these months and this year actually that's why i'm saying uh talking about this work this year is particularly emotional and i know that it's not very healthy to and maybe not very right to make a parallelism through the time that i when i left the country and now and leaving this state of emergency found me to rethink a lot about the work uh i did in this particular way and the text i i did and there are lots of parallelism at the time uh that i was living in the former yugoslavia and and today actually i haven't been coming back for for a year now in the balkans and this is something that really make me uh uh reflect to the notion of how detached how the touch you feel from your country of origin what happens to your ident identity belongings and how the emergency state mixed up once again all these notions so uh what uh what has left uh since we left uh really uh gives a form to a very complex state of uh all the people who doesn't necessarily leave the country but just like this let's call it comfort zone or the place they were born and explores in a very uh healthy and complex way the different layers of belongings and last but not least the conflict the concept of betrayal i ask myself whether the choice and uh the willing and also the choice of leaving your country means also betraying uh the broader picture and broke their sense of belonging so um the text actually tries to to summarize the very complex journey my personal one and that of the last year hopefully it will raise some questions and maybe doubts and hopefully i i i think some critics regarding what is considered to be the country that doesn't exist anymore or the former yugoslavia thank you so much thank you very much marina for explaining so eloquently a project that is so complex and so layered but also so charged with your own personal experience i loved how you uh kind of were able to talk uh and to merge very uh like reflections and thoughts that is very easy to empathize with like this sense of nostalgia almost for uh what was like a a project you developed one year ago uh so to talk with the language of of uh personal emotions while also speaking about the project it is so complex and layered so thank you for that i guess we will get back to it later later on um during the panel um i'll also now talk briefly about my contributions uh to the book um which is a text sci-fi text titled political tinder in my approach to to the book i you decided to use sci-fi as a as a lens to reflect on topic because um for a reason that is associated to my personal biography i am a designer architecture curator but i have a background in political philosophy and international relationship and usually when approaching a socio-political phenomena someone who has a background in political philosophy does in there to to employ tools that are not rigorous academic incredibly serious whereas my my my intentional decision to use scifi was meant to sort of counter and challenge the assumption that we cannot talk about political phenomenon through languages other than academic ones in my text i tried to unpack the allegory of the idea of europe as an allegory of relationship by thinking about how people of my generation and even younger than me think about a love relationship or emotional relationship which is often time a way mediated by a digital platform uh so in that sense tinder uh of course uh comes up as a kind of uh as um immediate reference in that case um it is not a coincidence that i thought about digital platforms as a mediation of relationship because i wrote the text as probably also the other contributor exactly during the first lockdown so at the time when obviously most of our relationship were mediated through the screen so in that case the sense of in that context a sense of of a digital platform mediating relationship was even more relevant in my text i i invented a fictional character called louisa who uses a tinder an application called political tinder that basically function as it in the application but applied in the in the political sphere so you basically can pick and choose your nationality uh choosing among a range of options um and uh what these meant for me or what this kind of like stood for for me was an implicit criticism to um the kind of like silent competition that still exists among countries within the european territory that even though portray themselves at the surface as uh very friendly towards each other actually still um put forward uh some kind of chauvinistic narrative and and really sort of like breaks about their identity and compete about their identity almost as if they were competitive or something they're trying to get on the on on a successful date um so this was one of the kind of like trajectories that i wanted to explore uh in my text the idea that there is a sort of pervasive cycle form of nationalism uh which still informs uh relationship among european countries and then uh the second kind of like uh axis that i wanted to explore was the idea that um there are so many aspects of our life that are dictated by free will we can choose for example whom to date um which actually was not the case a few decades ago and so similarly um i wanted to kind of poke fun the rigidity of the system where national identity are taken as a given and are never questioned uh almost as if they were genetically transmitted even if obviously they are not um so this is in a nutshell what my text was about and now i'll give this stage to my one yeah hello thank you erica so um thank you all for being here and thank you for watching um so i got the invitation to take part of this project from julio a few months i think before we left to gather the van aak academy we were in residency together and for me it was a bit awkward to receive this kind of invitation because i'm an outsider to europe so i'm from beirut i'm from lebanon and i'm