Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons

Join us for the Glasgow launch of this new collection of interventions seeking to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism, through a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in experimental aesthetic practices. ​The volume brings together ten chapters from 13 authors, all working in the Europe of post-1989.

Each of the chapters departs from differently formed ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day. The different chapters include:

• an intimate engagement with the feminised experience of labour emigration from contemporary Georgia
• accounts of the challenges of internationalist organising on the Left today through the prism of the publication collective LeftEast
• protest choreographies of the 2020-21 uprising in Belarus and the repression that followed

• the relationship between Poland’s old-growth forests and feminism and communal practices

• the mythologies of the potent and fraught imagery showing the connection between earth and labour

• the question of the role of friendship and comradeship in political organising

and many more.

The book’s editor Neda Genova and contributors Mariya P. Ivancheva and Rastko Novaković will present some of the book’s key themes and ideas. They will be joined by Sophia Lycouris and Milica Prokić for an evening of discussions on the role of culture, media and artistic practice in experiments of commoning on post-communist terrains.

A free copy of the book can be ordered from the Institute of Network Cultures through the link here, or you can pick your copy up on the evening.

POST-COMMUNIST GROUNDS. IN SEARCH OF THE COMMONS

Edited by Neda Genova

Contributors: Sasha Anikina, Aleksei Borisionok, Noah Brehmer, Miha Brebenel, Aleksandra Fila, Nino Gavasheli, Hanna Grześkiewicz, ​Mariya P. Ivancheva, Rastko Novaković, Olia Sosnovskaya, ​Mary N. Taylor, and ​Yasemin Keskintepe

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025

About the Participants

Neda Genova is lecturer in digital media in the department of film studies, University of Southampton and founding member of the editorial collective for Bulgarian-language journal dVERSIA.

​Mariya P. Ivancheva is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour at the University of Strathclyde.

​Sophia Lycouris is an academic interested in interdisciplinary research methodologies, including approaches informed by creative practice. She is also an artist working with movement/dance, choreography, improvisation and performance for over than twenty years, who gradually developed a dialogue with new technologies.

Milica Prokić is an environmental historian and visual artist from Belgrade, currently based in Glasgow as a researcher at the University of Strathclyde. Her research explores the relationships between landscapes, bodies, and power, particularly in the context of political and state violence, with focus on environments of incarceration and exile.

Rastko Novaković is filmmaker, curator, queer tango dancer and sometime organiser. He is the founder of Glasgow’s Inclinations film/book club.

INCLINATIONS Film/Book Club socials:

https://www.instagram.com/inclinations_film_club

https://x.com/inclinations_fc