2 June, 18:00-19.30 Goldsmiths, Richard Hoggart Building, room RHB143, in-person, registration link
CIIP is pleased to invite you to a book launch of “Politics of Surfaces: Transformation of Public Space in Post-Communist Sofia” by Neda Genova.
What does it mean to examine post-communist politics through the prism of the material and semiotic transformations and modifications of surfaces? A rethinking of surfaces as dynamic and complex sites opens a path for a detailed study of their crucial role in the governing of post-communist urban space - but also of the forms of subversion that can be discerned through interventions on and with surfaces. The book explores a set of surfaces - Wall, Monument, Electricity Boxes, Memes, and Paving Brick - to investigate the kind of political engagement they enable and foreclose in post-communist Sofia, Bulgaria. The examination of each of these sites draws on an array of interconnected theoretical propositions, pertaining to surfaces’ conceptualization as temporal, fictitious and relational objects engaged in the production of political meaning.
Politics of Surfaces brings critical cultural and media theory, philosophy, and post-communist studies into conversation with each other, allowing for a two-fold political and theoretical intervention. On the one hand, it intervenes in existing scholarship on surfaces by demonstrating the stakes of their politicised understanding as complex spatio-temporal objects. On the other hand, it permits the crossing of disciplinary boundaries in the field of post-communist studies (usually reserved for area studies approaches). This involves a rethinking of some of the common presumptions about the post-communist condition such as its apolitical character, the governmental logic of temporal belatedness and the dominance of a memory studies approach for the analysis of post-communist transformations of public heritage sites such as monuments.
The book launch will take place on 2 June, 18:00-19:30, at Goldsmiths, Richard Hoggart Building, room RHB143. Starting with Neda introducing the book’s themes, there will be brief responses from Olga Goriunova, Louis Moreno and Sasha Anikina before opening to general discussion. There will be drinks afterwards.
You can order the book here. There will be copies available at the launch.
Neda Genova
Neda Genova is Lecturer in the department of Film Studies, University of Southampton, whose interests centre on developing interdisciplinary methodologies in research and teaching; the politics of post-socialist transformation and in particular aesthetic practices of commoning. She’s interested in probing out collaborative methods of knowledge production in and beyond academia - as in the context of the edited volume Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons(Institute of Network Cultures, 2025). Her writings have appeared in Time & Society, Journal of Visual Culture, New Formations and others.
Olga Goriunova
Olga Goriunova is professor at Royal Holloway University of London and author of Ideal Subjects, The Abstract People of AI (2025), Bleak Joys, Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility(2019) and Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2012).
Louis Moreno
Louis Moreno is a writer, lecturer, urban theorist and music producer. His work investigates the cultural modalities of financial capitalism with a critical focus on the spatial aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and electronic music. He is currently a Research Fellow and PhD Supervisor in the Department of Visual Cultures and Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sasha Anikina
Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina is a media theorist, artist and organiser who investigates infrastructures and technology imaginaries through feminist technoscience and critical theory. She is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Technocultures at the University of Southampton and co-director of Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group.