The claims about the “end of history”, which have been around for quite some time, gained a different, bitter momentum in the current crisis. Disturbance and chaos, having entered our lives almost two years ago, colored our experience of space and time with disorder and disorientation. However, the ruptures caused by the recent developments stem from the cracks that have been here long before, and they are echoed within our post-Yugoslav cultural space in specific ways. On one hand, we are constantly surrounded by figments of past fantasies that continue to “haunt” the post-Yugoslav context, while, on the other, our everyday is shaped by the global(ized) effects of digital technologies that dislocate time and space by their own means.

The ways the ghosts of the past intertwine with the present, as well as the chilling dynamics of technology that is utilized as a means of monitoring and control, present the two thematic focuses. The experience of time (and space) as out-of-joint has been described and utilized within the notion of ‘hauntology’, the term employed as a starting point for the programme.

The Seminar brings together the perspectives of the younger generation of researchers and activists who have been tackling various paradoxes brought to the surface by the ruptures in our shared space-time. Their explorations cover a wide range of phenomena “haunting” our here-and-now – from uncanny intersections of the past and the present in cultural practices of “dark tourism” and the Yugoslav Dark Wave, to the eerie ways in which digital technologies of the past shape our present and the challenges that the currently omnipresent techno-solutionism poses to our media sphere.

For a free ticket and Zoom link, write to hana@kulturpunkt.hr