In early October 2024, I stood in the shadow of Mount Hum, the highest peak on the Croatian island of Vis, as dozens of European volunteers hauled stones out of the ground. A mix of American blues and buoyant Yugoslavian revolutionary music carried on the breeze. The air smelled like rosemary and rang with the constant smack of axe against stone.
“Is there a hammer over there?” a middle-aged Croatian man yelled at me. I shook my head as I walked to an outdoor kitchen to chop onions. Cooking was the only practical skill I could offer my fellow students at the Island School of Social Autonomy (ISSA), a project cofounded by the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat “that imagines, experiments with, and cultivates forms of knowledge production and sharing that go beyond traditional notions of education and its purpose.”
A red pepper sauce simmered on a camping stove under a chef’s watchful eye, but without electricity, it was taking hours to prepare. Lunch was going to be late. “Offer them wine,” Horvat said from his perch outside the school, a one-room stone building, and soon plastic jugs of a light red were decanted into tiny paper cups. Igor Mataić, a local expert in dry stonewalling, supervised people pushing wheelbarrows of dirt, from which small clouds of dust occasionally erupted. Others lounged on stony ledges or in camp chairs and checked the news on their phones: the Israeli army had bombed a road that Lebanese refugees were using to flee the expanding war; parts of Appalachia were flooded after Hurricane Helene; and, closer to the island, Croatia was militarizing its borders against migrants.
Vis is one of some 1,250 islands scattered in the Adriatic Sea, which separates Italy from the Balkans. The day before, I’d taken a roomy ferry from the coastal Croatian town of Split two and a half hours to the island, where ISSA was holding its second annual week of actions and philosophical debates. “To live together” was the theme of the gathering. Up on the mountain, participants were laying the foundation for an outdoor terrace beside the school. In the fishing port of Komiža below, there were panels, films, readings, and performances, all guided by questions of how we could survive and even flourish in the face of unremitting disaster.
It had been a summer of catastrophe in the Mediterranean: a heat wave in July; forest fires in Greece, Italy, Albania, and Bulgaria; in mid-August, the waters off of the Egyptian coast reached 89.53 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest temperature ever recorded; and across southern Europe, fish suffocated in too-warm lakes. Of course it wasn’t just the Med, although the area is warming at a rate faster than the global average—July 22, 2024, was the world’s hottest day on record. A sweltering heat dome blanketed the United States’ East Coast for six weeks. Daily news coverage of extreme weather events mixed with the climbing death tolls in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine. Apocalypse, as Horvat has written, was not some distant fever dream but the present we were already living through.
It was his clear recognition of our dire contemporary moment that sparked my interest in ISSA. I’d grown up in northwestern Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, alongside preppers before the term had been coined. Up the dirt road from my mother’s house was an underground bunker called Mount Weather, where the federal government could retreat after a nuclear attack. Those formative experiences must have stuck with me. Lately, from my home in Berlin, I’d been thinking about acquiring land in the mountains in case of emergency, and I had a running list of criteria: a natural water source, the ability to grow food, and proximity to a land or sea border.
Of course, this was just an idle, privileged fantasy. Reporting on manmade disasters has taught me that crisis can occur anywhere, and that most people usually do not have time—or the means—to flee. And yet in the fall of 2024, as Russia threatened to go nuclear, Trump’s reelection loomed, the world failed to meet global climate targets, and the United States sent Israel some $22.76 billion in military aid, everywhere I went, people were contemplating the same kinds of escape. I wondered if there were any varieties of survivalism that did not depend on retreating underground and leaving the rest of humanity to its fate. American publications were inundated with articles about billionaires buying islands, millionaires buying bunkers, a boom in disaster real estate, but clearly there was an urgent need for organizing post-catastrophe that did not rely on plutocrats or increasingly fascist states. Could we learn to fend not just for ourselves, but for each other? I had traveled to Vis in search of answers.
Freaks and Greeks
Srećko Horvat has long understood calamity as occurring on both the individual and structural level, having experienced it from an early age. He was born in 1983 in Osijek, located in what is today Croatia but was then Yugoslavia. At the time, his father, a liberal who held prodemocratic and free market views, was serving a prison term for political dissent. After his release, when Horvat was some six months old, the family received political asylum in Germany. But they returned to Croatia in 1991 when his father took a job as director of a state-owned factory, only for war to break out a few months later. “It was a weird moment,” Horvat reflected in an email. “Yugoslavia was already dead, but the majority of the population still didn’t believe it would end up in so much blood.”
