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2003-07-16 - Croatia (Hrvatska)
ART-e-FACT - Strategies of Resistance
In the first issue of ART-e-FACT, an online magazine instigated in Zagreb, Croatia, we work to expose the topic of illegal immigration in and around Europe through artworks, interviews, reports and other writings. These materials were developed largely through the collaborative and multi-disciplinary project, Motel Ježevo.

In a similar way we are now developing the second issue around a discussion of the ideas and perceptions of utopia. Outlined below is our approach to this topic and we invite you to join us at our site and/or contact us with artwork or writing proposals that are rethinking and reshaping the subject of utopia in the 21st century.

Nada Beroš, Editor-in-Chief
Žarko Paić, Guest Editor
Join us online at: http://artefact.mi2.hr
or contact us at: info@artefact.mi2.hr

/ U T O P I A /
Žarko Paić

THE NEW CALL OF UTOPIA
/ Art-e-fact: a text of invitation for cooperation /

With the theme simply entitled UTOPIA, Art-e-fact wishes to provoke an interaction between theoreticians and visual artists by posing a set of questions related to contemporary society/art. A self-confident artist in the age of conceptual-performative "upheavals" of the boundaries of social perversions of power (globalization, symbolic and real violence of capital on living labour as a subjugated substance-subject of history, bio-power of technology, terrorism and war as "transformational logic" of the new cartographies of the world) no longer has a WALL of monolith ideology in front of them.

Can the utopian "being" and "thinking" from a deficiency of utopian perspectives of all our transitional, post-industrial, postmodern societies of general apathy not end up in the uncritical blindness of one ideology for the creation of "real" hope for the success of one's own utopia? How much longer can art as the new image of sub-version of social and cultural boundaries be outside the clear form of ideological discourse? Who are the relevant contemporary thinkers of utopia at all? Why does every form of opposition to the governing neoliberal system of imperial globalization have no real utopian perspective? How to oppose the international movement of "cosmopolitan internationalism of capital" more than the abstract non-power of the resurrection of the icons of the student revolution of '68 (NGO, civil society, zones of cosmopolitan culture of non-violence and peace)?

The new call of utopia no longer has a reason for escaping to a deserted island. There is no reason for the late discovery of any kind of eastern exoticism. In the global world of the one and same ideology -neoliberal fundamentalism of capital, power, new religions of pleasure - which now assumes the contours of the eternal, universal and "natural" civilization - the last escape has already been carried out. This is the escapism of spirit of unbearably shallow hybridity of culture and the so-called individual salvation in New Age ideology of the Age of Aquarius. Utopia today? Is that not real ground for live criticism, the irreducibility of anything previously utopian issued in the name of the future as the history of salvation (communism, anarchism, libertinism and last but not least - utopian socialism) which in the 20th century unavoidably transformed itself into its opposite?

How to envision utopia, and not run away from society's real repression/depression into a ghetto or exile for fantastic outsiders?
Source: New Media Announcements by Alenka Pirman - Slovenia

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