ROUND TABLE: WHAT IF THE APOCALYPSE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED?

Tuesday, July 24
Cinema Square, 8 p.m.

Opening of KotorArt Philosophers’ Square
ROUND TABLE: WHAT IF THE APOCALYPSE HAS ALREADY HAPPENED? 

Participants:SREĆKO HORVAT, ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS, ALEKSANDRA SAVANOVIĆ

Day by day, we are bombared by the news of global or local disasters, from polluted beaches to the overwhelming accumulation of plastic, which we seem even to injest on a daily basis. At the same time, we are witnessing the migrations of millions of refugees, wars, ecological disasters... and the possibility of a nuclear war. However, what if, as paradoxically as it sounds, the Apocalypse has already happened? What if every day is for someone, somewhere, if not already in Kotor today, “the end of the world?” And what if this idea actually allows us to survive the Apocalypse that may have already happened? This will be discussed at the round table of the opening of this year’s Philosophers’ Square by Aleksandra Savanović, Andrej Nikolaidis, and Srećko Horvat.

SREĆKO HORVAT is a philosopher, author, translator and political activist. He was born in 1983 in Osijek and lived 8 years in Germany before returning to Croatia in 1991 – the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, followed by wars. Today he says he lives “nowhere and everywhere.” He is one of the founders of the Democracy in Europe Movement – DIEM25, which gathers some of the most important intellectuals and figures of today, including Yanis Varoufakis, Noam Chomsky, Saskia Sassen, Naomi Klein, and Julian Assange. His books – with more than ten titles to his name, including The Radicality of Love (Verso, 2015), Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia (with Igor Štiks, Verso, 2016), and What Does Euorpe Want (Slavoj Žižek, Columbia University Press, 2014), have been translated into more than 15 languages. Horvat has been described as “one of the most exciting voices of his generation” (Der Freitag) and as “the charismatic Croatian philosopher” (Oliver Stone). He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and Newsweek. Next year, Horvat could assume a completely new role if, as a candidate on the transnational list of DIEM 25 for the 2019 elections, he finds himself in the seats of the European Parliament.

ANDREJ NIKOLAIDIS is a writer and columnist, born in 1974 in Sarajevo, where he grew up in a Montenegrin-Greek family. Since 1992, he has been living in Ulcinj. In 2016, for his novel The Hungarian Sentence, Nikolaidis received the Meša Selimović Award for the best novel published in the speaking territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and Serbia. His novel The Son (part of The Children trilogy, along with the novels Coming and Till Kingdom Come), received the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature. His prose was included in the Best European Fiction 2012 anthology. In the collection Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia (Verso, 2015, editors Srećko Horvat, Igor Štiks), Nikolaidis published his essay The Silence of Lamb – Eaters. He is an anti-war activist and a fighter for human rights, especially minority rights. Nikolaidis is known for his razor-sharp wit and effective expression of his views, which have incurred him a myriad of threats. He publishes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Mladina. His novels have been translated into 14 languages.
 

ALEKSANDRA SAVANOVIĆ was born in 1986 in Novi Sad. She studied International Relations at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade and Sociology at the Institute for Sociology at the Free University, Berlin. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in electronic and printed magazines and short stories collections. Currently, she is one of the editors of Zent – a magazine dedicated to politics, technology, and the arts, and co-author of the recently published book Commons and the Boundaries of Capitalism. Her first novel, Life no.10, will be published this autumn.

FILM PROJECTION: ON THE BEACH
(Director: Stanley Kramer, 1959)