Youth Center CK13 in Novi Sad, Serbia
“Youth Center CK13” is an independent and educative project dedicated to stimulation and development of social engagement and political activism of young people above all, which implies high degree of self-organizing and self-sustainability of youth activities and their independent political actions.
“Youth Center CK13” is established by three independent organizations from Novi Sad: Kružok, AKO – Alternative Cultural Organization and New Media Center_kuda.org. The project represents continuation of their common work on the problems of rightwing extremism, nationalism and xenophobia. Realization of the project is enabled by initial support of “Schueler Helfen Leben” foundation from Berlin, Germany.
“Youth Center CK13” has been initiated due to a dramatic lack of educational and media equipped youth gathering spaces in Novi Sad, which conceptually connects needs of youth population and which are accessible to them. Systematic unconcern of ruling structures for the development of both public and independent cultural and youth spaces in Novi Sad, from 1980's up to date, has primarily lead to devastation of those spaces, and thence to the marginalization of political and social engagement of youth in general. Today, every form of independent social engagement suffers significant pressure of instrumentalization, where under the plea of neoliberalism, its connection with specific and extremely narrow meaning of democratisation and with uncritically embraced mechanisms of economic normalization, is used as justification. Thereby, every activism in the field of culture, art, society and politics easily becomes co-modified and alienated from its fundamental meaning, as a potential for initiation of concrete and controversial social changes.
Precisely from that reason, “Youth Center CK13” is initiated, in order to create open space dedicated to public discussions, research projects, independent publishing, concerts, workshops and lectures, employing diverse methods of networking and transdisciplinarity. To that effect, CK13 represents integration point of different socio-political initiatives and their common work on exploring rightwing extremism in our society, (anti)-racism, (anti)-fascism and (anti)-nationalism, within the scope of the research centre, library and the archive of the Youth Center.
