Reconfiguring the Apolitical in SKC of 2025: Self-Organization and the Promise of New Politics

• In Event: Yugoslav Aesthetics I: October 75—Fifty Years On

Abstract

This paper examines the articulation of the Self and politics in the epistemic stances and activist discourse of students who participated in the liberation of the Student Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade, Serbia, in February 2025. The building housing SKC became central to the student protests of 1968, when students demanded its liberation, and the state conceded. Since then, SKC evolved into a key hub for contemporary art and a platform for a wide range of critical views on the state, spanning from radical leftist critiques to more liberal and proto-nationalist ideologies in the 1990s (Vesić 2014). The Centre remained largely (politically) inactive until February 12, 2025, when students reclaimed the building, inspired by the mass student protests that began in December 2024 in Serbia.

The study explores the logics that structure political awareness and action by examining current understandings of the student movement’s visions of and agency in the socioeconomic and political transformation through (allegedly) neutralized political action. The analysis of published materials, social media interaction patterns, and interviews with students highlights emerging meanings, performative practices, and new political subjectivities and infrastructures in the making, using the 2025 students' liberation of SKC as a case study.

Author

• Jelena Calic, U College London (UK)