on european territory since six years so i just i'm still a stranger on a strange territory so how to love a stranger anyway and i started thinking about kind of answer to this question uh proposed to me by julian so the first thing that came to my mind and that made the structure of the of the text i proposed was an image um it is known in the myth in the mythologies that europe is a princess kidnapped from tear which is a lebanese now part of the lebanese republic lebanese city and she was a princess from there a bull came which is just himself who became a bull a white a very beautiful white bull came in the sea kidnapped the beautiful princess and took her to the european land and europa this princess gave her name to this new land so for me a love relationship began in the beginning of europe between an animal and a princess between man and animal and i created this kind of hypothesis which is is european anyone who is still capable to fall in love with an animal it sounded a bit awkward at the beginning and i started just thinking about it so while thinking about it the first uh thing that came to my mind was a visual representation of this myth so in history of art the large majority of this representation of this myth depicts a bull with a closed lips having princess europa on his back and growing taking her to to europe so this is the imager presentation of the myth and then i remember too that few years ago in lebanon we discovered a lot of that cow in the lebanese dying because the ship had an accident in the sea so a lot of dead corpses of cows were left on the shores on lebanese shores and while trying to see to watch again these archival images i discovered that all the cows had their lips open and then another idea came to my mind that the possibility to have a communication between the strange land which is europe and my own land the possibility to situate this relationship in the in the domain of language and the possibility to create the most basic element of language which is a word which is a harmony between a consonant and a vowel it is a relationship between going to europe with this bull having his closed lips and coming back to beirut coming back to lebanon with a dead animal having an open mouth and for me i discovered then that the possibility to communicate between those lands is only made possible by this backhand force that is two ways between europe's land and a stranger lands and i made a parallel between uh this image between this possibility this travel between a living animal and a dead animal between a consonant and the vowel to structure the word between the kind of uh biographical story which is the story of the first time i came to europe and which is still the same each time i come back to europe which is when i arrive to the airport and uh the policeman tries to read my name on the password on the passport there is a kind of impossibility to pronounce my name as if the consonants and the vowel are separated again in his mouth so as if the dead animal and the living animal were again separated inside his mouth and to be able to pronounce my own name in order for me to be part of europe we should try to imagine a reconciliation between those two again between consonants and vowels so that's how the basic structures of the text started and then the second part which is a bit theoretical um related to the problem problem of language and of translation which is in the heart of julia's uh work and this uh this book and this film uh specifically the question is a political question which is there's two fundamental postulates to any political structures for example if you take any form of state let's not take europe take a very small state uh not a union so we have a kind of effect uh apostolate which is the need of people to live together to be together on one on one land this is a kind of positive political apostolate which we call the fact that this plurality it is effect the kind of effect a necessity for people to live together and another one is the factum lo queng which is a kind of obligation for people to live together but to speak the same language to share the same language for me as a stranger to this land i discovered this impossibility to be part of acting proletaries and of factum and in the text i try to invent another possibility to create another possibility which is a phantom defectum which is what unites us together for me as a stranger and as european land is failure as effect in a way so this eternal survivor of the failure to pronounce the name and to travel from the consonant to the vowel between the dead animal and the living animal to take this failure as effect and to try to build on it a possible european union so to answer the question what has left since we left i think that what has left is this this possibility in itself and the fact that there is something is left is what makes uh european union possible today this possible factum defect this possible failure between us that's it thank you very much marwan this was great just a thought to move on i very much liked what you said at the end that what unites us is in fact failure as a fact and this almost replicates almost literally a sentence that uh julio uses um in the introduction to the book where he speaks about the notion of europe as sitting on its own ruins so this is something i'm sure you would want to come back later but now i give the stage to precis beckering thank you erica um yeah i'm i'm invited here um tonight or this afternoon as a as a guest just to share some reflections on the book from more of an outsider perspective and um um maybe here and there uh disrupt with the question um i met julio and erica at the young writer in residence um a year ago the topic of my current research novel which is um to be published next year yes um and i'm just gonna i'm gonna keep it short what my research