Before We Forget
Autonomous movements of students and lecturers in Slovenia have a complex continuity, which the documentary tracks from the year 2002 onwards. The then active anti-NATO movement had a strong presence…
Before We Forget
Autonomous movements of students and lecturers in Slovenia have a complex continuity, which the documentary tracks from the year 2002 onwards. The then active anti-NATO movement had a strong presence among students at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was using similar tactics as all the subsequent initiatives to express concerns over national political priorities. The following examples of Autonomous Tribune (2007) and Student Initiative (2009), through which students from various faculties in Ljubljana were protesting against privatization, précarisation, and marketisation of higher education, show how the act of symbolic occupations of physical spaces can be used as a form of political struggle. In the run-up to the strongly publicized occupation of the Faculty of Arts (2011/12), there was a significant influence from abroad: in Croatia (2009) and in Serbia (2011), numerous faculties were beginning to be occupied by students demanding an end to tuitions in higher education and an end to the Bologna process, which many students and lecturers saw as a transformation of education into a quasi-market that lowered standards and damaged accessibility. At the same time, the world saw the rise of Occupy (2011), the global movement against financial capitalism in light of its crisis. Slovenian localised versions of Occupy sprung up in various cities in the form of occupations, the most memorable of which was the occupation in front of the stock market building in Ljubljana. This occupation was crucial for the spread of the initiative We Are the University, which was formed at the start of the year and had begun to publicly address demands to the University of Ljubljana and the Ministry of Education regarding tuition and the conditions of higher education. The vote for occupying the Faculty of Arts was held during one of the assemblies in front of the stock market and so it was decided that another assembly was to be held at the faculty itself to make the final decision. On the 22nd of November 2011, the assembly at the Faculty of Arts decided to begin the occupation the next day. The students, lecturers, and other participants took it upon themselves to begin regular negotiations with the faculty and university leadership, to communicate their demands to the public via media, to build a horizontal organisation upon the principle of direct action democracy, and to provide an alternative education programme in the few spaces they had occupied - all the while continuing with their studies, sleeping at the faculty, and cooking hot meals for participants free of charge. The occupation lasted for two months, until the 23rd of January. Towards the end, the participants of the occupation grew exhausted and realised their demands were getting lost in the bureaucratic system of representative democracy of the faculty, university, and ministry. But the fight did not end with this - as the interviewees in the documentary explain, new generations of students took up the struggle to better the social status of students, and to raise the quality and accessibility of higher education. Some fights were won, others lost along the way, but the documentary strives to make the point, that autonomous student movements have a continuity of their own and relentlessly find new ways to adapt their tactics, even if they often must build themselves up from scratch again.
Before We Forget
Drama,Family
Film Details
Autonomous movements of students and lecturers in Slovenia have a complex continuity, which the documentary tracks from the year 2002 onwards. The then active anti-NATO movement had a strong presence among students at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was using similar tactics as all the subsequent initiatives to express concerns over national political priorities. The following examples of Autonomous Tribune (2007) and Student Initiative (2009), through which students from various faculties in Ljubljana were protesting against privatization, précarisation, and marketisation of higher education, show how the act of symbolic occupations of physical spaces can be used as a form of political struggle.
In the run-up to the strongly publicized occupation of the Faculty of Arts (2011/12), there was a significant influence from abroad: in Croatia (2009) and in Serbia (2011), numerous faculties were beginning to be occupied by students demanding an end to tuitions in higher education and an end to the Bologna process, which many students and lecturers saw as a transformation of education into a quasi-market that lowered standards and damaged accessibility. At the same time, the world saw the rise of Occupy (2011), the global movement against financial capitalism in light of its crisis. Slovenian localised versions of Occupy sprung up in various cities in the form of occupations, the most memorable of which was the occupation in front of the stock market building in Ljubljana.
This occupation was crucial for the spread of the initiative We Are the University, which was formed at the start of the year and had begun to publicly address demands to the University of Ljubljana and the Ministry of Education regarding tuition and the conditions of higher education. The vote for occupying the Faculty of Arts was held during one of the assemblies in front of the stock market and so it was decided that another assembly was to be held at the faculty itself to make the final decision. On the 22nd of November 2011, the assembly at the Faculty of Arts decided to begin the occupation the next day.
The students, lecturers, and other participants took it upon themselves to begin regular negotiations with the faculty and university leadership, to communicate their demands to the public via media, to build a horizontal organisation upon the principle of direct action democracy, and to provide an alternative education programme in the few spaces they had occupied - all the while continuing with their studies, sleeping at the faculty, and cooking hot meals for participants free of charge. The occupation lasted for two months, until the 23rd of January. Towards the end, the participants of the occupation grew exhausted and realised their demands were getting lost in the bureaucratic system of representative democracy of the faculty, university, and ministry.
But the fight did not end with this - as the interviewees in the documentary explain, new generations of students took up the struggle to better the social status of students, and to raise the quality and accessibility of higher education. Some fights were won, others lost along the way, but the documentary strives to make the point, that autonomous student movements have a continuity of their own and relentlessly find new ways to adapt their tactics, even if they often must build themselves up from scratch again..