Or, it can be perhaps taken as well as a challenge and an excuse for a probe towards an alternative geographical, psychological, aesthetically-ethical, socio-political or cultural scrutiny. How to shed light on several obsolete, “ancient” strategies, and theoretical and practical approaches? Some of the texts directly refer to the framework how and by whom the Hermit organizers and participants were inspired, 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 as outlined in the text “On Rhizomes, Parasites and Hermits Caught in the Webbing” written already in 2020.¹

The envisioned PDF Anthology, which was supposed to be published with the support of Muzeum Umění Olomouc in 2024, could not be realized so far. This, therefore, is a “partisan bundle of first aid” and could be the first step towards this hazy goal in the ages of the approaching warmth of the Climate Wars together with the declining 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.² Our plan was to draw on some of the artistic and curatorial investigations into the arts and societies of the 1990s in the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe, an investigation, approached from different, even very subjective, points of view, of memories 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.³ The subtopic of the general frame of the review was a bit more complicated than just a summing up of individual memories about how “free, wild, bad or great” it was in the 90s, (as many of publications about this topic do).

It rather points towards the actual and specific situation within Central Europe (“post-communist or post-totalitarian countries”) questioning to what extent it was, actually, essentially “different” (even before 1989) from the Western, or Northern European countries? Were the fermentation processes and the cultural turbulence during the disintegration and upheavals triggered by the growing pandemic of emerging communication and electronic media networks, which were able to penetrate all frontiers and borders? Could it perhaps be seen as one of the first symptoms of globalization?

For the gathering at the end of the exhibition in Olomouc we invited people who could contribute to the bedrock of the present situation in art and culture of Central Europe. In Olomouc we listened to the personal experiences and reflections of Gertrude Moser Wagner, Martin Zet, Tomáš Ruller, Michal Murin, Michael Delia, Alexander Roberto Moust and (online) David Miller. They are on the list of about 400 people who actively participated in the Hermit events during the 1990s. Marina Gržinič, Jovita Pristovšek, Miklós Peternák, and Dušan Barok who participated online and draw larger contours of the particular situation for both today and then in Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Petr Bergmann talked about his attempts to build an “alternative” cultural community in Prague and later in a remote area of East North Bohemia. He was operating at more or less the same time when Hermit was ending. Ivan Mečl as a "grassroot" cultural / artist / activist, independent publisher and spiritus agens succeeded to adjust to the changing times of the Czech society for 30 years and survived until today in the idea of Nová Perla.

I argued during the gathering that the individual "Hermit story" was born from zeitgeist and was deeply interwoven with a heterogenous, asynchronyous textures of alike (both ancient and contemporary) narratives, thoughts and ideas, reaching beyond limitations and restrictions of any singular “strivings' ', or “achievements.' To reflect this I decided to approach and address as well other "actors" who wrote about, or during the 1990s. There are several interviews by Dušan Barok with Diana McCarty and János Sugár, interview with Ivan Mečl, older and some new texts by Martin Škabraha, Mirek Vodrážka, Eric Kluitenberg, Ted Byfield and Felix Stadler, Robert Horvitz, Kristóf Nagy, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Madina Tlostanova, János Vargha, Bob Kuřík and Arnošt Novák among others.

Anyway back to my previous statement about the exclusiveness of systems of ecology in transitions: I think that if there were differences across Europe then, they were rather a matter of degree, not of kind. The prediction of the collapse of bipolar systems involved all European countries. I am aware that this statement has usually been criticized as a form of “dissent.” ⁴ After 1989, several kinds of criticism of such bipolar or binary Weltanschauung emerged for example as the idea of a Deep Europe. It was conceived as a tactical tool for negotiating with authorities and acting beyond those ideologically-constructed patterns of the “national” identities, territorially rooted concepts based on the military and economic control of state and mass media. Inspired partly by the East European dissent, some of the network activists and theorists emphasized the need to articulate a 'different, heterogeneous, deep-level, cultural layers and identities of new Europe'.

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.“⁵

Ongoing media conflicts, media wars of independence, and insurgencies in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 indicated how fragile and shallow the hope for a new Europe without borders was.
This hope that electronic technology, networking and civic media could become a vehicle to reach a 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 1989 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 1960s 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 in 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”.⁶

Such initiatives would not 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”). Akin to the earlier “underground” or “grey-zone” communities, those artist-run initiatives, such as art residency programs and festivals, were usually sustained by individual artists or small collectives working as activists, rather than by cultural managers. They were usually grassroots people, 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.

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 1980s, 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. They were emerging parallel with different social movements in the 1980s and beginning of 1990s, giving a message to the general society that there are fundamental problems in a certain area or in social and political structures.

Italian sociologist of "contemporary nomadism" and "collective action and movement," Alberto Melucci, called those autonomous initiatives a prediction of a kind of "new media":

"Within these networks there is an experimentation with and direct practice of alternative frameworks of sense, as a result of a personal commitment which is submerged and almost invisible.... The 'movements' emerge only in limited areas, for limited phases and by means of moments of mobilization which are the other, complementary phase of the submerged networks.... What nourishes (collective action) is the daily production of alternative frameworks of meaning, on which the networks themselves are founded and live from day to day.... This is because conflict takes place principally on symbolic grounds, by challenging and upsetting the dominant codes upon which social relationships are founded in high density informational systems.”

Melucci concludes: "The normal situation of today's 'movements' is a network of small groups submerged in everyday life that requires a personal involvement in experiencing and practicing cultural innovation."⁷

From the distance of almost 30 years since the turbulent art and culture of the 1990s, it appears a challenge to consider what is "outdated" and historical and what could be still considered as an inspiration or a pattern to develop further.

I would like to thank all who gave their time and energy, who shared their thoughts so kindly and without any reward. Thanks as well to their patience in enduring the expiration date of the Anthology (for the Forgotten). It remains and will be an ongoing "work in progress".

Miloš Vojtěchovský

Prague, July 2025

2 https://muo.cz/en/vystavy/flashback-hermit-1992-1999-2/

3 in the spectrum between "autonomous" or "independent" to financially dependent of the emerging state and private grant systems.

4 The mainstream interpretation of the histories of the Cold War grows from the the juxtaposition between the totalitarian Soviet or East Bloc and the “liberal,” “democratic” or “free” West Block.

5 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

6 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.

7 _{Alberto Melucci: Nomads of the Present (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1989)} The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Social Movements, Social Research, 1985. https://archive.org/details/nomadsofpresents0000melu

_{English correction: Vít Bohal, Sarah Brock}