Agosto Foundation

 

Flashbacks & Backlashes

Miloš Vojtěchovský
Anthology of Forgotten Thoughts

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Article

Project

Hermit Foundation

The (now updated) text was distributed as the invitation for a gathering on the recent history and trends in cultural diversity in Central Europe in Olomouc NOT FOR SALE / SOLD OUT, September, 2023.

"This meeting draws on artistic and curatorial investigations into the art of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe seen from the perspective of the then emerging artist-run initiatives and networks outside the cultural centers and institutions. The goal of this meeting is to address the histories and potentials of such (often half-forgotten) case studies, models, strategies, networks and experiences, as well as to discuss the place of art in post-socialist societies in the period of 1989–2000. The archive of Hermit Foundation and Center for metamedia Plasy, which is in the collection of Olomouc Museum of Art, offers an example and is a step towards the outline of a broader geographical, socio-political and cultural map. It indicates how and by whom the organizers were inspired and what contacts and exchanges they established with similar centers and initiatives in the West and in the closer Central European area. see further: cead.space/Detail/occurrences/3861

 

Flashbacks are noisy, dangerous, painful intrusions from the past that arise from the tension between the desire to forget and the necessity of remembering.... The linearity of perception of time, which naturally erodes memory, is interrupted by the traumatic event, disturbing the integration of the past into a narrative, its assimilation into memory systems. Out of this conflict, of the body’s re-ordering of time, the past returns repeatedly and intrusively through flashbacks in the form of auditory, visual and sensory hallucinations or dreams, sometimes precise, intensely clear and lifelike accompanied by a full spectrum of sensory and emotional associations, at other times fragmented and cloudy.

Cathy Caruth: Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History

The key point is that all systems (from the very largest, the universe as a whole, to the very smallest nano-systems), have three moments: their coming into existence, their “normal” life during which they are constructed and constrained by the institutions they have created, and the moment in which their secular trends move too far from equilibrium and bifurcate.

Immanuel Wallerstein

The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. "Basic values" and excuses merge imperceptibly.

Peter Sloterdijk: Critique of Cynical Reason, translated by Michael Eldred. German edition: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

I hope it is legitimate to approach those almost “historical” cultural and / or art initiatives in the proximity of the ongoing – in both academic and non-academic context – discussions, which are evolving around such buzzwords as "collective national identities", or “politics of memory”, reaching to the beginning of the United Europe around 30 year ago. Because: who is authorized and who is competent to judge and comment about our past in an authoritative way? Lets try to observe and approach those narratives from a perspective of ongoing cultural clashes, deeply intermingled with social, political, cultural or ideological turbulence and tensions of the societies in East and Central Europe (and beyond).

For at least ten years we have witnessed different Cultural Wars in the public sphere of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland or Hungary for example the hot discussions, resonating in the Czech public sphere: how do we align with our “totalitarian” past i.m. normalization years between 1969 and 1989? What are the turmoils of “anti-system” protesters during the ongoing demonstrations both on streets and in the parliaments? And (on a smaller scale) how to interpret what happened during the first years of the political and economical transitions, after the return of the political plurality system, and of market economy after both the Velvet and not so “velvet” revolutions? In Poland are the conflicts and discussions evolving around similar topics, maybe tempered by the stronger position of nationalists in the government and the power of the Catholic church. But similar rhetorics are present in Hungary and Slovakia and to a certain extent in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania or Bulgaria, not mentioning Albania, Moldavia and Baltic states.

Such controversies are sometimes violent, sometimes milder confrontations of different opinions or ideological standpoints. They are fueled by weak common sense and insecurity concerning how to "get over" the shared recent “small” histories. In fact, do we rather address here our future or our past? The waves of flashbacks haunt us with the “burning” questions as: who are we? What is our identity? How integral was my ethical intransigence as an individual and as a part of a class or a community? These flashbacks disturb us, wake up our bad consciousness, our suppressed, or even rejected memories. Deeds we would prefer to forget.