It was not enough to have a progressive party in power in one country if the prevailing international order objected.
Against this turbulent backdrop, he got involved with community organizing, published punk rock fanzines, and studied philosophy at the University of Zagreb. When the Croatian government announced plans to increase college tuition, Horvat joined a movement against the privatization of higher education. Students occupied around twenty universities during thirty-five days of protests. Traditional classes were banned, but organizers held lectures and debates, a formative experiment in direct democracy and alternative education that Horvat took to heart.
In 2008, when he was twenty-five, Horvat and two friends founded Zagreb’s Subversive Festival, uniting radical left thinkers in the Balkans on the fortieth anniversary of the international student protests of 1968. Five years later, Horvat stumbled upon an obscure blog written by a Greek economist named Yanis Varoufakis about the Greek debt crisis that criticized the austerity measures imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Horvat invited Varoufakis, then based at the University of Texas at Austin, to deliver a keynote. It was there that Varoufakis connected with the progressive politician Aléxis Tsípras, who would be elected Greece’s prime minister two years later; a few years after that, in January 2015, Varoufakis himself gained notoriety as Tsípras’s finance minister, tasked with negotiating Greece’s second bailout with the EU and IMF, until European leaders forced him to resign.
For Horvat, who had just coauthored a book entitled What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents with philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Tsípras wrote the foreword), Greece’s ordeal changed his approach to politics. Even though Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected the terms for an EU bailout in a referendum, Tsípras ultimately accepted a package of blistering austerity policies. It was not enough to have a progressive party in power in one country if the prevailing international order objected. So, in February 2016, Horvat and Varoufakis founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a transnational political initiative with the goal of democratizing the EU, which they considered dominated by bankers and a technocratic elite. DiEM25 aimed to act like an umbrella for different political parties and factions craving a common platform. The initial DiEM25 manifesto called for full transparency in EU decision-making; redirecting its institutions to focus on crises including debt, migration, and rising poverty; and the convening of a constitutional European assembly to reform EU representational practices.
In 2019, DiEM25 decided to focus on electing progressives to the EU Parliament, one of two EU legislative bodies that also helps determine the EU’s annual budget. DiEM25’s strategy was to form a coalition with other progressive parties; their shared agenda was called “European Spring.” In Germany and Greece, DiEM25 ran their own candidates: EU rules stipulate you can run in any country where you maintain a residence, so both Horvat and Varoufakis entered the race in Germany despite being Croatian and Greek, respectively. Their campaign eventually reached Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, where I saw DiEM25 posters featuring Pamela Anderson, who had met the two organizers through Julian Assange, calling for a “Green New Deal.”
In May 2019, Horvat and Varoufakis received 130,000 votes in the parliamentary election, but they needed some one million to win seats. Still, Horvat was encouraged, considering that their budget had been hardly enough “for a moderate new German car.” He went back to coordinating DiEM25’s agenda, pushing for policies like a universal living wage and investing in a green transition. In those hectic years of bouncing from one European capital to the next, lobbying and coalition-building, Horvat began coming to Vis to clear his head. As he approached half a decade of political organizing, the prospect of an alternative school where people might learn practical skills and dream up radical solutions slowly took shape.
Three years ago, Horvat had a daughter with his partner, the writer Saša Savanović, and went on parental leave from DiEM25. He never returned. Instead, Horvat spent more time on the island, reading about other experimental education projects; Vis itself had hosted multiple illegal schools in caves when it was occupied by Italy during World War II. One day, he came across a remote patch of land with a crumbling, one-room stone house not accessible by car and without plumbing, sanitation, or electricity. “You had to either be a millionaire or crazy to buy the land,” Horvat said, laughing. Since he was neither, he conspired with two friends—one of them the actor Goran Bogdan—to turn the plot into an entirely self-reliant archive, seed bank, residency, and theater powered by solar panels. “In a world where everything is utilitarian,” Bogdan remarked to Horvat, “it is beautiful to do something which seems utopian.”
