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What is Tocka?
Tocka should become a
mirror image that would reject the cultural autism of the privileged
"national" centers.
Tocka
is a multifunctional space in a physical and contentual sense. There
is a librarian-bookstore part that develops a readership club, and
presents artworks by domestic and regional authors. Indeed, the
creation of this cultural center is an attempt to build a core
point, cultural and social urban nucleus in the capital where the
marginal and the mainstream production would match, intertwine,
confront and consent. Tocka should become a mirror image that
would reject the cultural autism of the privileged
"national" centers.
Tocka follows the concept that sustains discussions together
with thematic small exhibitions, presentations and projections. The
focus is put on the hybrid spheres and the results from the direct
confrontations between, let's say, art and theory, art and media and
their participation in the ideological and political construction of
the society.
Tocka is a place for conversations, a site for spreading of the
primary democratic culture of hearing and dialog; in spite of the
declarative claims for democracy, in fact there are so little places
where people could practice open and tolerant exchange of opinions.
One of the main activities in Tocka would be the regular
debate club, the so called alternative school for democracy, a kind
of forum for discussions, by which there might appear a model for
definition of the relations and intertwining among culture, politics
and theory in a wider social field. The end aim would be developing
of a "healthy" critical thinking which will stand contrary
to hegemonistic intellectual practice.
The main motive for doing this we find in the urgent need of
activating a hub of permanent and open polemics in art and culture,
in stimulating all kinds of alternative and non-institutionalized
thinking, in development of the mechanisms for creating and
maintaining communicative standards in the intellectual community
and it's more radical openness towards the society.
One of the reasons for creating the cultural center Tocka is
the attempt to wake people from the horrible apathy that has
occupied the country; we try to wake young and more educated people
in the society who are totally put aside and who prepare themselves
for exile. We try to do this by presentations of attractive,
contemporary and important themes which are not actual only for us,
and to do that on an authentic way, with the real knowledge of
"organic intellectuals", in the sense that Antonio Gramsi
gives to the word, intellectuals that have the feeling of power for
politics, for the social stratifications and manipulations and who
know that the knowledge often serves only to strengthen the long ago
established hierarchy in the society, and not for the
democratization of the society.
This project was funded by Foundation Open Society Institute -
Macedonia and by Swiss Cultural Programme Macedonia that has helped
out project for two years already.
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