XIV KROKODIL FESTIVAL: The Year of Magical Thinking

30 May XIV KROKODIL FESTIVAL: The Year of Magical Thinking

XIV KROKODIL FESTIVAL: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

First evening (17th June)

For more photos from the first day of the festival, please click here!
Here you can watch the video recording of the festival’s first evening!

Second evening (18th June)

For more photos from the second evening of the festival, please click here!
And here you can watch the video from the second evening!

Third evening (19th June)

For more photos from the third evening of the festival please click here!
Watch the video recording here!

DEBATE PROGRAMME

You can find more photos from the debate programme here!

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH PROGRAMME

For more photos from children’s and youth programme click here!

DEBATE PROGRAMME (NOVI SAD)

First day (23rd June)

You can find more photos here, and video is available here!

Second day (24th June)

See more photos here and watch the video from the second day here!

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17-19 JUNE 2022, BELGRADE; 23-24 JUNE 2022, NOVI SAD (DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT THE DEBATE PROGRAMME THAT REPRESENTS A PART OF THE EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE NOVI SAD 2022 EVENT WILL BE PUBLISHED SEPARATELY AT A LATER DATE)

EVENING PROGRAMME

LOCATION 1: Amphitheatre in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia, Mihaila Mike Jankovića 6, Belgrade

WHEN:

Friday, 17 June, from 8 PM

PARTICIPANTS: Aleksandar Šurbatović, Ariana Harwicz, In memoriam – Mira Furlan (Ivan Bevc and Mirjana Karanović), mini concert – Marčelo, Margaret Atwood (online), Dušan Petričić, Asja Bakić. Moderators: Mima Simić, Rumena Bužarovska, Daško Milinović, Jasmina Ahmetagić, and Silvia Monros. Consecutive interpretation from Spanish: Ilija Stevanovski. KROKODIL radio and continuity: Mjehur.

Saturday, 18 June, from 8 PM

PARTICIPANTS: Boris Dežulović, Jasminka Petrović and Radivoj (Raša) Andrić, Ilija Đurović, mini concert – Ana Ćurčin, Predrag Koraksić – CORAX, Tena Štivičić (stage reading: Vladica Milosavljević and Hana Selimović), and Ana Marija Grbić. Moderators: Mima Simić, Daško Milinović, Jasmina Topić and Dejan Matić. KROKODIL radio and continuity: Mjehur.

ADMISSION: With a ticket (from Monday 23 May, ddtickets.rs and KROKODIL Center, Karađorđeva 43)
LIVE STREAM: No online stream

LOCATION 2: Center for Cultural Decontamination, Birčaninova 21, Beograd

WHEN:

Sunday, 19 June, from 7 PM

PARTICIPANTS: CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) – Arianna Bonazzi (Italy), Andraž Rožman (Slovenia), Lisa Weeda (The Netherlands) and translators Ana Popović, Jelena Dedeić, and Bojana Budimir. Programme moderator: Mima Simić. POETS SOUNDS – speech art trio SPRECHBOHRER (Germany), Tone Avenstroup (Norway), Katalin Ladik (Hungary) and Miia Toivio (Finland). Programme moderators: Dragan Protić Prota and Florian Neuner.

ADMISSION: Free
LIVE STREAM: No online stream

DEBATE PROGRAMME

LOCATION 1: Center for Cultural Decontamination, Birčaninova 21, Beograd

WHEN:

Saturday, 18 June, from 11 AM

PARTICIPANTS: JOURNALISTS AGAINST RACISM – Iva Parađanin (BURO), Stefan Slavković (LiceUlice/NIN), Aleksandar Đuričić (NOVA), Aneta Goranović (Danas) and Milena Berić (KROKODIL).

Saturday, 18 June, from 12 AM

PARTICIPANTS: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING in partnership with Belgrade Center for Security Policy – Igor Bandović (BCSP), Darina Shevchenko (The Kyiv Independent), Marko Babić (University of Warsaw), Milivoj Bešlin (The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory), Andriy Lyubka (writer and translator), Ivana Dragičević (international affairs journalist). Moderators: Milena Berić and Srđan Hercigonja.

