ALL TALK — Public Programming, Institutional Discourse and Militant Care

— A two-day gathering reflecting on public programming as a contested space for discourse, organisation and care

Drugo more (Filodrammatica, 2nd floor, Korzo 28/2, Rijeka)

⊗ Saturday & Sunday, May 24-25, 2025

Public programming has long shaped how art and cultural institutions convene publics, from lectures and workshops to pedagogical experiments and assemblies. Often presented as neutral, these formats are deeply entangled with ideological, institutional and economic dynamics. Today, amid crises of representation and rising authoritarianism, this event brings together researchers, artists and organisers to interrogate the historical genealogies, present contradictions and future possibilities of public discourse production.

Structured through thematic working groups and culminating in a public roundtable, ALL TALK will explore:

● Contemporary right-wing discourse and its influence on cultural space

● Liberal paradigms of public debate and institutional neutrality

● Colonial and imperial legacies that shape cultural discourse and subjectivities

● Alternative genealogies of public assembly and radical education, drawing from movements such as Bandung, feminist and anti-colonial struggles

● The stakes of militant care in formats of gathering and discussion

This event seeks to deepen our understanding of public programming as both a practice and a contested domain, asking: how can new formats emerge that are grounded in the very social, political and embodied conditions they seek to address? How can programming become a space of militant care, acknowledging exclusions and creating room for consequences?

To join the working group sessions, please send a short expression of interest to valeria.graziano[at]uniri.hr or davor[at]drugo-more.hr

Janna Graham
Dr Janna Graham is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work examines the aural, pedagogical and micropolitical dimensions of urban dispossession and resistance, including how legacies of colonial administration underpin neoliberal subjectivities, institutions and modes of publicity. Originally trained as a geographer, Graham has written extensively on radical education genealogies in relation to contemporary art and conditions based on twenty years of work in the cultural sector as initiator of the Centre for Possible Studies (Serpentine Galleries), Head of Public Programmes and Research (Nottingham Contemporary, Art Gallery of Ontario) and member of collectives Ultra-red, Precarious Workers Brigade and Deptford People’s Heritage Museum.

Susan Kelly
Susan Kelly is a writer, artist, organiser and educator who researches the relationships between art and micropolitics: where the production of subjectivity becomes a site for analysing and intervening in the reproduction of capitalism, imperialism, art and culture. She has worked in performance, video, installation and public / site-based practice, but more recently, has been focused on writing and producing workshops and research processes using various forms of participatory militant investigation. Kelly has worked individually and in the context of collectives situated between the fields of art, education and political organization and activism (including Micropolitics Research Group, Precarious Workers’ Brigade, and previously, Carrot Workers Collective and 16Beaver, New York). She holds a BA in Fine Art and Art History (NCAD Dublin); an MA in Cultural Studies (Leeds University); she completed the Whitney Independent Study Studio Programme (New York) in the late 1990s, and a PhD in Visual Cultures (Goldsmiths) in 2010

Margareta Kern
Margareta Kern (she/her) is a visual artist working across performance, moving image, and installation. Her practice emerges from sustained critical and embodied research into how collective imaginaries and subjectivities are constructed, contested, and mobilised amid overlapping crises of neoliberal capitalism and climate breakdown. Kern’s lived experience of displacement and conflict – having migrated from Bosnia-Herzegovina/Yugoslavia to the UK as an asylum seeker in the 1990s – informs her deep engagement with themes of power, ideology, and resistance. Kern’s work has been exhibited and screened extensively. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London, where her research examines the intersection of performance, militarism, and mischief. www.margaretakern.com

Toufic Haddad
Dr Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian American academic and author. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (I.B. Tauris, 2016). He has worked in various capacities across the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher. He recently directed the Council for British Research in the Levant’s Jerusalem Branch – the Kenyon Institute (2020–24) and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter based in Jordan until April 2025.

Davor Mišković
Davor Mišković is cultural worker from Rijeka. He is director of the cultural organization Drugo more. Most of his work is related to programming, research and fundraising in Drugo more. Beside that he was involved in advocacy for the independent cultural scene, and the creation of policy documents and cultural strategies for national and local authorities.

Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė
Agne Bagdziunaite is a curator and cultural organiser based in Lithuania. Her practice explores critical public programming, collective memory, and the politics of visibility, often working through experimental formats and collaborative methods. She has curated projects at Kaunas Artists’ House, including Obscene West, which interrogated the ideological framing of “Western values” in post-Soviet contexts. Agne is a member of the organising teams behind Social Centre Emma, a self-managed cultural space in Kaunas, and Kombinatas, a festival of leftist ideas. Her work is grounded in care, resistance, and building counter-publics within and beyond institutional structures.

Valeria Graziano
Dr Valeria Graziano works as an Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies, University of Rijeka, and practices otherwise across political organising, radical pedagogy and artistic production. Her research is rooted in the legacies of autonomous Marxism, schizoanalysis, and transfeminist approaches, and explores gestures of refusal of work and the political uses of pleasure as embodied tactics for unsettling capitalist and fascist productivity. She has been active within various collectives, including PWB, and is among the initiators of TIAN – Transversal Institutional Analysis Network (https://institutionalanalysis.net/). Recent publications include Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press, 2025) and Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures (Drugo More, 2024).

Manuela Zechner
Dr Manuela Zechner is a researcher, facilitator and cultural worker. She is a founding member of the Common Ecologies School, where she coordinates co-research processes, publications and encounters, and produces the Earthcare Fieldcast. Her work focuses on care and earthcare, feminist and antiracist agrarian change and urban-rural relations, and socio-ecological movements and transformation. She is currently affiliated with the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking of Copenhagen University and teaches on socioecological transformation, co-research methods and the politics of care in Barcelona and Koblenz. She periodically intersects with the arts and public education, currently through the creation of a school garden in Vienna that’s part of an arts-based research project.