DISCUSSION CAFÉ

series of debates with accompaniying the installation Under the Carpet

Mladi levi festival’s Discussion Café has been designed under the influence of the new living conditions. For the past three months, we have experienced solitude and socio political anxiety, which made us search for answers to even the most intimately repressed thoughts. We were searching for good interlocutors, but in the conversations through computer screens, they were limited by the strict rules of technology. If we don’t hear each other, we don’t know whose turn it is to speak, we lose our thread, interruptions are more frequent, the technology fails more often than our memory or our listening or talking condition. During the months of constant change that feel like years, we are trying to constantly think, understand, influence change, and at the same time, we are trying to understand the future; how is it going to be, what is it going to be, will we be part of the changes at all, or will they simply catch us? We have never witnessed so many debates of artists and philosophers as at the time of the lockdown of public life, but we miss the charm of juicy conversations. In the heat of the debate, we were not carried away outside of the structures, to reply instantly and listen at the same time, or to occasionally speak over each other. To be once again able to feel and see the reactions of our interlocutors, these year’s Mladi levi conversations will take place outdoors, in a relaxed café atmosphere under chestnuts, on footstools with coffee and Bosnian coffee pots of the project Under the Carpet, which will take place inside the Tabor Sports Association hall.

The topics of doubt, corona and art will be discussed by Renata Salecl, who researches doubt and scepticism as a philosopher, and Jure Novak, director and author of the performance in the making about conspiracy theories and the growing scepticism about professionalism and experts.

The topics of moderation, corona and art will be discussed by Muanis Sinanović, poet, publicist and philosopher, and Miloš Kosec, architect, editor and a great ruins enthusiast. Is moderation the right way not to be guided by constant growth, and how to determine just the right amounts of everything in life?

The topics of courage, corona and art will be discussed by Tjaša Pureber, political science theoretician, researcher of social movements and our comerade, and Katarina Stegnar, a theatre creator, progressive author and activist whose work transcends the boundaries of art and social responsibility.

And the topics of freedom, corona and theatre will be discussed by performance arts theorist and pedagogue Bojana Kunst, author of the recent letter on the paradigmatic shift from “care for” to “care with” and on the freedom and limitations brought by it, and Milo Rau, theatre director, artistic director and one of the strongest voices in contemporary art, who at the time of the pandemics dared to make a prediction about how things would be or how they could be.
*** Bojana Kunst and Milo Rau will participate in the discussion through a video call, the moderator and audience will talk to them live, from under the chessnut trees.

The discussions were conceived as conversations about “major topics” that will always be in a dialectic relationship with art, theatre and the time of Covid 19 measures. This triangle will always be started by the moderator Grega Ulen and the pair of invited speakers, and will be continued by all present. Until the last coffee.

Concept and production: Alma R. Selimović
Moderator: Grega Ulen
Produced by: Bunker, Ljubljana

With the help of: ACT – Art, Climate, Transition, European Union: Creative Europe programme – Culture