LOCATION 2: KROKODIL Center, Karađorđeva 43, entrance from Male stepenice

WHEN:

Sunday, 19 June, from 11 AM

PARTICIPANTS: TRANSLATION CAFÉ – CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) Arianna Bonazzi (Italy), Andraž Rožman (Slovenia), Lisa Weeda (The Netherlands) and translators Ana Popović, Jelena Dedeić, and Bojana Budimir + local and regional translators and authors.

Monday, 20 June, from 11 AM

PARTICIPANTS: BREAKFAST WITH PUBLISHERS – CELA  (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) Arianna Bonazzi (Italy), Andraž Rožman (Slovenia), Lisa Weeda (The Netherlands) and translators Ana Popović, Jelena Dedeić, and Bojana Budimir + local and regional translators and authors.     

ADMISSION: Free
LIVE STREAM: No online stream

LOCATION 3: Creative District (former Chinese Quarter), Novi Sad

WHEN:

Thursday, 23 June, from 8 PM

PARTICIPANTS: Boris Dežulović, Dubravka Stojanović, Boris Buden, Aida Ćorović, Dragan Bursać, Marina Fratucan

Friday, 24 June, from 8 PM

PARTICIPANTS: Ivan Krastev, Svetlana Slapšak, Ivan Vejvoda, Ljubica Gojgić, Njuz.net vs. Marka Žvaka (Marko Dražić/Viktor Marković vs. Dušan Čavić/Dušan Šaponja)

ADMISSION: Free
LIVE STREAM: Online stream via KROKODIL Engaging Words YT channel

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH PROGRAMME

LOCATION 1: Park in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia, Mihaila Mike Jankovića 6, Belgrade

WHEN:

Friday, 17 June and Saturday, 18 June, from 11 AM

PARTICIPANTS: Jasminka Petrović, Mjehur – Srđa Anđelić,READ (Regional Network for Cultural Diversity) – Rudina Çupi (Albania), Fatih Erdogan (Turkey), Biljana Crvenkovska (North Macedonia) and Erina Rrahmani (Kosovo)

ADMISSION: Free 
LIVE STREAM: No online stream

INTRODUCTION

“The Year of Magical Thinking is a title we owe to the recently deceased American author and essayist Joan Didion, whose insight into the roads travelled by the human species through the XX and XXI centuries, and her memorable descriptions of societal unrest and psychological fragmentation have left an important mark on the way we experience the contemporary world. Taken from her eponymous autobiographical book that talks of her facing the sudden death of her husband and terminal illness of her only daughter, this title, of course, represents a direct homage to the insuperable writer. However, it also directs our attention towards the collective, global, extremely complex trauma the population of planet Earth is facing today. In a direct head-on collision with the certainty of environmental apocalypse, new and mysterious pandemics, aggressive, bloodthirsty dictators with their fingers on the triggers of nuclear weapons powerful enough to destroy all of humanity, and the extreme stupidity and blindness of the human species that, due to the development of communications technologies, has been unveiled before us in all its splendour while as Arthur Koestler said, we “sleepwalk toward Armageddon”, it would seem we are unable to fully comprehend where we have led our civilisation. And in return, where our civilisation has led us.

If we zoom in further to have a better look at our tiny part of the planet, the by now proverbially depressing south east of Europe or western Balkans, however you like it, things will seem even bleaker. Faced with the debilitating rule of stabilocrats and identity-peddlers followed by the overbearing shadow of an enormous tidal wave of retrograde right-wing sentiment and native ur-fascism that literally springs from the ground all around us, we face the fatalistic idea that some phenomena are so deeply rooted here that any fundamental change will be a matter of arduous decades and probably centuries of work with a highly uncertain outcome. To make things worse, this work has not even properly started, and when will it be – we don’t know. It is with increasing frequency, therefore, that we give in to the thought that the easiest, and perhaps smartest route would be to give up on everything or simply raise our eyes to the heavens and hope for the best. I.e., to think magically. 

