Skip to main content

Talk at Trans-Europa Festival, Cluj

Image by Novi Kolektivizem
This Thursday I will be speaking at a special three-part event taking place in the framework of the Trans-Europa festival...


1) Lecture: On the the Future of European Culture by Alexei Monroe
2) Alexander Nym: Address to Europa
3) Codex Europa Alter-Europa DJ Set. European Electronic sounds: EBM, Electro, Synth, Techno, Industrial

ABSTRACT:

Alexei Monroe will discuss the current plight and possible (but far from certain) future of European culture. He will analyse the ways in which various artists and musicians have envisioned Europe and its troubled history and the political and cultural consequences of the almost total failure of the European political class to build a visionary trans-European culture. This failure has left Europe at the mercy of "Euro-cidal" forces on both the right and the left. The cultural question is not the added or unaffordable luxury that authoritarian Marxists and neoliberal ideologues would have us believe and needs to be addressed urgently and courageously. Current events lead us to face hard questions: is there a possibility for a trans-European cultural response to the crisis and the tragic beauties of Europe's cultural heritage and what hope is there for a European cultural resurgence?

17th May 21.00

Irish & Music Pub

Adresa: Str. Horea, nr. 5, Cluj-Napoca

http://www.transeuropafestival.eu/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

4th Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021 recording

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it. 

A Tale of Two Future Glasgows

Despite its undoubted cultural vitality, Glasgow has often had a grim reputation, especially south of the English border. Yet the very bleakness, exacerbated by epic mismanagement, aggressive deindustrialization and sectarianism has also made it a site of constant and sometimes tragically over-ambitious attempts at utopian regeneration. This can be seen in the now highly poignant film Glasgow 1980 , which was already being quietly forgotten and surpassed by harsh reality even before the city had reached the year the film is supposed to depict. It poignantly promised a gleaming, post-industrial future in which "muscle gives way to automation." Yet in between the completion of the film and 1980, the oil shock and economic slowdown shattered the dreams of its makers and backers. Relatively little of the utopian plans (which to some already seemed dystopian) was ever built and many of the hopes of the "white heat of technology" era came to nothing. Other buildings...

J.M. Bowers - Edison's Residue

J.M. Bowers is a well respected sound/noise producer who gave a very memorable performance at the Noise=Noise event at The Foundry last autumn. I have just discovered this intriguing free release for download. The source is a heavily rendered recording of Edison's famous 'Mary had little lamb' test recording. The result is a very tactile audio landscape, full of rich and uncanny detail. Recommended.