Horvat and his co-owners created a nonprofit and leased the land for ninety-nine years. But they needed help to realize their vision. Fortunately, they had come to the right place. For almost fifty years, Vis had been a Yugoslav military base closed to foreign travelers. When it opened for international tourism post-1990, its remote location and lack of development meant that it attracted a dreamier kind of visitor, like Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo, the artistic duo behind Mediengruppe Bitnik, whose projects often challenge power, surveillance, and capital. (They once successfully mailed a live camera to the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange was hiding out.) On Vis, Horvat and Savanović befriended Weisskopf and Smoljo; along with several others, including Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Norwegian designer Predrag Kolaković, they created ISSA, named after the island’s first Greek settlement.
The collective envisioned ISSA as both a physical space and a vehicle for cooperative thinking. First, the stone building, which had sat unused for sixty years, had to be restored. In early 2022, ISSA’s core group began reconstructing an on-site gustirna, a traditional water collection tank to conserve rainwater. They relied on in-kind labor and donations to pay for construction materials and supplies. That summer, they lugged some 450 sandbags and 45 bags of cement uphill. The group planted a hibiscus and a young cypress tree, considered sacred in the ancient Mediterranean, in front of the building. Along the way, they shared progress on their website, calling that summer the days of “happy Sisyphus.”
When it came time to design their public-facing symposium, ISSA drew inspiration from the Korčula Summer School, convened by Praxis, a circle of Marxist-humanist philosophers in Yugoslavia who launched a journal by the same name in 1965 that aimed “to deal with the current problems of Yugoslav socialism, of the contemporary world and man.” They were critical of what they saw as the persistent alienation of Yugoslav society, caught between market reforms and a sclerotic communist bureaucracy, and their school attracted luminaries of the Western left like Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. (In a darkly ironic turn, some Praxists would later become Serbian nationalists.)
ISSA’s goal, to “cultivate ways of living, learning and teaching together,” aims to protect humans and the planet as we head toward possible extinction. To that end, they nurture networks of communal, anti-capitalist self-governance, or what they call “archipelagos of autonomy.” Their questions range from strategic (“What forms of social organization and coexistence can we foster because of, or despite, the impending disaster?”) to more abstract (“How can we achieve a ‘good life’ amidst extinction, and what does ‘good life’ truly mean?”).
In 2023, ISSA hosted their first four-day conference, with zero budget; some fifty people attended. The following May, Horvat took to X to advertise ISSA’s second public symposium. In a short promotional video with a soundtrack of riotous cicadas, Pamela Anderson recites the words of the poet Tin Ujević, who traveled to the island in 1930:
I find myself in the deep heart of the deep sea. It was the fairies themselves who brought me here, on an unknown date when the globe fell asleep, and no one could see me. I am a part of the empire of adventures, a miracle of events. I finally experienced what the world has forgotten. And I became the owner of a mystery.
The week’s program was free, although visitors had to fund their own travel to the island. This time, ISSA had received a small grant from Anderson’s foundation to cover transport for the speakers. They were also awarded a €40,000 grant from the EU to trial a circular water system. The group was expecting maybe another fifty people. Instead, they got close to two hundred. Most were from Europe, although there was another American woman—also from Virginia, no less—and some even more far-flung guests, like the Brazilian architect-artist collective Aventura. “I didn’t think this many would show up,” Horvat said, mildly bemused.
Yugoslavia, Megoslavia
On my first morning on Vis, I boarded a bus in the port town of Komiža with around forty other people. Most wore hiking boots and carried water; the instructions noted that “we strive to build social autonomy, so the more self-organised you are, the better it is for our collective aspirations.” As we wound up steep inclines overlooking the sea, I chatted with a young Italian man whose family runs an agritourism business. They were attracted to ISSA because of their work with dry stonewalling and water conservation. His parents waved from their seats at the front. Eventually, the bus deposited us in an empty parking lot halfway up the mountain, next to a towering stack of long wooden planks. There did not appear to be anyone in charge, but even without instruction, people donned garden gloves, grabbed as many slats as they could carry, and filed onto a narrow trail heading uphill through dense shrubs and spindly pines. In the other direction was a path leading to a cave where Josip Broz Tito, fleeing the Axis powers in Italy during World War II, had directed the Yugoslav resistance. I balanced a plank on my shoulder and followed the crowd.
“We strive to build social autonomy, so the more self-organised you are, the better it is for our collective aspirations.”