Our answer to all this lies precisely in the new edition of the KROKODIL international and regional festival we have before us.”

Vladimir Arsenijević
Programme Director of the KROKODIL Festival

The fourteenth edition of the KROKODIL Festival under the title The Year of Magical Thinking will be held in Belgrade during three days and evenings in June (from 17 to 19 June) at the open amphitheater in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia and at the Center for Cultural Decontamination, as well as in Novi Sad (on 23 and 24 June) under the title On the Margins as part of the programme arc Fortress of Peace of the European Capital of Culture Novi Sad 2022. It will feature readings, discussions, sofa interviews, musical and stage performances, programmes for children and youth, meetings with journalists and audiences, book signings, forums, debates, promotions, online discussions, video projections and conferences.

EVENING PROGRAMME

An excellent selection of local, regional and international writers, as well as musicians, actors and others will be presented as part of the first two festival evenings in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia, on Friday 17 June and Saturday, 18 June, from 8 PM.  We are proud to announce the participation of one of the greatest living authors in the world Margaret Atwood, who will join us for a half-hour conversation with author Rumena Bužarovska and Mima Simić, and for an online reading from her home in Canada. We are also proud to announce the live participation of the Argentine literary wonder Ariana Harwicz, whose brutal novel Die, My Love took our reading public by storm.

This year, the dynamic sofa interviews are reserved for a pair of legendary caricature artists and ruthless commentators of the local social and political reality, Corax and Dušan Petričić. We should also not omit to mention the participating regional stars, including the provocative and sharp-witted Boris Dežulović, popular drama author Tena Štivičić, the excellent literary comet from Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Asja Bakić, as well as the high representative of new literary prospects writing in our common tongue, the young Montenegrin novelist Ilija Đurović. 

Along with the In memoriam segment dedicated to the one and only Mira Furlan and the specific roles we gave our insuperable actresses Mirjana Karanović, Vladica Milosavljević and Hana Selimović, the programme will be rounded off by a conversation with our beloved Jasminka Petrović and equally beloved Raša Andrić about the book/film The Summer I Learned to Fly and the success this creative duo found nationally, in the region, and the actual international scene. A true jewel of the evening programme will consist of musical performances by Marčelo and Ana Ćurčin, as well as a presentation of noted books published last year by Ana Marija Grbić and Aleksandar Šurbatović.

As usual, the festival will be moderated by the one and only Mima Simić, this time with support of Daško Milinović from the famous radio duo Daško and Mlađa, tasked with sofa interviews, along with a series of moderators such as Jasmina Ahmetagić, Silvia Monros, Jasmina Topić and Dejan Matić who will present individual authors comprising the phenomenal line-up of this year’s KROKODIL Festival through brief on-stage conversations.

The programme of the third festival evening will be held on Sunday, 19 June, starting at 7 PM at the Center for Cultural Decontamination, dedicated to innovative authorial solutions that explore hitherto undiscovered links between writers and their translators on the one hand, and between poetry, sound, and stage movement on the other. The programme is being implemented as part of the CELA project (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) implemented by organizations from ten European countries, including the KROKODIL Association, and the POETS SOUNDS project initiated by KROKODIL’s friend organization Lettretage from Berlin.

