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somewhat deflated about the level of progress, or
lack thereof, in the intervening years? Do you have personal political allegiances? We agree that Eastern Europe needs to change more and for the better. However, we are conscious that this kind of discourse is liable to perpetuate other ideas that we try to oppose with the journal: that Eastern Europe is lagging behind, that this region is forever under construction, that the West needs to liberate it from its own perils and constraints. In this context, we considered the commemoration of three decades since of the fall of the Berlin Wall as the perfect framework to critically explore the struggle of post-communism with the last issue. And touching upon similar themes, we choose to focus on the idea of periphery with our forthcoming volume, asking ourselves: how has the region dealt with its own condition of marginality? – Can you discuss some of the visual projects which accompany these series of essays in Kajet Journal? What is the balance between submission and commission? We start every issue with an open call, where we welcome as many angles and perspectives on the main topic. Upon structuring them in several chapters or ideas, we discover gaps that we try and fill in with new material. For this, we contact writers and artists that we appreciate and that work in the field or cover the subject matters that we feel are missing from the issue. – You look at an array of aspects such as counterfeit culture, the appeal of porcelain in 1980s households, Teknivals (free parties) - how important is the lens of culture for your academic explorations? We consider culture to be the first layer of interest that we try to explore through our publication. There are also articles on politics or economics or philosophy for instance, but these are often tackled from a cultural premise. We choose to focus on the cultural realm because it can reveal broader manifestations of power that exist in our contemporary society. Power that is often hidden, but a kind of power that subverts and divides. – What excites and deflates you most about Eastern Europe at the moment? It has to be the sense that we are lacking alternatives. And here we are referring to alternatives of all kinds, not just political. It seems that our society has accustomed itself to a primary mode of operation, to a self-perpetuating system and a recurrent discourse. The youth of today know that change is needed (again not just political but also social and economic), yet the existence of any alternative on the horizon does not seem likely very soon. In terms of excitement, it is this idea of being able to work with a rich history, full of interesting traditions and customs, imbued with personal histories and narratives, and naturally this makes Kajet a process of documenting and archiving the past. – You both run Dispozitiv Books in Bucharest also. How important is the ease of access of international journals and ideas to your creation of Kajet Journal? We returned to Bucharest initially with the idea to open a bookshop, but lost ourselves in the bureaucratic and financial tangles of it. So, we started Kajet and given the (arguably) successful feedback we received with it, we received this much needed encouragement to continue our initial ambition. We saw that people are interested in such editorial projects, we got to know people who know and constantly read publications that unfortunately cannot be found in Romania. So we took it upon ourselves to fill in this gap. It is certainly an intricate process of educating the local audiences, but we are learning with them. – How has it been received by the political classes? What’s next for you? We don’t think that the journal managed to burst our bubble of people and enter new worlds, let alone be received by the political class. To a certain extent this is a struggle that we have. How do we end up popularising the project even more here, in Bucharest and across Eastern Europe, how do we end up democratising the knowledge that we think is so valuable for the region. In terms of the future, we are now working on two new projects – an archival platform seeking to unearth Romanian printed matter published between 1947 and 1989 and to revamp our website and focus more on the production of interviews. Both these separate projects will also exist as two separate books that will come out by the end of the year under our new publishing venture, Dispozitiv Books. Issue No. 2 (On Utopias) and No. 3 (On Struggle) are available at kajetjournal.com, €20 69