is about because i think it's much more thing to talk about the book uh um [Music] but other things contemporary collective melancholy mostly in the context of of this novel um and this melancholy that i'm talking about is a sentiment that is expressed widely in contemporary artistic expressions but also in in music for example um perhaps most overly in the genre of or sensibility that we call sad core um and i understand that sadness is something that is as much produced by as a refusal of an all-pervading sense of futurelessness um the feeling that the future won't bring us an alternative i don't even think it's necessary to give a full explanation what produces these futurelessness just to name some um some potential causes is climate crisis um the dismantling of systems of care collectivity and social security on a more distant or abstract level the claustrophobic closed circuit of algorithmic governing that only feeds off the existing material of the present and doesn't allow for the permanence of global crisis now the pandemic is just another one of those um i guess it's this whole picture this whole map that creates a feeling of being trapped of endlessly rehearsing the present julia already mentioned groundhog day as a reference and i've been looking at a lot of examples in recent culture that that express this featurelessness what interests me about melancholy is the extent to which it can be shared and if that shared feeling has political potential a political medical for me is a form of sadness that not so not so much longs back nostalgically to the past but expresses um a refutation of of the present um the new possible futures we are longing for they have never existed they might have been promised to a few of us but it's also this promise that should be attacked in political melancholy for example in the type of critique that svetlana bryan called off modern um now i'm i'm interested in discussing if if the ghosts of europe that julio staged in his film and the sense of living among the ruins that that has been mentioned that is present in all the contributions also if that can be transformed into something political and productive um if it can be mobilized perhaps i guess melancholy if it wants to be political should be projected forward as a project of the future and it's dangerous if it's located in nostalgia for our past that never was um so the idea of europe at its core has always been a deeply problematic and violent enterprise carrying the ghost of colonialism and the uncountable the carrying the ghost of the rape and abduction of europa um that's where it's named after um so yeah maybe we can discuss this i i relate very much to this idea of marwan uh the fuckton de facto [Music] why are you right what is shared by all the inhabitation of the failure as a social um and i actually wonder if we are capable of recognizing this failure of or maybe we should do that even more um marwan maybe you could reply to to this first yes thank you persis i don't know if i was the only one but i there was a bit of cuts in your in your question but i will try to um yeah so i think i have kind of answer i don't know if it's direct but it could help i think that i know that during the discussions about the creating the philosophical fundamentals of europe during the creation of the european union there was a kind of discussions related to trying to trace to find the roots of the european union so there was a question at some point if they want to put the roots of the european union in a kind of greek or roman philosophical tradition this was refused and then they were thinking about if they want to put the roots of the european uh union inside the christian or jewish tradition and this was refused too and the alternative that was chosen is that the roots of europe are in the future are not did not happen yet the roots are in front of us and this other possibility which is also um from greek tragedy it is a linguistic term that the past is in front of us and the future is behind so it's the future that comes from behind us to to kill or to attack the the hero so i think this turn and the temporalities of the thing so regarding this question of roman ruin is it at the same time a past that is destroyed that is a failure but it is at the same time a building that is being built it is something that is being made now so it is a failure but it's in a turning point you see as a failure but having its roots in the future at the same point so understanding this as an allegory as a survival of past and the future inside this european union and not having or being able to attain this future root is what makes uh the european union i think today if i thanks marwan if i can i step in purses because i had um i was kind of listing a lot of keywords that came out like while you're representing that and of course like two of the contributors are um are not here today but like of course like reading the book that'd be way clearer but uh for example this idea of uh recreation uh which is both in the film with this idea of uh you know decision makers being locked up in a room having to decide but never coming up with a solution and keep on thinking and rethinking over and over again about basically what happened he's kind of the focal point of federico lodoli's text which um kind of list of uh aphorisms he entangled the idea of european identity uh on the basis of war basically which means that of course we got together um because we destroyed each other's cities during second world war and in order for that not to happen again we had to form and to shape a community of people that would share some ideas what was always interesting to me since the beginning which i pointed out in the introduction of the book is that since i was a kid um i mean there's an anecdote that i i wrote down in the in the introduction of the book which