One intention of the CELA project is to place translators on a level with authors as equal-rights literary creators. This intent has promoted a new review of a literary performance in cases where it occurs outside the context of the language a certain author writes in. Come see how the creative communication between those who write and those who translate their works can result in exciting stage solutions through performances by future European literary stars – Arianna Bonazzi from Italy, Andraž Rožman from Slovenia and Lisa Weeda from the Netherlands – and translators Ana Popović, Jelena Dedeić and Bojana Budimir. The programme moderator is Mima Simić. This programme segment will be followed by a unique experiment under the title POETS SOUNDS. This artistic cooperation of composers, performers and poets explores the boundaries where literary language meets the field of New Music – an aesthetic region barely explored to this day. Through a creative interplay of the speech art trio SPRECHBOHRER from Cologne and six renowned European poets: Tone Avenstroup from Norway, the Catalan Eduard Escoffet, our Katalin Ladik, Morten Søndergaard from Denmark, Miia Toivio from Finland and Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck from Switzerland, we will present new breakthroughs in the fields of instrumental capabilities of the voice, the tonal spectrum of speech, and issues of notation. These transgressive musical-poetical pieces that premièred in Berlin will, after Belgrade, be presented in many other European cities as part of a unique avant-garde tour. The programme is moderated by Dragan Protić Prota from the Škart art group and the revolutionary open mic poetry festival Pesničenje, and his colleague from Germany Florian Neuner.

DEBATE PROGRAMME

Forums, panel discussions and round tables will once again be organized this year as part of the KROKODIL Debate Programme, dealing with the latest social and political issues from a cultural viewpoint.

We will open KROKODIL’s debate programme on Saturday, 18 June, from 11 AM at the Center for Cultural Decontamination, with a discussion on diversity in media with a focus on cultural diversity, gender equality, LGBTQ+ and ethnic diversity and its representation in media. Journalists, editors, media and cultural workers will take part in a discussion under the title Journalists Against Racism, including: Iva Parađanin (BURO), Stefan Slavković (LiceUlice/NIN), Pero Jovović (NOVA), Aneta Goranović (Danas) and Milena Berić (KROKODIL). Before the KROKODIL Festival they and their colleagues from their editorial offices will run a school of journalism focusing on media and information literacy, better representation of minority groups in media, and combating media disinformation. They will also mentor this year’s generation of 15 KROKODIL journalists for a day who will have the opportunity to report for some of the leading media companies in Serbia on minority groups, fundamental human rights, ethnic and religious relations, as well as sexual and gender equality, through written interviews, reports and investigative stories, video interviews, podcast shows, and photo-reports from this year’s KROKODIL festival. The project Journalist for a Day – Journalists Against Racism is being implemented as part of the project Reporting Diversity Network 2.0 funded by the European Union.

At 12 o’clock a social and political discussion will follow bearing the title of the festival itself, The Year of Magical Thinking, reflecting on all the topics covered in the introduction and the very “ratio” of this year’s festival. In cooperation with the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy we will have the opportunity to hear some of the most prominent voices in the public arena in Serbia, and articulate topics ranging from the pandemic and its consequences, through the aggression against the Ukraine and its population, to the growing populism, right-wing politics, sabre rattling, economic crises, and crises of awareness and thought. We will speak of a global need for new formats in policies, thought and action at all meridians with a reflection on the south-east of Europe or western Balkans.

The Belgrade edition of the KROKODIL festival will be closed with events dedicated to publishers and literary translators, authors and the general professional public. On Sunday, 19 June, from 11 AM in KROKODIL Center, translators from various European languages and their authors will have the opportunity to discuss various challenges they face when translating works by young European authors working in “small” European languages, to exchange experiences and meet local publishers at the traditional KROKODIL breakfast with publishers on Monday, 20 June from 11 AM, also at the KROKODIL Center. Translation Café is being held as part of the European cooperation project CELA (Connecting Emerging Literary Artists) run by organizations from ten European countries, including the KROKODIL Association, with one of its main goals being to place translators on a level with authors as equal-rights literary creators.

The Novi Sad edition of the debate programme of the XIV KROKODIL festival will be held in Novi Sad on 23 and 24 June, under the title On the Margins as part of the programme arc Fortress of Peace of the European Capital of Culture Novi Sad 2022.  In the new Chinese Quarter, reconstructed and remodeled for this occasion and now bearing the name Creative District, KROKODIL will present its three popular discussion formats: Debate on Europe, Gigantomachy and Sofa Interview.

