Violence is being traditionally inscribed in the historical context of the 20th century with its totalitarianisms, genocides, and mass terror and is clearly defined in negative terms. Hence the idea of non-violent development and the achievement of a state of society in which manifestations and methods of violence would morph into increasingly civilised forms, which seemed to have become generally accepted in the last few decades being particularly inspired by a range of the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 that were dubbed ‘non-violent.’ This approach, which seeks to reduce or avoid violence in society, to make it controllable and transparent, has utterly failed in the last years. In the context of brutal full-scale wars and genocidal attempts in Eastern Europe, violence in its most savage and archaic forms once again merged with the very fabric of society, penetrating all spheres of life and leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity.

Against the backdrop of raging wars and a fascist turn in global politics, the event tackles the multifaceted realities of violence and its societal impacts by addressing the extreme violent ideologies and their political applications, war traumata and the mass psychophysical devastation, the destruction of nature particularly due to military hostilities, the current visual violence and the variety of forms of its representation in arts and media.

Program:

16:00 Bloody Mass and Bureaucracy – Two Faces of Fascist Violence

Keynote: Michał Herer

Discussion with Michał Herer and Vasyl Cherepanyn

17:40 War, Body, Landscape

A discussion with Stanislav Aseev und Yana Kononova

Moderated by Kateryna Mishchenko

19:00 Reception

19:40 Images of Violence / Violence of Images

A discussion wit Lesia Kulchynska, Mykola Ridnyi and Till Gathmann

Moderated by Susanne Strätling

Free admission

Please register here.

Organized by Susanne Strätling (EXC Temporal Communities/Freie Universität Berlin) and Vasyl Cherepanyn (EXC Temporal Communities/Visual Culture Research Center, Ukraine) in cooperation with the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education)