This book is to be published fifty years after the events of ’68. The focus of the symposium, as is clear from the title, is concerned with both the discontinuities and the continuities between ’68 and our present situation, examined in a series of lectures organised by Vasyl Cherepanyn from the Visual Culture Research Center and with a contribution from tranzit.cz, in Kyiv.
Being Together Precedes Being offers a text book for the project “The Kids Want Communism,” which was initiated towards the 99th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution of October 1917 as a series of exhibitions, symposiums and conferences, screening programs, publications and a summer camp. In this textbook, communism does not merely describe an “us versus them” relation, but also offers that we are becoming the future. This trajectory of communism runs parallel to us at every single moment and its guiding principle is that being together precedes being.
The authors whose writings appear in this book come from twelve different countries and represent a range of disciplines and interests: they are art historians, philosophers, cultural theorists and activists, critics, curators, and poets, with most of them falling into at least two or three of these categories. All have made important contributions to contemporary art and cultural production, art history writing, and critical thought within, and sometimes far beyond, the region once known, problematically, as ‘Eastern Europe.’