The World Is Upside Down, but the Books Are in the Garage

A discussion and roundtable on reading, media revolutions, creativity and democracy as part of the Think Tank Train project.

European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorica and the Complexity Festival, as part of the Think Tank Train project, announce a new stage of the festival, presenting the Ljubljana Manifesto on Higher-Level Reading, which has played a prominent role in this debate over the last year and a half. The meeting will take place on Wednesday, 12 March 2025, at 18:00 in the Grand Hall of the SNG Nova Gorica.

At 18:00, there will be a meeting of the co-authors of the Ljubljana Manifesto, questioning the role of reading in contemporary societies. The world seems to have fallen off its hinges. Do we need such upheavals to move forward, or do they pose a threat to creativity, civil liberties and freedom of speech? How are social upheavals and media revolutions connected? How are democracy, science, art, critical thinking and reading at a higher level connected? And how is something as seemingly archaic as reading books connected to all this? Is it time to say goodbye? Or are they part of the solution to problems that seem insurmountable? The participnts are:

• Adriaan van der Weel, Professor at Leiden University,
• Andre Schüller Zwierlein, Director of the University Library of Regensburg,
• Miha Kovač, full professor at the University of Ljubljana and co-curator of the guest country programme at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2023.

The Manifesto presentations will be followed by a roundtable on the role and importance of book reading at 19:30, featuring:

• Vesna Milek, journalist at Delo and Sobotna priloga, columnist and one of the most widely read Slovenian writers,
• Dan Podjed, writer, anthropologist, senior research fellow at the Institute of Slovenian Ethnography of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and associate professor at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana,
• Anja Intihar, reader, journalist at Delo, winner of the 2024 Outstanding Journalistic Achievement Award,
• Jaka Gerčar, researcher in reading publishing, currently working at the Chamber of Book Publishers and Booksellers at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry,
• ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence tool that pretends to be human and has all the answers.
• The round table will be moderated by Miha Kovač.

Photo: Jernej Humar