Ivan Krastev, Dubravka Stojanović, Boris Buden, Svetlana Slapšak, Ivan Vejvoda, Boris Dežulović, Aida Ćorović, Dragan Bursać, Marina Fratucan and Ljubica Gojgić are just some of the participants who will use the six festival events during the two programme evenings to cover issues related to life in conflict and post-conflict European zones, the struggle for women’s rights in various forms of patriarchy, the dialectic of objective and subjective violence, the ethics of non-violent resistance and the future of the world after the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme will gather some of the most eminent European writers, intellectuals and experts in various fields – artists, culture workers, professionals and theorists, sociologists, historians, philosophers and activists, including the unfailing Njuz.net and Marka Žvaka duos.

CHILDREN’S AND YOUTH PROGRAMME

On Friday, 17 June and Saturday, 18 June, starting at 11 AM, dynamic and playful activities will be organized for children and youth. Guided and coordinated by our renowned children’s and youth writer Jasminka Petrović, important contemporary children’s authors will present their work, including: Rudina Çupi (Albania), Fatih Erdogan (Turkey), Biljana Crvenkovska (North Macedonia) and Erina Rrahmani (Kosovo). In addition to guests from the region, several excellent local children’s authors will also present their work through a series of innovative multimedia workshops. The programme will be enriched by a Mobile Library, placed in the area of the park of the Museum of Yugoslavia, where the literary programme will be implemented. The area around the Mobile Library will also be the location for various creative programmes: Illustration and drawing workshops, public readings, creative writing workshops, while the abundant contents of the library will be available to the audience even after the festival. The children’s and youth programme of the festival is being implemented as part of the READ project (Regional Network for Cultural Diversity). 

The aim of this project, gathering organisations from five countries (North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Turkey and Serbia) is empowering and nurturing good neighbourly relations, reconciliation, and intercultural dialogue through various activities: implementation of residential stays of authors and literary translators, support for multilingual and intercultural projects by civil society organisation in countries in the region, presentation of the content and programme of the Mobile Library and the participation of authors from the region in literary festivals.

KEY INFORMATION ON TICKET SALES

• Tickets need only be purchased for the first two evenings of the KROKODIL Festival, Friday and Saturday, 17 and 18 June. 
• Tickets will be on sale as of Monday, 23 May at 12 o’clock through the sales network, online at ddtickets.rs and in the KROKODIL Center, Karađorđeva 43.
• Price of a one-day ticket if purchased by 31 May: RSD 750. Price of a two-day ticket if purchased by 31 May: RSD 1400
• Price of a one-day ticket if purchased from 1 to 16 June: RSD 850. Price of a two-day ticket if purchased from 1 to 16 June: RSD 1600.
• Price of a one-day ticket if purchased at the entrance on 17 and 18 June: RSD 950.
• Price of a one-day ticket for university students and pensioners: RSD 600.

The organiser of the KROKODIL Festival is the KROKODIL Association.

Support for the festival was provided by: the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, the European Union through support for the READ project and the Journalist for a Day – Journalists Against Racism programme implemented under the Reporting Diversity Network 2.0 project, the European Commission through the Creative Europe programme co-funding the projects CELA and B(P)art, and the Museum of Yugoslavia. Media partners: Danas, Nova and LiceUlice.  

Technical production: Marsh Creative Production.

The KROKODIL Festival (an acronym that stands for Literary Regional Gathering That Alleviates Boredom and Lethargy) is a literary festival presenting in a unique and original way local, regional and international literature in its full scope – without generational, poetic, gender, or any other form of exclusion. With its modern and dynamic approach in presenting writers, consisting of readings with the use of modern video and audio media, musical and stage performances, and a broad selection including poetry, prose and drama, since its founding in 2009 the KROKODIL festival has become one of the most successful literary events in the region. Thirteen summer festivals have been organized thus far, and over fifteen guest editions of our festival in nine European countries, with the participation of nearly four hundred writers from the country, region and Europe.