Gal Kirn: Partisan ecology
lecture
In his lecture, Gal Kirn will define the concept of partisan ecology and place it in the context of the Second World War and the Yugoslav partisan struggle (National Liberation Struggle). He will interpret a number of partisan artworks and their authors who tried to depict the immense sensitivity to the non-human world, plants, animals and especially the forest. The author argues that in contrast to the fascist occupation and domination over humans and nature, the partisan movement sought to build a solidarity between the partisans and animals/nature. He will therefore examine the tropes in poetry, prose, drawings and printed matter in which the forest becomes a shelter, a site of resistance and a promise of liberation. He will also focus on the emerging subjectivity of the partisans, which includes the oppressed but diverse animals, a pack of wolves, burnt trees, birds that continue to sing despite thorny branches, a snail as a figure and example of resilient resistance and a liberated forest. The lecture ends with an attempt to harmonise the Yugoslav partisan struggle with a more general line of anti-colonial and ecological struggle.
Image: France Mihelič, Scorched Pear Tree, 1944, black chalk, 38 cm x 27,5 cm, RI-11964. Courtesy of the National Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia.
Gal Kirn is a research associate at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, where he leads the project “Protests, Artistic Practices and the Culture of Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Context” (2021–24) and participates in the programme group of the project “The Social Contract in the 21st Century” (2021–25). Over the last ten years he has worked in the German academic context (Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin, Humboldt University, TU Dresden, GWZO Leipzig, Akademie Schloss Solitude, WZB). Kirn’s research has focused on the theme of transition in socialist and post-socialist contexts, and he has been particularly interested in changes in the fields of art, politics and memory. He has written two monographs in English, Partisan Counter-Archive. Retracing the Ruptures of Art and Memory in the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle (De Gruyter, 2020) and Partisan Ruptures. Self-Management, Market Reform and the Spectre of Socialist Yugoslavia (Pluto Press, 2019). With Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri, he edited the book Nights of the Dispossessed. Nights of the Dispossesed. Riots Unbound (Columbia Press, 2021), and with Marian Burchardt he edited Beyond Neoliberalism: Social Analysis after 1989 (Springer/Palgrave, 2017). In 2012, he received his PhD summa cum laude from the University of Nova Gorica (Intercultural Studies of Ideas and Cultures). In 2005, he graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences and was awarded the Prešeren Prize of the University of Ljubljana for his thesis.
