• Website with white background. Occupying the majority of the image is the entry for

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    Homepage listing. Megan Hoetger, “Dispatch: ‘I don’t believe in revolution, but sometimes I get in the spirit,’” L'internationale online(opens in a new tab), September 2024.

  • An A4 sheet of paper has been filled with handwritten notes. Slightly on top of it, at the bottom, is another sheet of paper, printed digitally. It says 'Co' in a large font.

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    Collective notes as written by workshop participants and compiled by Mabel Tapias in the workshop Collectiveness as method and as wish. Alliances and friendship as ways of intervening in the world, 28 August 2024.

  • A person sits at a table delivering a presentation. Behind them a slide is being projected. The slide is titled 'Accidental archivism' and shows two images. One of a group of people around a camera and another of a male presenting person in a natural setting.

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    Mila Turajlić, “Accidental Archivism” presentation slide from the workshop Non-Aligned Newsreels: Fragments from the Debris, 26 August 2024.

  • A slide with an image is being projected. The image is a photograph of a shelf of books annotated with colourful sticky notes.

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    Ala Younis, Presentation slide with notated shelf of books (every time a woman is mentioned) from the workshop Book of Transfers, 28 August 2024.

  • Travel postcards and brochures have been set on a table. A group of people is standing around it. Two people observe one of the postcards closely.

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    Left to right: Marija Marković, Seda Yildiz, Dubravka Sekulić. Yugoslav information booklets on non-aligned countries as found at flea markets by Bojana Piškur and featured in the exhibition Constellations of Multiple Wishes: Along the Eastern Horizon⁠(opens in a new tab), 27 August 2024.

  • A magnetic flipchart easel has been filled with notes. Behind it, to the left, something is being projected on a screen.

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    Collective notes as written by workshop participants and compiled by Mabel Tapias in the workshop Collectiveness as method and as wish. Alliances and friendship as ways of intervening in the world, 28 August 2024.

  • A film is being projected onto a screen. The captured frame shows a monument with a star on top. Behind it, several flag poles remain empty. The subtitle reads:

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    Installation view. Larry Achiampong, A Letter (Side B), 2023. Featured in Constellations of Multiple Wishes: Along the Eastern Horizon(opens in a new tab), 23 May - 3 December 2024, MG+MSUM, Ljubljana.

“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.

Our Many Easts summer school was organised by Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana in partnership with ZRC SAZU (the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) as part of the L’Internationale project Museum of the Commons. Special thanks to Sanja Kuveljić, Bojana Piškur, and Adela Železnik for their support throughout the program, and to Nick Aikens for the invitation to write a reflection on the experience.