is kind of um [Music] not an epiphany but it's it's um the ignition for my interest towards uh the idea of uh traditions and identities there was this thing written on a wall which was uh stating uh no usa neither uh wars like soviet union europe okay and as a kid i was always wondering okay like i i am european i was really i mean the berlin wall was still up and i was anyways like like questioning myself what does it mean then like to be european if this writing on a wall is this graffiti on the wall he's stating basically what we are not we're not americans so we're not imperial imperialists we're not uh soviets okay we are europeans and i always question myself what does it mean then growing up i was all the time really um um more and more um keen at understanding how you can define an identity by what you're not basically which is a bit what um linking it to for example uh she wrote a a very good book which is called after defeat and in in her contributions she kind she kind of takes over that notion of um empires right after they they they fell and how they could build a sort of uh propaganda to a kind of shape for the people living in the country the idea of what they are even if they're not anymore so we're not an empire anymore um how can we redefine reshape our own identity based on that on what we're not and that i think it's a good hint for what uh mourinho wrote as well like with this idea of having uh um a country that is built up on um basically different people inhabiting that and her own experience by leaving that and going towards a europe in the making and then by living in that europe in the making seeing at that all country that is not there anymore so uh it has to do a lot of course with language and the idea of definition and the ideas of identity i i kind of point pinpoint out out some things that came up while you were all speaking so even this this notion of the loss of the future and this idea of uh former one especially when he writes in his text uh how can you be something sharing something if you don't even share language how can you understand each other's okay and and that was kind of the very first thing that was pointed out the first time i got into the the maastricht hall for something that was completely random but the speakers that they they were insisting a lot on that idea of a new war coming up so we kind of shaped our own community on the ashes of a war let's not have this happen and again so i think there's this um the idea of doing a book uh based on these different and scattered notions depending on all your personal uh experiences that was the main point so like for example on mar one like addressing the issue of like mythology entangling that with language and his own experience in europe and as as you said percy is like um the idea that the the notion it's i mean the name itself europe is is like started and they all meet is like based on on this idea of abduction and and basically a rape you know it's it's uh the kidnapping of a robot is uh we we are built even in the world itself on an aggression on a person that was minding our own business somewhere else summer and take it somewhere else and to kind of give uh to this person the the the again like the the ignatian plane to start a new a new something by only naming it with her own name does it make sense it does i think it very much does um i wanted to jump in following up following up on what you're saying um i think um there are indeed ways of building upon uh ruins uh and um but there are different ways of of doing it uh you can build on voice while feeling resentment and fear towards the past or i think especially was suggesting you can build on ruins uh with a sort of eagerness and sense of hope towards the future which obviously requires a re-elaboration and a mobilization of whatever these wounds carry with them in this in this sense i found very interesting uh a lecture that i was following yesterday by ventura de soura santos uh in which uh he uh talks he starts this this lecture by saying a sense of exhaustion is haunting europe and then he mentioned the financial crisis the climate crisis the energetic crisis and this was a lecture that he gave uh more than five years ago eight years ago if i'm not wrong and still this sense of tiredness this sense of self-questioning is is very much present today if anything uh uh in in even stronger and uh resonating even more powerfully with everyone so somehow i feel um there is this sort of tension that we and frustration that we very much feel i think each of us individually and collectively towards on the one hand uh understanding concepts such as unity uh and togetherness is positive and in that sense the european union as an east political institution that's crystallized a sense of unity and togetherness on the other hand knowing what the european version of togetherness also implies which is the exclusion of others so we are kind of stuck especially in a critical time right now between on the one hand feeling that is important to rely on structures that already exist and somehow keeps at the surface and keep us floating while on the other hand being very aware of all the problematics and all the structural injustices that are crystallized by this very institution so uh to to to kind of rephrase uh this thought in other in other words how what how do we deal with these ruins can we how do we mobilize them without keeping the terrible legacy that somehow is inscribed in them this is i think really the the the kind of like biggest question for me was it a question for me i think was a general reflection that yeah i would like um everyone pressed to to comment on if anyone has something to say about you yeah well i think it's it's it's a question that should be left open um anyways but um my connection is very unstable no um we can hear you now but sometimes you freeze