Flashbacks can even influence our mode of perception, can induce an altered, trance-like mindsets, and dissolve our sense of reality. If we don't know how to handle them, they infest our volition. get suspended and we are becoming vulnerable and more easily exposed for emotional chantage from the extreme political currents.

The main task and time-span of the Olomouc rather informal gathering was to reflect several topics of marginal histories, culture and durability in the framework of artists' private archives which survived from the years between 1989 and 2000. The exhibition Hermit Flashback served as a model of a small-scale assemblage of “historical” documents, derived from a particular initiative, which almost entirely disappeared 25 years ago. Nevertheless in memory and in documentation its aura survived, even if by "a chance”.

The state of vulnerability / fragility / temporariness is not necessarily endemic for the situation of a “transformation period” of the 90s and for the situation of former East Block countries. Let's presume it is symptomatic of the times of shifting from the ancient regime to the new one.

It would be less interesting to discuss the role of art in the post-socialist societies in 1989–2000 without mentioning the current situation of Europe of 2024 / 25. How has the geopolitical setting of Central Europe in the course of the last 30 years changed and what are the tendencies? Are we not following the path towards new physical and virtual curtains, rising from the ruins and remnants of the communication breakdowns and negligence of our own history? When we compare the situation of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland or even Austria today, it appears that those “cosmopolitan” liberals who in the first years of 1990s were successful to win with communists, national conservatives and populists, are retreating or morphing into something else. And those who were defeated are coming back to “take revenge”. Often the new populist are searching alliance with actors of anti-liberal turn, populistic, neo-nationalistic, neo-fascist or neoliberal conservative power.

Victor Orbán famously stated back in 2017: ‘In 1989 we saw our future in Europe. Now we are the future of Europe.’ And it sounds almost like a sign of a clairvoyant prophet.

The political scientist Ivan Jotov Krastev in his article The Unraveling of The PosT-1989 order express his fears that "The establishment of illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland—complete with media controls, hostility to NGOs, disrespect for judicial independence, and intense polarization—has many fearing that Central and Eastern Europe is sleepwalking its way back to the 1930s." (1)

The wave of neo-nationalism / ultra-conservatism or neofascism in Central Europe does not seem to be a product of the reverberation of the not mature "post-communist" societies, or the clash between the totalitarian past and the fully democratic future. It is rather an integral structure and parcel of the pan-European, maybe even global “anti-globalist” movement, the ongoing battle for the identity of our western society. When the machine of market economy and the tools of liberal democracy in Central Europe during the 1990s was established, the fragile balance between cosmopolitan-liberal and national-conservative camp lost its raison d’être. Where to search the entrance to the “promised land”, when and how to replace the colonialistic utopia of the “Global West” with the "Real" East-West-South-North Union of equal rights and benefits for everybody?

Miloš Vojtěchovský
Prague, September / November 2023

The specter haunting europe the unraveling of the post-1989 order

Backflash

Last updated: 2025-08-15

"False conclusions are being drawn in the (ex-)Communist world, where the magic of the market is supplanting the magic of planning, whereas the market will by and large be no more efficacious an instrument of economic welfare for these states that had been planning, since the primary economic difficulties of these states derived (and derive) not from their internal economic mechanisms but from their structural location in the capitalist world-economy.”

Immanuel Wallerstein: Geopolitics and Geoculture: essays on the changing world-system (1991)
https://archive.org/details/geopoliticsgeocu0000wall

"The same incidentally is also true for Western art. If the world were not so much interested in what’s going on right now in New York and Los Angeles and if contemporary American art did not act as a source of information about the current state of affairs in American society, then this art would lose much of its attraction.
Likewise, Eastern European art is seen, and must be seen, as Eastern European; if the Eastern European artists like it or not - and most do not, you know. But it doesn’t change things. They are looked upon as being part of their society, as being sources of information about their society in general. So Eastern European art is first and foremost an art that is subjugated to the external point of view, – and every point of view is an external point of view on art.