Despite rain the night before, the ground was dry. Pebbles crunched under my feet. I was intently focused on the task at hand when an older painter named Aleka, who lived in a squat in Madrid and whom I had met a few hours earlier over coffee, chanced by. While we chatted, I forgot the plank was balancing on my shoulder. As it tipped toward the ground, I lost my balance and fell over. This opening exercise was inspired by a pillar of Yugoslavian socialism, in which self-managed workers built roads and other key infrastructure. ISSA aimed to foster cohesion through even simpler forms of manual labor. “When you carry a wooden plank or a stone together with someone, the kind of connection, the kind of trust which is created is much stronger than anything else,” Horvat explained. It also helps participants to imagine “a different mode of production.” After a fifteen-minute walk, I deposited my plank on a stone ledge next to a bent olive tree and entered the school.
Inside the dim, cool space was a growing library that contained everything from revolutionary magazines from the 1970s to books on the philosophy of education and donated sociology tomes. Symbols and icons dotted the walls: in a small nook was a bronze bust of Che Guevara and two burning candles, while signage for Komiža’s old fish cannery, the Neptune, sat on a shelf. On the wall hung a framed, original paper by the Austrian theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich, composed in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he ran a radical research hub called the Center for Intercultural Documentation from 1966 to 1976. “The university graduate has been inescapably schooled for selective service among the rich of the world,” begins Illich’s text.
Illich’s 1971 book, Deschooling Society, was a bestseller that made his name beyond the counterculture, but his 1973 primer Tools for Conviviality was most prominently displayed in ISSA’s library. In it, Illich warned of large-scale future catastrophes stemming from unchecked economic growth and industrialization. Technologies, he believed, had to serve communities and foster autonomy rather than prop up the credentialing power of institutions and the managerial class, which taught people to become desiring consumers and eroded their capacity for free thought and self-reliance. “The bureaucratic management of human survival is unacceptable on both ethical and political grounds,” wrote Illich, referring to technocratic solutions to ecological crisis that set limits on growth “just at the point beyond which further production would mean utter destruction.” As an alternative to this “managerial fascism,” he proposed the concept of “conviviality.” A convivial society would not only reject outright the gospel of industrial growth for its own sake; it would “guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.”
Development of Illich’s convivial tools is central to ISSA’s goal of helping people find collective ways to live through catastrophe. A library is one such tool. Inside the building was an anonymous offline file server that allowed participants to download a collection of forty-five free e-books, including two works by Illich. It also hosted a copy of UbuWeb, a digital collection of avant-garde art created by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. As the titles popped up on my phone, I became mildly giddy.
At the end of that first day, we filed back down the mountain as the sun sank, turning the hills a furry blue-green. Like most participants, I was staying in the faded, Soviet-style Hotel Biševo, which was built against a steep cliff and faced a curved, rocky beach with cerulean water. A former worker’s holiday resort, or radnička odmarališta, it was constructed during socialist Yugoslavia’s heyday, when it was considered the right of every worker to take a sea holiday. Once, it had bustled. Now, the lobby was quiet and dim, as though the hotel were asleep. Inside the rooms, the bed frames were eggplant purple, there was just one hair dryer for all guests, and only half the showers drained. No one seemed to care. Outside, people shrieked as they ran into the sea.
Yo Ho Ho
Standing on a hill overlooking the glassy Adriatic during his ISSA presentation, Marcell Mars felt like a preacher. “I look like effing Jesus,” he told me later. With his long, scruffy beard, mischievous eyes, and spider web hand tattoo, he really looked like a pirate. Mars was here to talk about Memory of the World, the project he cofounded with commons and disability activist Tomislav Medak that creates “shadow libraries” using software Mars developed to save books from censorship, paywalls, and other existential threats. (Their name appropriates a UNESCO initiative that preserves the world’s documentary heritage; while their archive currently lists some 496 entries, Mars’s boasts 159,121.)
Technologies had to serve communities and foster autonomy rather than prop up the credentialing power of institutions and the managerial class.
For Memory of the World, a truly public library is not a government-run institution, which can be decimated by funding cuts; instead, it entails “free access to books for every member of society,” or hacker-created libraries. “With book piracy, it’s not only that something is possible—we can make Alexandria again,” Mars, whose real name is Nenad Romić, told an audience assembled on dirt ledges outside the school. “We can make everything we want available to everyone, and in that sense, everyone could do it. Everyone can be a librarian. If everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere.”
