The Cultural Vanguard of Workers’ Movements: A Social History of the East Central European Avant-Garde between the Two Wars
UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER
—— Dance of the Machines (the cogwheel scene). Performers: Klári Erdélyi, Ágnes Kövesházy, Ödön Palasovszky, Anny Bíró, and Kató Angel. Published in 100%, 1928.
The ProletGard ERC project examines how workers’ movement culture and avant-garde artistic techniques fused in East Central Europe. The project explores how this avant-garde-inflected counterculture shaped the collective imagination and everyday practices of working-class people. It addresses the following questions:
How did ideas, images, and practices crossing linguistic and political borders contribute to the formation of a workers’ movement counterculture in East Central Europe and beyond?
What new reading practices and forms of performance emerged within this milieu?
And how did this environment become a space of conflict, negotiation, and transformation, particularly where avant-garde artistic ambitions met everyday working-class realities?
#LECTURE
Gábor Dobó Presented Lecture on Proletarian Avant-Garde Periodicals in Prague
26 May 2026
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#CONFERENCE