With technology rapidly evolving on one side and catastrophes and wars on the other – how far has our civilization really come? The answers can be found at DK Festival, which will return to Rovinj on 20-23 April.
If you are lucky enough, you are bombarded daily by images of the Apocalypse. Or you are, like many around the world, addicted to doomscrolling about recent catastrophes. Wait… how exactly are you lucky then? The thing that would truly make you lucky is the fact that you’re not among the millions hit by devastating catastrophes – from climate crisis to devastating floods and earthquakes – or brutal military attacks. Instead, our biggest concerns seem to be questioning whether our organic fruit is truly organic or if it’s worth investing in an electric car. These bizarre contrasts will be explored at DK2023 by a renowned philosopher Srećko Horvat in his talk Your Lips, My Lips, Apocalypse.
“One of the most exciting voices of his generation.” This is how the German weekly Der Freitag described Srećko Horvat, whose original texts can be read in The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. Horvat is a Croatian thinker and author of several books published when he was barely into his thirties, while nowadays he is known as a fiery voice of dissent in the Post-Yugoslav landscape. Aside from co-founding DiEM25, which campaigns to reform the EU into a “realm of shared prosperity, peace and solidarity”, he is a founder of the Subversive festival, an annual jamboree in Zagreb of radical thought.
If you aren’t familiar with Horvat’s work, you can probably recognise a lot of people who are. He is friends with the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and had regular visits with Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, an organisation that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. He is also a staunch friend of Slavoj Žižek, the maverick Slovenian celebrity academic with whom Horvat co-wrote a book in 2013 entitled “What Does Europe Want?”.
Even though our minds create different scenarios for Doom Day, questioning the rapid technological advancement, do we really know where we are headed? In his DK2023 talk Your Lips, My Lips, Apocalypse and a follow-up Q&A on 20 April Horvat will tackle our contemporary post-apocalyptic Zeitgeist and reality, various reactions to the End and dive deeper into the concepts of the supraliminal, Apocalypse blindness, commodification and fetishism of the Apocalypse.
We know you’re impatient to find out the festival schedule, so you’ll be happy to hear the wait is almost over. But we can tell you that Srećko Horvat will give his talk on the first day of the festival, prior to Edward Snowden’s talk.
Following Edward Snowden former CIA officer and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who will join the festival via video link; James Whittaker, evangelist, visionary, and rockstar of the tech world; Munise Can, a strategy expert from Highsnobiety who helps brands find new ways to matter; creative person of the year from faraway Japan Toshihiko Tanabe; the world’s leading authority on sextech Bryony Cole; Media.Monk’s Main Monk from the world’s biggest creative digital production agency Victor Knaap; Rory Sutherland, one of the most original thinkers in the advertising industry and beyond; the surrealist directing duo Vallée Duhamel; and now Srećko Horvat, a philosopher with a global following, the announcements of many more inspiring speakers are soon to follow.
Creatives, marketers, digital experts, media representatives and other communicators that want to be in the company of national and global industry leaders are welcome to find more information about tickets and join us at DK2023.