COURAGE

savienojot kolekcijas

The Study Centre for National Reconciliation in Ljubljana was established in May 2008. The Centre is a government institution working under the Ministry of Justice. Prior to the establishment of the Centre as a separate scientific and research institution, it operated as the Sector for Redressing of Injustices and National Reconciliation within the framework of the Ministry of Justice. The Centre was established with the intention of researching the totalitarian systems that existed in Slovenian territory in the 20^th century – fascism, national socialism and communism. Given that the fascist and Nazi repression in Slovenia has been more explored, the Centre primarily focuses on researching human rights violations in the communist era.

The Centre conducts scholarly and research projects, the first of which explored the revolutionary violence of communism in Slovenian territory. Currently, the Centre is carrying out a project based on an interdisciplinary approach which deals with the history of violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms in the 20^th century. The Centre collects testimonies from victims of World War II and its aftermath and tries to make the general public more familiar with these stories, ultimately influencing the enhanced awareness of democracy and human rights in Slovenia.

Substitut is a Berlin-based production company and picture agency whose projects mainly focus on sub- and counterculture in the GDR. Their main emphasis is punk.

In 2005 Substitut organised the exhibition “Too Much Future” that gave an in-depth look at the topic punk in the GDR. It showed how countercultures can develop in a dictatorship, which influences they exert outside this counterculture and with which repression its members had to fight.

The exhibition eventually developed into a multi-media archive which is named “Substitut” too. The archive incorporates private and professional documents, mainly from the 80s. Those include music-recordings and movies as well as files from the Ministry of State Security. It also contains extensive graphical material like posters, flyers, photographs, and paintings.

Summa Artium was established at the end of 2003 by the Soros Foundation with the aim of boosting sponsorship and support for the arts from the corporate and private sector and to promote the cause of arts and business partnerships and private support for the arts in general. In Hungary, profitable companies are legally permitted to devote up to 80 percent of the taxes on their profits to theatres and orchestras, paying only the remaining part to the state. Summa Artium mediates between the business sector and the art sector for 5 percent of the amount of the support given. The non-profit Foundation originally was meant to fill the gap the Soros Foundation left when it had ceased operating in Hungary.

In 2003, when Soros practically terminated the Hungarian Soros Foundation, András Török was a member of the board of curators. Soros then expressed his desire to keep a spinoff organization of the Foundation, and he provided a relatively modest sum for its launch. There was no one, however, with a plan to lead this organization until Török came up with an idea inspired by the London-based charitable organization Arts & Business, which mediates between the cultural scene and the private sector. Though Soros was skeptical about the model, he let it launch. The original budget was quickly spent, but the non-profit foundation manages to operate from market incomes.

In Török’s assessment, in a world in which the slogan "Big is Beautiful" was the defining paradigm, launching a non-profit foundation in order to help smaller projects survive demanded a nonconformist attitude. Summa Artium never received any state support, and Török is proud of this, as in Eastern Europe state involvement often involves symbolic or actual corruption. The Foundation is currently looking at possibilities to enhance community funding of the cultural sphere.

The Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies was founded in 1926, concurrently with the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Many outstanding Ukrainian scholars have worked during the Soviet period and after independence in 1991, including Jeremiah Izenshtok, Agapy Shamray, Sergy Zubkov, Mykola Syvachenko, Fedir Pogrebennik, Mykhaylyna Kotsubynska, and others. Research in the department focuses on working with manuscripts that are kept in the institute’s repository. The Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies collects manuscripts and archives of Ukrainian writers, catalogues them, and sometimes prepares these materials for publication. At the moment, the department has the biggest special collection of materials on Ukrainian literature. In 1999, the institute published a finding aid of its collections, and publishes annually a list of processed materials that updates the institute’s holdings. This institution has the status of a national heritage repository, and thus receives funds from the state to ensure its facilities are up to date.