Mars is also a core member, along with Medak and Valeria Graziano, of Pirate Care, both a concept and a network that “stands against the criminalization of solidarity and for a common care infrastructure.” Pirate Care believes that neoliberalism has repurposed, rather than dismantled, the welfare state, turning basic care infrastructure—like health care and housing—“into tools for surveilling, excluding and punishing the most vulnerable.” One way to challenge this system is to operate in gray zones, or outside the law, if it means saving lives and ensuring access to basic needs. For example, intellectual property rights are worth breaking to recreate a medication that is prohibitively expensive or unavailable in certain markets.
Pirate Care opposes what they call “purity activism.” Instead, the trio focuses on concrete actions, however small. “We don’t have a large plan to topple the system, but that doesn’t mean we can’t destabilize the system,” Graziano said at ISSA. The collective draws on the work of David Graeber, who they knew personally. Graziano paraphrased the late anthropologist: “Care is anything we do that helps the freedom of another—in the sense that their freedom is our freedom.”
An Italian cultural theorist and organizer with coiled auburn hair, Graziano met Mars and Medak in the UK, where they lived together for several years. In 2019, they held a writing retreat in Rijeka, Croatia, with a dozen other activists to draft a Pirate Care Syllabus, inspired by the #FergusonSyllabus and #StandingRockSyllabus. The resulting document laid out the movement’s organizing principles: “Caring labour needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.” But it is also full of practical instructions, like how to extract hormones from human urine or build a collectively run kindergarten. The group had plans to further develop the curriculum in 2020 on the island of Cres before Covid struck. Interest in the concept exploded as people struggled to access medical services at the height of the pandemic. In early 2025, Pirate Care released a book of the same name with Pluto Press.
Although I’d never heard the term, examples of Pirate Care are plentiful in Europe: organizations like Sea-Watch, who began running their own rescue ships in the Mediterranean when the EU ended search-and-rescue operations for refugees, and Women on Waves, a ship that docks in international waters to provide abortion care near states where it is outlawed. (Both are mentioned in Pirate Care, although not necessarily affiliated.) Many of these groups have been viciously targeted by countries in the EU, their members surveilled, and in some cases imprisoned. Mars himself was facing a lawsuit in Canada, but he seemed entirely unbothered, having been raised in socialist Yugoslavia, where the sacredness of private property was not a given. “We are not in that sense impressed by like, ‘Oh you shouldn’t do that,’ or ‘There is a border’—ballash!” he said with a grin.
In the middle of my time at ISSA, Graziano and Medak hosted a workshop that asked us to imagine our own forms of Pirate Care under pressure. (Mars was on child care duty.) Attendees had to create a plan in the event that the island was suddenly cut off from the mainland. “Can we eat the carob tree?” wondered one woman, pointing to the flowering branches that stretched overhead. As we discussed water, translation, and the rationing of medical supplies, there were few disagreements; but then, we were surrounded by like-minded people. Still, the exercise felt useful, reframing the future not as a series of cinematic endings—the world going up in flames—but of specific scenarios that we could prepare for, if not prevent.
Vis Me Deadly
As the week went on, I spent my time in Komiža attending readings and discussions. Silvia Federici, the Italian Marxist feminist, called in on Zoom from her living room in Buffalo, New York. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the Italian philosopher, taped a lecture on the genocide in Gaza. There were readings with poet Marko Pogačar and novelist Rumena Bužarovska and 3D printing classes from Luka Vlahović and Marina Andrijašević, who live on Vis. Mediengruppe Bitnik taught us how to build a pirate radio station, or low-range FM transmitter.
“Care is anything we do that helps the freedom of another—in the sense that their freedom is our freedom.”
As I wandered through Komiža’s backstreets between sessions, I saw posters in Croatian for ISSA everywhere, but I wasn’t sure how many of the island’s 3,600 locals, especially those who were not artists or philosophers, were engaged in the conference. Previously, ISSA had organized acting workshops on Vis for kids, and for the 2024 symposium, they invited local poets and performers to participate, including at a solidarity reading for Palestine, where most participants from the Balkans read in their own languages. Still, outreach did not always mean that islanders could actually join in. I asked the waitress at a bustling lunch bistro if she’d attended any of the sessions, but she shook her head. “I worked until midnight,” she replied, tilting her head toward a group of lively European tourists at another table who’d come to the island for an electronic music festival. “I have to be back here at 7 a.m. I wish they’d all go home.” Attending a speculative, weeklong symposium—even a free one—was a luxury many could not afford.
