The Missing Emotion: A Psychosocial Study of Hope and Post-communist Art in Times of Polycrisis

In this paper Magda will be presenting excerpts from her new research project which studies hope as a precarious emotion that is potentially missing or in crisis.

Feeling hopeful in modern societies means to feel through narratives of progress and to desire, whether consciously or unconsciously, a better future. But can hope survive in a world in which the future is no longer the place of imaginary wealth and wellbeing but the site of inevitable catastrophic damage to earth and democratic infrastructures?

Magda argues that this latent crisis in the emotional landscape of modern societies is deeply worrying for with hope disappears society’s concern for the good, for ethics. At the same time, she sees the current crisis as an opportunity for discovering subversive texts or narratives, and with these, alternative formations of being hopeful in hopeless times.

More specifically, this research project studies artists and artistic communities in post-communist sites. It looks at these sites as an undervalued archive for studying experiments with practices and narratives of hope during times of extreme socio-political transition and disorientation.