Free space

March 7th 2019
Artists who enjoy the privilege of not having their art being questioned as labor can commit to improving the welfare of all artists by using their privilege to make a stand for fellow art laborers who have not attained this status.

The Italian writer Erri De Luca on the global South as the source of the future, on the European nightmare and on writers as a partisan vanguard of a new EU. A statement.

January 10th 2019
When we build coalitions that combine social justice and equality we reassert the possibilities of organizing more democratic digital societies.

November 5th 2018
Nothing can guarantee freedom – not algorithms, artificial intelligence, or human beings. Freedom is something we negotiate with ourselves and our surroundings on an everyday basis against a horizon of unlimited, but unattainable ideals.

October 11th 2018
Freedom and responsibility are directly related – but we often do not care to admit it. Those who desire freedom without assuming responsibility run the risk of restricting the freedom of others as much as they do their own. Freedom is therefore charged with preconditions.

September 14th 2018
A guarantee of sovereign power over your own body has so far been more utopia than reality. A utopia that is much more in danger today. 

August 21th 2018
It is above all civil society that is qualified to ensure, and indeed responsible for, the future of freedom in Europe. This responsibility cannot and must not be delegated blindly.

 July 26th 2018
The concept of peace has not been lost so long as people who carry it in their minds, on their lips and on their flags and helmets understand it as a hope for a possible, binding and uniting co-existence.

July 5th 2018
The struggle for economic, political, cultural and gender equality and liberty must be consistent, constant, adequate to each context individually, and needs to create a sense of belonging, unity and emancipation.

June 16th 2018
The democratizing forces at work in Europe are offset by nationalisms, racisms, and exclusions, so that the promise of a post-fascist Europe reveals itself to be a missed appointment with history.

May 16th 2018
We can listen more to art and literature, because they promote empathy and understanding and act therefore as a protection against totalitarian currents.

April 17th 2018
Freedom and equality are a question of the financial viability of social security systems. European countries should focus more on their core competencies of culture, science, research, ecology and social integration for positive economic development.

April 5th 2018
A democratic, social and solidly united Europe without borders still remains a utopian dream that we must all work to realize.

March 14th 2018
From a historical-cultural point of view, what connects us Europeans are the great civilizations that we have built together, which have left a very important identity heritage to all of us.
 

February 27th 2018
Freedom is a common space that has to be filled by all who inhabit, enliven and narrate it. We must find our way towards a common position, or find our way back to one.

February 20th 2018
To me, freedom means recognising responsibility and the ability to grasp that freedom is not anarchy.

December 4th 2017
Political developments in Poland since 2015 are often described as a national conservative revolution, as a sudden authoritarian about-turn. But Karolina Wigura, a sociologist, journalist and historian of ideas, disagrees: in her view, the policy of the governing PiS party was laid out much earlier. A specific post-communist configuration has given rise to a brand of populism that could develop in many other European countries – unless we learn to listen to one another again. An essay on the roots of Polish post-communist populism.

Karolina Wigura

December 5th 2017
Freedom is an omnipresent concept that is increasingly degenerating into a marketing tool. Philosopher and theatre director Mériam Korichi, "Freiraum" partner of the Goethe-Institut in Paris, is attempting to fill it with substance. She examines its ambivalences, with stopovers in the history of theory with Spinoza, Hobbes and Rousseau - and ultimately ends up on the road to autonomy. An essay

By Mériam Korichi

Neoliberalism wants people to serve as ultra-flexible performers, the new fundamentalisms want fixed, Procrustean identities. Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch talks about the pressure to achieve creative personal fulfilment, about the selfie culture, the two-way movement* of freedom, and about love and art.

October 16th 2012
In this essay, David Cole, formerly professor at Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C., expounds an American liberal view of the ever-contentious issue of free speech. He makes a compelling case against any attempts to regulate free speech by law and for “tolerance for the intolerant”. Cole is convinced that hatred and hate speech cannot be equitably and effectively combatted by “empowering the state to limit speech”, but, on the contrary, by protecting everyone’s right to express their opinion, however offensive it may be to others.

By David Cole