percy so maybe you can stop your video okay good point um yeah i was thinking a lot about this this concept of living among the ruins um that is very much part of of of the european identity i think um i mean this is not a concept that we coined i guess it's benjamin um but it's interesting to that extent that this also this book project and the film speculates on the end of europe um because the end of europe is is also invoking the sense of ruins right so in a way in a way this whole the what we're doing to here like thinking together and and speculating on the end of your end of europe might be as well a continuation of what europeanness is right it's it's almost like a a performance or an act acting out of europeanness um i mean maybe this sounds very sophistic i don't i don't want to just uh play with language or words it's just it's it's interesting as a thought experiment i think um to take this notion of living among the ruins and understanding maybe what that means also what does it mean to live among the ruins and how can it be yeah as i asked earlier how can it be mobilized okay this [Music] sort of like brings me back to um a book by heather davies who is a scholar that has worked with donna harry for a while and it brings me to one of her book which is titled living with the trouble heather davis is a scholar that doesn't necessarily reflect on uh political teams uh in in a strict sense as we are doing right now but she is a scholar of ecology that thinks about natural environment and the relationship to to humans but still she uh interestingly enough uses an expression that uh capture a thought that is similar to the one that we are now describing so livings well what do you do as a political agent uh when you're sitting on ruins and and heather davis from their perspective thinking about uh dealing with the the climate crisis uh while stating that the perspective we should embrace is that of uh dealing with the with the troubles that we have caused so i think uh if we it might be interesting to sort of like borrow from from her and and um and just kind of at least as a first step which of course is very partial but this is the first one thing that is uh inevitable and necessary and actually important to embrace this difficulty embrace as malwan was saying the fact that what unites us is failure and really make this this intuition as a sort of like um as a sort of like key factor to propel and mobilize melancholia into something that is more proactive and possibly optimistic in the future marina you also wanted to say something i guess go marvin then i will jump in uh thank you i just have a proposition which is just to try to turn the question around and think what would ruins feel while living between us and i think it's an interesting question because when i think of myself being a ruin and living between i can feel myself living between projects which is the opposite of the ruin because ruin is something that happened but does not is not anymore and project is our situation now as european or people sitting in the european union people being projected outside the time of ruins outside now so i think the not the solution but trying to understand this cohabitation between uh between the room and that already passed and ourselves ourselves as project as being sent into the time of project which is today started to being the norm for example in art residencies or any kind of project not to put yourself outside your timeline and to throw yourself outside the present to be to become the project like the ruin itself which is taken outside the timeline and sent outside today to be in the past so i think the problem is this this living together of these two uh like two people each one looking on the opposite direction at the same moment the project and the ruin and the failure is here i think which is structural it's not uh i just wanted to jump in regarding the notion of european union with regards to okay the text that my contribution and like um and also the maybe some positive idea of european union if i might uh positive it's not because all this discussion wasn't so optimistic but uh maybe i'm too on the like very rational not so um let's say um very rationally speaking i was tackling the model of yugoslavia as the anticipation of a dream but also the anticipation of the nightmare as a like the worst nightmare is a dissolution which i called balkanization and on the other hand which i really found it interesting the words of marwan uh regarding the okay the metaphor of ruins and european union and also one of the sentences that i mentioned of one of the writers of the firm yugoslavia who said andri who said it's easier to die in the land where you don't have an accent and i really found myself very um attached to this sentence because i feel very emotional i speak different languages and uh and in every of these worlds i have an accent and the only world where i don't have an accent is my mother tongue and i feel emotional you know when after so many years you speak your language without an accent and you feel emotional because as you uh marwan use this world you don't feel a ruin is a bit like maybe too much for for me like you don't feel detached you don't feel a foreigner but for me it lasts just a couple of minutes then you understand that the the shared values and the shell spheres which i really call the hugosphere but we can call it anglosphere francophony german sphere are more important the idea of belonging the share values are much more important of not having an accent or not considering yourself in a tangible way way as a foreigner and when i'm saying about the positive perspective about the european union is that yes when i as julia said look back to the country that doesn't exist anymore but there are lots of other countries existing now they're still longing to be part of of this territory