Being subjected to this external judgment on it, this art becomes Eastern European; becomes informative about what Eastern Europe is, what Russia is, what the Czech Republic is. So we can’t ignore that. And in this sense, Eastern European art is really Eastern European art and nothing else."

Boris Groys: East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe: “The Complicity of Oblivion” (2003)
see:/east-of-art-transformations-in-eastern-europe-the-complicity-of-oblivion/

In our imagination, Eastern Europe was always black and white. Travelling to East Germany or Poland meant suddenly leaving colourful Western Europe and entering a movie from the forties or fifties. Later we simply couldn’t remember having seen any colour, not the green of the trees, nor the red of the brick buildings. When we went to the movies to see a film by Wajda, Kieslowski or Tarkowsky, the filmmaker’s experiments with colour only reinforced our image of the East as grey. Europe clearly had an ideologically motivated neurosis when it came to the perception of colour.This particular brand of European Orientalism has now grown tired. Nearly ten years after the social upheaval in Eastern Europe, these countries have ceased being part of an ‘Eastern bloc’. Each is stepping out of the shadow of the Soviet empire and taking on once again its own particular face in the international arena. Each is becoming recognisable as a participating unit of the European patchwork.

 
Inke Arns: A Toolbox of Everyday Media in Eastern Europe,
in “Small Media Normality for the East’,( P. Schultz/D. McCarty/ G. Lovink / V. Cosic (eds.) Ljubljana: Digital Media Lab (1997)

"Civil disobedience represents perhaps the fundamental form of political action of the multitude [ … ] It is not a matter of ignoring a specific law because it appears incoherent or contradictory to other fundamental norms, for example to the constitutional charter. In such a case, in fact, reluctance would signal only a deeper loyalty to state control. Conversely, the radical disobedience which concerns us here casts doubt on the State’s actual ability to control."

Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e) /Foreign Agents, The MIT Press, Cambridge, and London, 2004

“What has happened to the utopia of the Velvet Revolution over the 20 years that have elapsed since November 1989? Human experience teaches us that the surest way to kill a dream is to make it happen. It was no different in this case. In line with the degree to which we have come close to becoming integrated into Western structures, we have begun to realize that the West is not the Promised Land and a final destination beyond historical time and space, but rather a concrete historical formation, burdened by many as yet unresolved contradictions and thus also open to an unknown future. As time has passed, the contradictions of the West have also progressively begun to penetrate our political scene. Up until accession to the EU in 2004, however, they were dampened by agreement on the main point of the political agenda—EU accession as such. With it we crowned the post-November transformation. Despite our original expectations, however, we have not actually entered a safe and calm harbor, but on the contrary have found ourselves in the uncertain waters of the open ocean, where we are being confronted with issues that we had previously been protected from within the framework of the post-November consensus. We had considered some of them to have been resolved, such as the future of global capitalism or the transatlantic alliance. There were other issues about which we had not the foggiest idea at the start of the 1990s—because at that time our entire horizon was occupied by the West, we did not consider the relationship between the West and the non-Western world to be an issue. With our return to Europe, we have thus paradoxically not confirmed the end of history, but instead have rediscovered history with an open ending.”

Pavel Barša: How To Kill a Dream: Our Life after 1989 in the Limbo of the End of History, 2009 

"But the Syndicate was much more than a piece of software: it was a network of people. The Syndicate was founded in January 1996 on the last day of the Next 5 Minutes 2 Festival in Rotterdam. It was a network which devoted itself to fostering contacts and co-operation, improvements in communication and an exchange between institutions and individuals in Eastern and Western Europe active in the media and media culture. By allowing regular e-mail communication between participants regarding forthcoming events and collaborative projects the Syndicate mailing list developed into an important channel and information resource for announcing and reporting new projects, events and developments in media culture. The complete mail archive is kept at http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/"

"Since the first meeting in Rotterdam in 1996, which was attended by 30 media artists and activists, journalists and curators from 12 Eastern and Western European countries, the Syndicate network grew steadily. In August 2001, it linked over 500 members from more than 30 European and a number of non-European countries. The original idea was to establish an East-West network as well as an East-East network. In the meantime, however, the Syndicate had increasingly developed into an all-European forum for media culture and art. Over the last few years the division between East and West had been growing less important as people cooperated in ever-changing constellations, in ad-hoc as well as long-lasting partnerships."

