Prešeren laureates for 2025

SLOVENIA, February 7 - Spoken word applies.

»Culture is the rule, and art is the exception.«

These words are taken from Je vous salue, Sarajevo, a two-minute film made by Jean-Luc Godard in 1993. Unlike the cigarette, the computer, the T-shirt, television, tourism and war, art is not defined by rules. Art is not mass-produced; it is created anew and comes to life anew each time. Even in besieged Sarajevo, where art meant future.

And what do Jean-Luc Godard and France Prešeren have in common?

Both were born on the third of December; each in his own century, of course. More than by cosmic forces, however, they are linked by exceptionality; but exceptionality in the sense of a discordance with the rules of their time and the rules of the medium in which they worked. Godard was interested in the materiality of film; Prešeren in the materiality of language. Specifically, of the modern Slovene language, which served him more as a medium for poetry than as a tool of identity.

What else can be discordant with its time? Not just art, but also cities: Srebrenica, Gaza and Mariupol.

War in Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century seems like an exception, since this is supposed to be a time of universal progress and permanent peace. But war is not an exception, and never has been in human history. Essentially, war is actually the rule. It is based on the banality of evil, which the oft-cited Hannah Arendt attributes to perfectly ordinary individuals. Individuals who, with no critical distance, follow social norms that are all too often instrumentalised from positions of power. And this is repeated throughout history, from which we have failed to learn anything.

The eighth of February is a national holiday for us, a ritual of repetition of material from our past.

Prešeren’s Baptism at the Savica Falls is essential reading that, among other things, defends a cultural autonomy that was once threatened by Christianising Germans.  For today’s purposes, its historical lesson should perhaps serve to identify contemporary cultural colonisers.

Slovenia’s national narrative is constructed on the threat to the Slovene language and the unceasing struggle to preserve it.  On the sixth of February 1986, this year’s Prešeren laureate Dragan Živadinov and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, inaugurated the Gallus Hall stage with a »retro-garde« event entitled Baptism Below Triglav, a performance that, rather than the literary language that is our symbolic national essence, pushed visual universal language to the forefront. In this way Živadinov broke with all prevailing interpretations of Prešeren’s Baptism at the Savica Falls and, as though to highlight this difference, named his creation Baptism Under Triglav.

This year’s other Prešeren laureate, Dragica Čadež, is an exception by virtue of her introduction of a female voice to the apparently universal language of visual art.  The fact that she has persisted as an artist for six decades – decades marked by tectonic shifts in cultural and political rules – already means a great deal. It is true that her sculptures grow from large pieces of wood, masterfully worked. Yet from today’s point of view, it is also significant that Čadež has pushed materials such as clay and ceramics – materials avoided by heroic “masculine” modernism – into the foreground.

Do materials speak? Does wood speak? Does clay? How do animals, plants and things speak?

The idea of post-humanism, which goes beyond anthropocentrism, is very present in contemporary art.  As is an idea of humanity that goes beyond Eurocentrism. This year’s Prešeren Fund Prize winners include individuals who give a voice to others: to refugees, nature, sounds and voices from unexpected directions. In a time of climate crisis, many artists are drawing attention to the crisis of modernity and showing where progress and constant growth have brought us. Art today advocates not only radical language but radical listening – listening to what we do not necessarily hear with our ears. This year’s winners also help us see beyond the visible. Today everything has first of all to be pleasing to our eyes. Image is what is counts: personal, corporate and political. Marketing experts say that an image has to convince us in the first three seconds.  How is this possible? Thanks to algorithms that rapidly identify what people like best: this new language that programmes what we watch and read and who we connect with online. Algorithms that dictate and shape our perception and expression and are thus writing alternative rules of culture.

And if, as Godard says, culture is the rule, it is more important than ever to ask today: Whose rule actually is it? Who or what shapes our aesthetic and ethical criteria?  Exceptions are increasingly disruptive, so algorithms erase them more quickly than any authority could: because they are built to reinforce the prevailing narrative. 

Yet history has always been driven by exceptions: both individual and collective. These include artistic exceptions that destroy the old and agitate or even shock. Throughout the twentieth century, this principle was known as avant-garde art.

What does avant-garde mean today? What is new, or groundbreaking? What breaks the rules? In our present age, where everyone has their own truth, and their own rules, it feels as though the symbolic order is crumbling. Politicians ignore international rules and trample on the rule of law. Industrialists release illegal quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Genocidal wars are being waged unhindered.  And no one faces any consequences for their actions. Where is the order here? And what kind of exception is art supposed to be in a reality that has itself become an exception – a kind of permanent state of emergency? Who could still be shocked today by the excesses of the avant-garde when excess has become the standard of behaviour of world leaders?

Some people say that the swansong of the avant-garde came in the 1960s. And that its only legitimate successor is the art of protest and political activism, art that operates outside institutions. But is it still even possible to operate outside institutions and outside the rules? Where is the dividing line between outside and inside, between art, politics and capital? Capital and politics have hijacked the language of art: they promote themselves through provocation, uncritical imagination and a non-binding freedom of spirit. What, then, is left for art? Provocation rarely shocks any more. Art is becoming increasingly inclusive, opening up space for the greatest possible participation in its processes. In this way it plays a part in creating our social fabric. This year’s prize winners connect with their environment while simultaneously exposing the broader mechanisms of social control.

They are not afraid that our national language will disappear. They are afraid, however, that it will become the universal translation of the abstract language of financial capital and algorithmic statistics, and thus lose its substance. We are faced on the one hand by the codification of our lives, the adaptation of our identities to a databank, and on the other by social networks that give us a false sense of freedom. Yet freedom is inversely proportional to our creativity for Facebook, Instagram and X.

This is something we can see today throughout Europe, where capital, in cahoots with reactionary forces, might cry “never again”, but only so as to drown out the voices of the hundreds of artists and cultural workers who over the last year, in a large part of the Western world, have opposed the genocidal war in Gaza.

But this doesn’t apply to Slovenia! We still dare to speak out. Slovenia’s cultural space still seems free and could even become a sanctuary for those who are unable to express their views clearly.  We could become exceptional again and once again be a true avant-garde on a global scale.

A Slovene avant-garde on the main stage of world history.