you know the people and they are still uh very close uh former yugoslavian republics who who were not longing their project and their political promises are still being part of the european union so there are jokes in in the balkans saying okay we will come when the party is over so we will join once again when everything is uh dissolved the my idea my my uh observation is you know the freedom the biggest freedom is is not to do things and i think that the biggest freedoms are still on this territory and and the positive uh maybe we are lacking the positive narrative of the positive aspects of of of this union um very rationally speaking and uh considering that you know european union as such is or is still a dream and actually when i was saying when we are rephrasing it and reframing it reframing it in the times that we are living in i'm once again uh as maron said um feeling as a foreigner ruin let's say because i have a freedom of movement just within the european union and my country is outside the european union and i feel like i'm living in alaska so it's the same the difficulty to reach my country of origin so i just say that these states of emergency maybe are emphasizing uh the force of what is considered as a weakness maybe let's say a question provocation or nothing well i i wanted to jump in uh first of all thank you for bringing the conversation on a lighter tone um a bit more optimistic um what you said uh actually reminded me of something that is perhaps not an answer to your question but uh can contribute perhaps a formulated answer which is a brilliant reflection that aisha zakharov makes in a in her contribution to the book um in the book she uh points to a weakness in this assumption that you've made that we can talk about the european union as using the metaphor of a family what she says is it is okay to think about the european union as uh as using the metaphor of relationship but talking about families is wrong because the links that connect the members of the family are in a way blood related are genetic and they imply exclusivity they imply the exclusion of others whereas she proposes instead the uh the metaphor of a marriage to better describe like like a to better illustrate a more positive idea of europe or perhaps the idea of europe that we all aspire to so in that sense it's interesting that she does see uh the possibility of europe to turn into the better version of itself and it's interesting that she looks at it from this perspective which is a linguistic perspective which is precisely what also marwan and julia were mentioning before um in the meantime we have received a question um from uh alissa arantlova who is asking us um i suppose this can be a question for everyone but especially for marine and marijuana she's asking us how much do you think are common people their everyday life and decisions affected by the fact that their identity is divided into several entities meaning their identity as citizens identity of being european and even more identities like for example of yugoslavia so how i guess the um the the the kind of fragmentation of your identity into different facets affect uh your daily life your your your daily decisions and shall i answer and then my i will give the floor uh what tell me okay you want maron first and or oh no please please go on okay no uh it's interesting because while i was reading um maron text and i really um because while i was writing mine i was inspired by amin malouf who is actually lebanese and franco lebanese writer who wrote lots about that identity and he took as a point of reference the yugoslavian identity as a multi-layer transformational identity and the answer to the question raised uh would be maybe the example he's posing of how would be for instance asking uh the person from sarajevo or where is he or she from 25 years ago and today so you see how these identities change through time of course with the with the war uh the religion and the nation and the state became uh more pro prioritized um so for for today how will this person define himself if we meet him in the same place 20 years hands which of his affiliation will he put first the european the islamic the bosnian the balkan connection perhaps it's better not risking a prediction all these factors are part of his identity and exactly that's exactly the answer but i might just ask answer with my um personal uh dilemma one of them and i'm writing in the text one of the most difficult questions to answer is when they ask me where you where are you from then then i'm forced to choose and choosing means sacrificing i don't want to be so apocalyptic but anyways sacrificing me means uh that um i don't feel attached to a country that is now part uh is is i'm serbian but i never say i'm serbia not because i don't like serbia because i was born and raised in a country that is a part really important of my identity yugoslavian i can't say i'm yugoslavian because it would have a kind of it will raise a political um dilemmas and maybe trigger some some discussions so i always choose belgrade as a kind of a neutral territory but also as a as an answer of a very complex uh question so belgrade was a capital of of the big countries yugoslavia became a capital of a small country but it's the only identity i am feeling now attached to but yugoslavian identity might be really a kind of an example of multi-layer european identities in a different way of course and i define myself european you feel more european when you are outside europe right when you go to the states or wherever they classify you as a european you know if i say i'm serbian where is that it's not because it's significant but it's a former yugoslavia then it's more easier to call to to define it i'm just saying that all these identities are as as as important as the belgrade one the serbian one the yugoslavian one the european