Or perhaps it can be understood as an excuse for a probe towards a deeper geographical, psychological, aesthetically-ethical, socio-political or cultural scrutiny? Would it help to shed light on obsolete, “ancient” strategies, and theoretical and practical approaches? Some of the texts directly refer to the topic of how and by whom the Hermit organizers and participants were inspired;₁ what kind of contacts they built and which exchanges and collaborations they succeeded or failed to establish or maintain. Last but not least, it indicates some of the similarly-spirited initiatives both in the West and in the Central European region, roughly between the end of the 1980s and the turn of the millennium.

The envisioned PDF Anthology, which was supposed to be published with the support of Muzeum Umění Olomouc, could no be realized so far. This “partisan bundle of first aid” could be the first step towards this hazy goal and vanity destination in the age of approaching the warmth of the Climate Wars together with the declinig temperature of the Neo-Cold Wars.

Several new and old texts, essays, and images evolved around the main topic of the gathering, organized in November 2023 on the occasion of the end of the exhibition Flashback Hermit – 1992–1999 in Olomouc.₍₁₎ The plan was to draw on some of the artistic and curatorial investigations into the arts and societies of the 1990s in Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe. It was originally conceived as an investigation of this topic, approached from different points of view and experiences of (then-)emerging artist-run initiatives and/or “autonomous” or “independent” networks. These operated usually outside official metropolises and centers and, if possible, outside commercial or state funded and controlled institutions. The subtopic of the general question was a bit more complicated than just a summing up of individual memories about how free, wild, bad or great it was operating in the 90s. It rather asks about the actual situation within Central Europe (“post-communist countries”) and how it was essentially different (even before 1989) from the Western, or (Northern) European countries? Were the fermentation processes and cultural turbulence during the disintegration and upheavals triggered by the growing pandemic of emerging electronic media networks penetrating frontiers and borders perhaps one of the first symptoms of globalisation?

I would argue that if there were differences, they were rather a matter of degree, not of kind, and I am aware that this statement has usually been rejected as a form of “dissent.” The mainstream interpretation of the histories of the Cold War grows from the concept of the binary juxtaposition between the “totalitarian” Eastern bloc and the “liberal,” “democratic” or “free” West. After ’89, one subversive criticism against this bipolar and binary Weltanschauung emerged as the concept of a Deep Europe, conceived as a tactical tool for negotiating with authorities and acting beyond those ideologically constructed patterns of “national” identities, as well as territorially rooted concepts based on the military and economic control of state and mass media. Inspired partly by East European dissent, some network activists emphasised the 'different, heterogeneous, deep-level, cultural layers and identities of Europe'.

Ongoing media conflicts, media wars of independence, and insurgencies in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 indicated how fragile and shallow our hope for Europe without borders was. Media theorist Geert Lovink in "My First Recession" describes in the text "Deep Europe and the Kosovo Conflict - A History of the V2_East/Syndicate Network" what “the deepness” could become: Deep Europe was meant as an alternative, imaginative mental landscape, a post-1989 promise that life could be different. Europe could have a future, beyond its tourist destiny as a theme park. The danger of exotic orientalism could be countered with enlightened nihilism. It should be possible to wake up from the nightmare called history. There had to be another agenda, beyond the (necessary) containment strategy to stop Europeans from fighting wars, colonizing the world, and expelling and exterminating “others.” Rejecting both superficial Western mediocrity and backward Eastern despotism, Deep Europe could be read as a desire to weave webs and tell stories about an unrealized, both real and virtual world. Deep Europe could be one of Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities,” a shared imaginative space where artists would be able to freely work with the technological tools of their liking, no longer confined by disciplines and traditions.₃ The hopes that electronic technology, networking and social media could become a vehicle to reach more democratic future in the age of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the syndicate of PayPal Mafia appears as something deeply and sadly utopic.

Naturally, there were many structural and cultural differences around the time of the turning point of the ’89 collapse of the Eastern bloc which influenced the discussions about how to reach appeasement and convergence of a United Europe. One of the structural reasons could be that the cultural revolutions of the 60s in the times of political ‘thaw’ were more subtle and shallow in Central and Eastern Europe. Suppressed and dispersed by military forces in 1968, they survived only in grey zones and margins, or underground and dissent subcultures. Such historical differences “account for the relatively shallow foundations of cultural liberalism in post-communist countries that made them less immune to the inroads of nationalism and conservatism.₄

Akin to the earlier “underground” or “grey-zone” communities, those artist-run initiatives, such as art residency programs and festivals, were usually sustained by artists working as activists, rather than by cultural managers. They were usually grass-roots, without professional schooling, seldom bound to academic or state structures, and survived on the margins. To compare with the well-funded and established integrated international network of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art or the Erste Foundation national branches, their operative mode lingered in floating and unestablished genres and/or in trans-national and casual networks. Such initiatives wouldn’t really fit into predefined patterns and/or geopolitical communities (i.e. nationally tinted narratives and patterns such as the “Czech,” “Polish,” “Hungarian” scenes, or disciplines such as “visual art,” “music,” or “performance”). ₅

The aesthetic, ideological and economic strategies of such initiatives and collectives covered a wide range of interests and features: what they had in common was the strong belief in a close linkage between culture and art, civic values and freedom, and the individual and social meanings of these terms. To a certain extent, such initiatives and collectives were building on the ‘pre-revolutionary,’ ‘anti-political’ tendencies, whose social strategy was to 'democratize society rather than change the state.' Some of them came from a wide spectrum of dissent communities of the 80s, some managed to become temporary alternatives or temporary autonomous zones, as well as containers of criticality which critiqued the notion of art as primarily being produced for the market, for entertainment or consumption.

We would like to thank all who gave their time and energy and who shared their thoughts kindly and without reward. And thanks to their patience in enduring the expiration date of this Anthology (for the Forgotten). It remains a work in progress.

Prague, July 2025

Miloš Vojtěchovský
_{English correction: Vít Bohal}

_{1.EXHIBITION and Catalogue: FLASHBACK: Hermit 1992-1999,  April .- September 2023, curated by Miloš Vojtěchovský and Jakub Frank, https://muo.cz/vystavy/flashback-hermit-1992-1999
2}._{Geert Lovink, "My First Recession, Critical Internet Culture in Transition, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2011, https://networkcultures.org/_uploads/tod/TOD9_MyFirstRecession_LQ.pdf
3.Inke Arns, Andreas Broeckmann, “Rise and Decline of the Syndicate,” (13 November 2001),
4.Such hybrid and heterotopic nature of a parallel polis of collectives was one of the reasons why it only seldom attracted the curiosity of the academic discourse and often still waiting for evaluation.}