July 4th, 2025, 18 – 20:30, The Albany Café in Deptford, London
You are warmly invited to the book launch of POST-COMMUNIST GROUNDS. IN SEARCH OF THE COMMONS
The event will offer glimpses into various contributions featured in the edited book in the form of readings, sounds and images. We will be joined by many of the contributing authors and artists for an evening of music, discussions, live collage-making and socialising at The Albany – so come hear about our two-year long collaborative effort and celebrate the book with us!
You will be able to also obtain a copy of the volume, which will be distributed free of charge (with solidarity donations to grassroots collectives encouraged).
ABOUT THE BOOK
‘Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons’ is a collection of interventions edited by Neda Genova. These interventions seek to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism in a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in developing experimental aesthetic practices.
This volume seeks to re-orient discussions about the commons away from prevailing frames of analyses, which tend to ‘assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West’ (Vilenica, 2023). On par with this supposition is the devaluation of experiments in commoning situated elsewhere that engage different historical experiences of struggle against enclosures. This includes not only various efforts of organizing reproductive labor, public infrastructure, or free time during state socialism across the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’, but also the experiences of anti-imperialist, agrarian, and anarchist struggles and revolts in these regions that may as well have predated or, as it were, outlived the formation of socialist states. The volume brings together contributions that depart from differently constituted ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day: from an intimate engagement with the feminized experience of labor emigration in contemporary Georgia to the disappearance of spaces of everyday creativity in Poland to accounts of the challenges of internationalist organizing on the Left today through the prism of the collective LeftEast. While some of the contributions engage historical and archival materials from different contexts, none of them employ a reifying approach towards the past. Instead, each works with different materials, media, or modalities of writing – from poetry to illustration, from essay to collage to movement score – to chart alternative coordinates in our present and future grounds of coming together.
Neda Genova is Lecturer in Digital Media in the department of Film Studies, University of Southampton. She’s interested in opening spaces for collaborative, experimental publishing practices that traverse disciplinary boundaries in art, activism, and academia. Neda is a founding member of the editorial collective for Bulgarian-language journal dVERSIA, which publishes critical Left analyses of contemporary politics, society, and culture.
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY
Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina, media artist and media scholar at the Winchester School of Art
Aleksei Borisionok, curator, writer, and organiser
Miha Brebenel, visual artist and scholar at the Winchester School of Art
Noah Brehmer, militant researcher and organiser
Aleksandra Fila, interdisciplinary scholar and activist, currently doctoral fellow at the University of Vienna
Nino Gavasheli, visual artist and cultural producer
Hanna Grześkiewicz, curator and researcher working with sound and words
Mariya P. Ivancheva, anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labor at the University of Strathclyde
Rastko Novaković, filmmaker, curator and organiser
Olia Sosnovskaya, artist, writer, and cultural organiser
Mary N. Taylor, scholar and LeftEast collective member
Yasemin Keskintepe, curator and PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam
OTHERS ABOUT THE BOOK
‘In our dire times of seemingly failed alternatives, this brilliant book takes on the task of tracing and making a liveable world. Returning to and renewing commoning as a set of experiences, rhythms or rituals gives us multiversal political propositions. These are new, aesthetic, conceptual or practical efforts as well as ways to relate to and inhabit spaces of hope and work, which post-communist territories have in common.’
– Olga Goriunova, scholar and curator in the fields of digital media, arts and cultures
‘Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons offers a necessary political and affective archive of movements across post-communist geographies. This collection is not a romantic celebration of the commons but a committed, grounded engagement with commoning as a practice of contradiction, risk, and invention. Drawing on shared experiences of crisis and rupture, the book constructs a living infrastructure of solidarity – of being with others – across borders and struggles. Through frictions, experiments, and encounters, the contributors trace how infrastructures in common are formed in the very terrains of loss, enclosure, and exhaustion. They offer us tools to sustain movements – not through purity or perfection but through care, vulnerability, and a radical openness to becoming otherwise. These are not easy or finalized answers but collective invitations to continue asking, walking, and building together.’
– Ana Vilenica, urban researcher, art theorist and editor of ‘Decoloniality of Eastern Europe’
This event is funded through a grant by the Southampton Institute of Arts and Humanities’ Higher Education Innovation Fund (2024/25).