one as it is put in a mall of uh example and okay the war in the former yugoslavia forced uh in a very harsh way this multi-layer visibility but i think it doesn't have to be fortunately the war to coexist uh to make co-existing all these layers i hope i i was uh comprehensive in this thank you yes i just have a a possible answer it's not a clear answer but a kind of test trying to open which is regarding these multiple identities which is also a political fact now just interesting to think about that an identity today is given by birth so it is given by the birth of the body and i believe that it's interesting to think about the thing related to what erica was speaking about genetics and family that an identity is given by the body it should be held by the body and these multiple identities are interesting could be interesting to think about them regarding the body so regarding the question of the body the desire etc so multiple identities could be we could think about them with this kind of putting creating kind of location of identity inside the body so how to think about identity while being outside while having the body outside a place for example during the last year i told you i'm lebanese during the last year there was huge revolutions in lebanon and on the 4th of august there was a very big explosion that destroyed half of beirut am i lebanese was my body not affected by this amaleban is but i was lebanese because my body was born in the city that was destroyed but how lebanese i am today so the answer could be in the body itself and the desires that could be born in the inside the body too so trying just to locate it um i'm not sure if what i wanted to say was directly an answer to alice's question but since we're talking about um feelings uh as a as the lens through which to think about europe um i i also need to share a feeling of um ambivalence that i that i keep having while we're talking talking about europe and thinking about europe um um i'm gonna turn off my video for the sake of connection um i mean in a way it's of course it's i think it's great to be european i feel european i have so many privileges as a european i can travel freely through many countries there's you know i can pay with my card everywhere and there's a being dutch i have um some form at least still remaining form of social security it's great but then you know this this european is is based uh we were talking about about runes it's also based on the exclusion of of so many others it's based on colonialism it's based on on violence um it's like within within the fort it's uh it's quite beautiful of course it's also problematic within the fort but uh you know what what what we're leaving outside is um it's just nothing but traces of of of of violence in a way and and so this is something i just had to share because you know thinking about what europe can be i think we should definitely take this into account um that you know what we want to be as europe what we can be should also include you know taking a look at in the dirt in a way um and this is also an answer i think to what marina said about like the positive aspects of um of european of europe um and yeah then another thing that it brought me to think about um eduardo's song i guess you all know him this the french writer from martinique um who in his poetics of relation uh wrote about the right for opacity the right for opacity with that he means the rights to not be known by others to be um not known in your identity um but we we can acknowledge each other's um differences in that way we can if we can acknowledge the other as opaque we can acknowledge the others differences and therefore um um not cross these boundaries um and this yeah this was a thought i had when when talking about multiple being a body that carries multiple identities um and being questioned who who are you where are you from um yeah i think it's it can be very important to honor this notion of opacity also as a as a as a as a foundation for for europe um to not um you know instead of instead of having a foundation um that's based on some kind of positive identity that we are something um to base it on a more opaque uh idea of um of who we are um as to also um yeah recognize differences and and and therefore making power more transparent if if you still follow me like if i if i if i can step in i think it's interesting to retrace a bit things that came out like so far uh not in general but like the ones that kind of got my my attention uh so we we kind of all agree somehow that we are this all project as my one said like it's a it's a project put together um it's a project put together uh i don't know i would say like on on on on a total failure which was the war okay so and and we could i would say like not define what we are or what we were or we as europeans or who put together europe was more willing to define what we are by waiving for it which means like rather than saying what we are now as europeans what we will be if you agree with me like i don't know who said that like so far that somehow the idea of a shared european identity was firstly done or or shaped by what we are not and then going ahead in time uh the idea of shaping it would have been done by waiting for it in terms of what we will be able to to construct together up until maybe a moment in which everything fills up both because maybe we're already sitting on the ruins of fader somehow and to re take a bit on the things that marwan said on uh changing the point of view so that was really interesting uh the idea of like uh instead of what do we think while sitting on those ruins what do the ruins think when we're sitting on them and this is very interesting because while for example i i was thinking or writing the film a question that was coming up very often by one of the two writers uh was like who's who's the protagonist basically