Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Time and social networks
Destinies of the post-war colonists in the village of Trate 111 its former owners "in kind’’, not in shares, caused new social injustice. The youth and rock club in Trate was not the only victim of this "denationalisation”. Alternative and local public culture had to adjust to the new situation - or to disappear. The first apparent problem for alternative culture was the finding of venues. In the nineties, vital civil society movements of the eighties had lost their meaning. However, the struggles of alternative movements continued. In two main cities of Slovenia, Ljubljana and Maribor, rebellious youth occupied empty army barracks. These “squats", which were occupied in 1994, are now centres of a new Slovene alternative culture. Some youth clubs and other venues survived and continue to struggle against the dominant system - now commercialised capitalism - within the so-called “liberated territories”. The alternative culture thus faces the new rules of the market, often existing and producing under awful conditions. In smaller towns and villages in Slovenia, the situation is sometimes favourable and sometimes quite unfavourable. The scene in Ceršak is becoming more and more important, in a reconstructed private house, the members of CZD built a club and a gallery, made a recording studio and equipped an office for the cultural institutions which were established in accordance with the new legislation: the society “Zid na meji" (The Wall at the Frontier) and the private non-profit organisation “Subkulturni azil" (Subculture Asylum) with the record label Front Rock and the publishing house Frontier. It seems that private initiatives of this kind can also aid in the preservation of resisting alternatives to capitalism. We shall see. Local alternative scenes were inevitable unintended consequences of the socialist project. It is more or less obvious that also capitalism initiates its own unintended phenomena. Capitalism is perhaps the most efficient political and economic system so far, but that does not mean that it cannot devolve into new forms of hegemony and usurpation.