Andreas Broeckmann, Inke Arns: Rise and Decline of the Syndicate

13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
www.tacticalmediafiles.net

"That day, we had scheduled-announced a late evening-night party at the Hybrid Workspace with music, more performances, projections, beer, etc. All documenta X visitors who wanted to come to the party had to have an invitation (or rather, a visa). And, by the way, all visitors to documenta X - who had paid their 25 or whatever DM - wanted to see everything there was to see and get their money's worth. However, the only way to get an invitation to the party was to apply for it much in the way we, here in Eastern Europe, would need to apply for an entry visa whenever we have to go to the West. Basically, the idea was to make the visitors feel with their own bodies what it actually means to live behind the Schengen Curtain. Visitors were meant to "suffer" all kinds of humiliations and arbitrary judgements based on absurd rules. And eventually, to experience the "depths of Europe" first-hand."

Luchezar Boyadjiev: Overlapping Identities, 1998
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/boyadjievtext3.html

 

Coming back to possible joint ventures with the “new federal states,” some initiatives dwindled because the themes endorsed by tranzit were unlikely to be of interest “over there,” as the same Dresden colleague once surmised. This supposition is corroborated by the observation that, in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the former Communist Bloc became fragmented from the perspective of art and cultural history. If so, this fragmentation contributes to the multiplication of post-transformation narratives: the GDR and the Soviet Union came to form their own research fields, while the countries in between still remain fairly invisible to international scholarship. At the same time, a formerly dormant cross-regional interest in the contemporary art production of neighbouring countries has started to gradually develop in the past ten-fifteen years. I want to suggest that this new dynamic of cultural exchange was partly the result of the initiatives of Soros and especially the ERSTE Foundations, aiming to facilitate a shared understanding of the present, growing out of the experience of the recent past. At the same time, they also branded East-Central and Southeastern European art on the international market and in the professional community. The former East Germany has been largely left out of this new regionalism and, consequently, the art of the GDR remains largely unknown to specialists of Eastern Europe and beyond. The new federal states and post-socialist Eastern Europe are seldom viewed in the same conceptual framework: after all, East Germans did not return to the “West” as citizens of a post-communist state, but as members of a new Germany.

Beáta Hock: Evolving networks: International sponsors of postsocialist art scenes, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, (2023) 95-108, DOI: 10.1080/25739638.2023.2182507

"The parliamentary commission, originally established in the autumn of 1990 to investigate the circumstances of the police crackdown on Národní třída, became a completely autonomous body that held its own press conferences, interrogated, announced the names of collaborators, and also established the convention that cooperation with the Secret Police could be recognized by the presence of a person’s name in the registry of associations. When it came to lustration of elected members of parliament, there was discussion about “the purity of our ranks” or “an ulcer from which all the pus has not yet drained”. Jan Sokol compared screening/lustration to an antibiotic, which is used against staphylococcus even it can damage the physiological intestinal microflora. Finally, several names of deputies who refused to resign quietly were read out in the plenary session on live television. It didnt matter that other names were added later and many of the accused won their lustration trials. "Screen or you will be screened!" was the imperative of the time. In October 1991, a lustration law which the government had submitted to the Federal Assembly was approved, but the parliament changed its proposal practically beyond recognition. It expanded the number of affected positions and, above all, excluded all examination of actual cooperation and any appeal instance; it once again relied solely on the entry in the register of unions. Nevertheless, of all lustration certificates issued in the nineties, only five percent found cooperation. It seems that most of the conscious informants didnt applied for high positions in the state administration, and rather prospered in the unregulated sphere of private enterprise.

Adéla Gjuričová: Historizace devadesátých let. in Host 2018, Téma Devadesátky.

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