March 29, 2016, 6 pm
Zpace (Al. Sciusev str. 103, Chisinau)
Participants: Mihai Gotiu, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Alexandru Vakulovski, Vitalie Sprinceana
The city of Cluj has become within the past few years the capital of activism in Romania. In Cluj started the protests from 2012, which provoked the fall of Boc government, and one month later thousands of people from Cluj went to the streets against ACTA. In Cluj there was formed the civic opposition against the mining project in Rosia Montana, which led to the great protests from Autumn of 2013, and the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Cluj who went to the streets in the Autumn of 2014 in order to protest against the violation of the right to vote of the citizens in diaspora have generated the wave that changed over night the results at the presidential election. In Cluj people go constantly to the streets for forests, against the shale gas, for the rights of the Roma community or for saving the willows on the bank of river Somes.
But few know that the recent history of activism in Cluj began and developed first around the battle for public space. For Cluj, public space issue has been extremely important and it is still is. A whole generation of activists involved in the enumerated causes and in many others took part in this battle for the public space (taken over in the 90ies and at the beginning of the 2000ies by the nationalist symbols of Funar).
Journalist Mihai Gotiu from Cluj, author of the book “Fools!” (in which there is presented the history of this phenomenon) will present briefly the activism in Cluj, how it began, its great themes and motives, its ways of mobilization and organizing.
oberliht
