Every year, with even regularity, I say "never again". And every year, I swear that’s true. And
every time, the next year, somehow, I find myself back for another Faki Festival
in Zagreb.
This year (the 5th for me) will be a little different from the normal – I am joined by Lithuania’s superstar critic Monika Jašinskaitė, and we
will publish edited
versions of dialogues every day of the festival. These will replace my normal review/diatribe format. Dialogues should probably be more
popular than they are as a way to write criticism – I know for me, I’ve never
pretended my view is authoritative, there is always a (visible or invisible) counterpoint.
We hope to bring useful, provocative discussion to these pages over the next
days.
Faki 22 takes the theme of ‘Inequality’ – a theme that,
whilst it dominates people’s material wealth and life circumstances, rarely
gets attention corresponding to its defining position. The reason why is up for
debate. Too hard? Too negative? Too much chance that it might have a real
effect on something? Take your pick. It’s a holding pattern that creates one of
the paradoxes of our contemporary situation in developed countries, that as
things get even more precarious, leadership creating the precarity grows in
strength.
The view of the neighbouring Westin Hotel, from the courtyard of the former medical factory Medika - host of Faki Festival 22.
The big recent exception was, of course, the Occupy and related
movements of 2011-12, where inequality came to the forefront of public
discourse, and certain inalienable truths – like 26 humans holding over 50%
of the world’s wealth – began to become widespread. Off the back of this,
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2012) presented, not for the
first time but perhaps in the right moment, the argument that inequality was
reaching a point where it was becoming the major hurdle to the continuity of capitalism
itself. Together with accumulated pressures, inequality, and our collective inability to address it, likely pushes us into territory where extreme choices must be made.
