Conference Introduction | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
by Maks Valenčič & Claire Elise
Transcription
Maks Valenčič:
Thank you all for joining us in this mini conference, Becoming Ljubljanastrophe. It's really nice to share this event with us. And, before we start, I just want to say big thanks to Tisa Troha for the amazing cover for this event. To Andrej Škufca and Ivan Slijepčević for securing the place for the event. To Lea Sande for all the encouragement and help along the way, to Valerija Intihar for the help with communication and PR, to Dušan Dovč for letting us use this place for these few days, and, of course, to the Kult.co students collective for being a part of this event. And of course, last but not least, Claire and Polymnia from Becoming Press, because the idea of this conference came from you guys, and we really appreciate that you decided to come to Ljubljana and make all of this possible. So big gratitude for that as well.
Before we start, I just wanted to read a few paragraphs just to give you a better feeling of what we were thinking through when organizing this event. Something has been taking shape in Ljubljana that has not yet received a proper name or institutional canonization. This something has been provisionally named Becoming Ljubljanastrophe. Šum journal has invited Becoming Press from Berlin and the local Kult.co student collective to jointly organize a two-day mini-conference. Special thanks goes to Open Secret collective for making it possible to screen the OS film in Ljubljana for the first time.
The name has a genealogy. Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together — Sadie Plant and Nick Land's distinction, sharpened by Amy Ireland into a theory of form as occult technology, then inherited and mutated by Šum #14 under the name Ljubljanastrophe. What the name marks is a shift in cultural production: the future no longer simply arrives — it begins to reorganize the present from within. Across two days, we will bring together voices engaging with philosophy, theory-fiction, psychoanalysis, internet culture, digital metaphysics, and media theory in order to ask what kinds of conceptual and aesthetic forms become possible once the internet is no longer treated as a novelty, but as ontology; when "cyberspace" is no longer a metaphor, but an infrastructural unconscious; and when the virtual is no longer elsewhere, but the very texture through which contemporary reality is composed.
Claire Elise:
I would also love to reiterate the huge gratitude for everyone who has come here today, and to the people that have helped us organizing this, from Šum to Izhodi to Kult.co. It's really nice to see you all here and to be here.
This is our second time trying to do a conference. We started this kind of practice of getting out into the real world, per say, last year, just at the beginning of 2025. So we had already been kind of operating online for two to three years before we actually kind of got the confidence to start getting out of the internet itself and into the physical space. So, given that we have this kind of history of working solely on the internet, and we even at some point were branding ourselves as a kind of net publisher, as if the main thing that was organizing our workflow was the kind of structures of the internet, when we started to get invitations to come out and give presentations, first of all it was in Lisbon, and then we did something in Venice, and then we did this tour with Exocapitalism — frankly, we were just really surprised that anybody was showing up, and we understood that we had maybe been putting too much emphasis on the internet and actually missing out on the fact that one of the main interesting things about the internet is that it can actually directly influence what is going on in real physical spaces. It's one thing to be able to project voices and projects and ideas through the internet, but it's another thing entirely to use the internet to overcome immense social sort of struggle, because, again, the situation that we're in with the internet and so on can be really kind of divisive and produces this kind of constant individuation.
So for us, it's been a really rewarding experience to get out there and realize that there's people that are interested in what we are doing, and realize that we have so many like-minded friends all around the world — that means that we can go to Venice, we can go to Ljubljana, we can come to Vienna, and we can find people that we have a lot of common ground with. So I just wanted to say that as a way of saying thank you so much for encouraging us to get out of our comfort zone. So thank you for being here.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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