I don’t believe in revolution, but sometimes I get in the spirit

“While others were inside dancing to a playlist composed by the program participants, I was absorbed in a sprawling conversation on non-alignment, imagination, structural racism, and the (im)possibilities of collective formation under EU neoliberal regimes. I recounted a phrase from a button I had seen once in a satirical social media post by the Belgo-Dutch grassroots media collective Black Speaks Back⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠: ‘We were going to fight for liberation, but we didn’t get the grant.’ We all laughed — it was that slightly pained and nervous laughter that couches grief in a veneer of self-protective scepticism.”

In the first of a series of dispatches from the 2024 Our Many Easts summer school⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠ curator and researcher Megan Hoetger assembles quotes and images from the workshops, lectures and conversations in Ljubljana, reflecting on the ‘charged laughter’, ‘internal contradictions’ and space of ‘respite’ that permeated the summer school.