On Thursday, 12^th June at 6 pm the MOCAK Library would like to invite you to Kinga Siewior's lecture titled Jugglers of Ideas, Aristocrats of the Soul. Zenitism and Yugoslavian Interwar Avant-garde.

The session will be dedicated to one of the most interesting trends in the Yugoslavian interwar literature: Ljubomir Micić's Zenitism. The conception arising from an aesthetic combination of expressionism, cubism, constructivism and dadaism, based on a unique marriage of Balkanism and critical cosmopolitanism, proposes an original ideological program of restoring European art and humanity to health through the ʻBalkanisation of Europeʼ. The story of vital, barbaric force coming to life in the figure of the barbarogenius is worth noting primarily for being a separate opinion in the all-European discussion on ʻnew artʼ, which deserves to be remembered. At the same time, it is a strong local gesture of emancipation, an option of self-definition of the new Yugoslavian identity and an attempt to determine its independent place and role on the cultural map of interwar Europe.

Kinga Siewior – graduated from Polish Studies and Slavonic Studies. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies, Jagiellonian University. She is currently working on a dissertation dedicated to the literature of the Recovered Territories. She is the author of the book  Odkrywcy i turyści na afrykańskim szlaku. O fotografii w polskim reportażu podróżniczym (Explorers and tourists on the African trail. On the photography in Polish travel reportage) (Krakow 2012), as well as several academic papers published in such magazines as Teksty Drugie and Ruch Literacki. Her academic interests are phenomena on the verge of photography and literature, geopoetics, Central European politics and poetics of memory.

A series of meetings with young researchers entitled Avant-garde of Central and Eastern Europe – Innovation or Imitation?, which is carried out at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University, is financed thanks to a grant from The National Programme for the Development of Humanities oraganised by The Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The main aim of the project is to answer the question whether the avant-garde movements arising in this part of Europe can be seen as a coherent trend in art and where its autonomy in regard to Western and Russian avant-garde might lie.

We encourage you to visit the project's website: www.awangarda-srodka.pl

The session will be held in Polish.