and and uh one thing i was really interested in was the area of the space itself the room where that treaty was signed in 1992 in which then the film is set and i always thought about the room as an empty room which is basically a ruin you know there's it's something that it's that collapsed basically beautiful ruin i don't know you can call it like the room itself is really beautiful which comes after that like to the to the idea of um to me actually that my one got me thinking about it like who is watching who is watching the people sitting on those ruins so what is the audience of this identity in construction if that makes sense like who are who who is who's the odin's like the ones out of the the borders of europe willing to sneak in to see so is is it that europe do you know what i mean like i'm willing really to cross that cro please allow me to be european once i'm in is it really as i expected that so the idea of having like a womb basically of uh a holder i don't know if that exists as a word but the the idea of having a room which is basically empty and a room which is echoing voices of the ghosts of all the kind of identities of europe and that idea of from the question there that was on on youtube um or yeah everyday like well more than that like how you you kind of developed that both marina marwan i was thinking that that that that happens like within europe itself but not but i mean by being born european myself i always had to read up myself to places i lived in europe which means which means like getting along with it and the more i am at home the more i feel the european the more i travel within europe with all the freedom we have as as um as versus was saying like that really uh um kind of make the board is falling down in terms of proximity it allows us to you know be more present here and there well before the covet uh and that kind of helps to get closer to the idea of being european with uh with the dutch with the french with the portuguese whatever but then i realized a lot that the more i was traveling within europe being european myself i kind of felt the need of detaching way more that from being european or as as marina was saying like i felt really roman rather than italian i don't know it is a strange notion but like i always said when traveling i'm from rome which is where my body was born as you know my one is saying so my identity is kind of a um an inconstruction identity in terms of where i am from because after living in the netherlands i kind of felt and got along with the way of doing things there so i think it's a very subjective uh question the one on like the the multiple identities of of traveling and i do agree with with marina when saying like uh the time i felt european at the most like it was when being in the us for example like not having ever somehow felt the need of saying i'm from rome i'm italian i'm from europe which again it's a definition of what by saying i'm from europe means like i'm not from the us if that makes sense which is still a definition of your identity by studying what you're not if i can jump in what i take from what you're saying julio is that if we need to perhaps pose uh a better way of uh identifying ourselves uh with the notion of europe we should really be open to this understanding that our identity are not rigid but should be instead as open as fluid and possible then gathering simulant contributions that go beyond and above the very rigid geopolitical limits of what europe is so it's important if we want to uh achieve a better europe so to say that you speak about what is european also with people that are not formally part of europe as if it's happening exactly right now it is important that we kind of take the time to reflect on the uh legacy of injustices that europe is entrenched with um it's uh unfortunate that we have to close this conversation but it's now time to uh to to conclude um uh i think we have uh touched upon very interesting idea there is this notion of opacity that versus mentioned that i really think uh is quite illuminating and there is also this notion of taking their perspective of the ruins that marwan has mentioned before and i think another um another thought that we can add to it is that uh not just we should take the perspective of the ruins but also remind ourselves that ruins our especially constructed concept uh we in themselves are what we decide are the ruins and uh are what we and yeah and they can be romanticized uh as in the case of uh most european monuments when ruiz are celebrated and kept as wind or they can be somehow fixed to provide the foundation for another kind of building so perhaps we can really think about it as a kind of like final metaphor to think about how we could possibly contribute to make the notion of europe more inclusive and more attuned to to our multicultural times and as to say like with percy's words i think i really like that of the opacity and as well like when you said like it is kind of a performance it is like an ongoing performance which looks for i don't know this godot which is the identity basically which has a lot to do of course with failure and failing and failing again and uh um what was else yeah i i really like that idea of the ongoing performance like which kind of attaches again with the marwan with the idea of uh what are the ruins thinking so i think the ruins are kind of the spectators of this performance so that's it i think so thank you so much to everyone really thanks amelia thank you for having us thank you so much thank you and hopefully we'll meet in person soon yeah hopefully bye guys thank you so much for everyone thank you everybody bye bye thank you bye ciao you

Channel: jan van eyck academie

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Id: YQSCbWb1irY

Length: 94min 53sec (5693 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020