Vis used to produce 57 percent of all the tinned fish from the Dalmatian coast, but after the fall of Yugoslavia, the island’s ten fish canning factories were privatized, and the industry collapsed. In the last decade, thanks to depopulation and the arrival of luxury tourism, Vis has changed drastically once again. The sequel to Mamma Mia! was filmed on the island in 2017, and now the ports are crowded with yachts every summer. Horvat lives on Vis for roughly half the year and is cognizant of the risk of perpetuating inequality between outsiders and the island’s year-round residents. In Poetry from the Future, he is withering about opportunistic developers who present their intentions as essentially charitable: “Every now and then, certain self-styled ‘saviours’ from Europe who descend on Vis try to convince these hard-working people that they are here to help them save the island.” Yet ISSA is still trying to figure out how its own project can create community both locally and globally.
Another night, I met a man in Komiža who worked remotely for Greenpeace. Many of the locals, he told me laughing, thought Horvat was nuts to buy the land up on the mountain. Horvat didn’t seem to mind. ISSA is still in its infancy, an ongoing experiment. “I think this is really a long-term project to which I’m committed after I die,” he said.
Islands in the Stream
On the fourth day, I walked to the Church of St. Nicholas for Horvat’s revolutionary tour, highlighting the island’s World War II-era history. Fascist Italian occupiers arrived on Vis in 1941. They unfurled posters of Mussolini from balconies, banned Slavic languages, and took control of the fish canneries to feed their troops. They were not prepared, however, for the resolute opposition of the islanders, whose resistance mirrored that of the broader Yugoslav Partisan movement, which, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was the largest resistance force in occupied Europe.
Dressed in a black button down, gray jeans, and sunglasses, backlit by the late afternoon sun, Horvat looked more like a celebrity than a guide, save for the tiny mic and yellow speaker dangling from his neck. As he stood at the top of the church’s stone staircase, his voice boomed over the crowd. The tour began in the church cemetery, at the grave of Nikola “Top” Marinkovic, the son of a fisherman who, on the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1942, scaled the church’s fifty-meter bell tower to raise a red partisan flag with a hammer and sickle in protest of the island’s occupation. The nineteen-year-old was gunned down in Komiža’s twisting streets. Horvat described his death as a “sign from the future” that freedom was possible—a year later, Mussolini’s regime collapsed—and a call for even greater resistance in the present.
As we headed to the port, we passed fishing boats parked sideways on the shore and the once-industrious Neptune factory. A young man driving a tractor pulled over to listen as Horvat recounted the cannery’s history and how, during the occupation, workers had swapped oil for chemicals to sabotage machinery. In the golden light, everyone glowed.
The tour ended at the Lady of the Pirate church, three interconnected buildings under wedged roofs located just a few steps from Hotel Biševo. An island legend said the church, which faces the beach, was once the site of a pirate shipwreck. It was also a haven for 37,000 European refugees fleeing Dalmatia during the war, many of whom were women and children. By 1944, Vis had become the headquarters of the Partisan Army, but the island could not accommodate such a large group, and the Yugoslav Liberation Movement asked the Allies for help resettling them. The refugees were transported on ships to El Shatt, a camp in Egypt’s Sinai Desert, where they lived until 1946 in mostly self-organized communities.
For Horvat, this forgotten moment in history demonstrated the hypocrisy of the EU’s increasingly closed-door policies toward people on the move. As darkness fell, he paced, his shadow large from a spotlight against the pale wall. Faced today with the greatest refugee crisis since World War II, with an untold number seeking asylum in Europe and more likely to follow, the story of Vis carried an important lesson, Horvat said. “Namely, refugees were fleeing from Europe to Africa.”
His comments touched on one of the challenges for the Island School: figuring out how their project intersected with wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and other conflicts to which the EU and the West had contributed material support. The week’s program included the solidarity vigil for Palestine, where funds were collected for a Palestinian relief group, but this was not enough for Jerko Bakotin, a well-known Croatian journalist I met on the revolutionary tour. “What does solidarity concretely mean?” he asked during a closing reflection session. “It’s not clear what we aim for.”
When I arrived to interview Horvat at Hotel Biševo’s pizzeria toward the end of my time on Vis, he and Bakotin were locked in a fierce debate over whether ISSA could achieve its goals without discussing ways to improve material conditions for the world’s majority. Bakotin wanted to focus on the survival of those who are not living on real or metaphorical islands. Horvat contended that there are already plenty of spaces for these discussions, including the DiEM25 movement, and fewer to build and share practical, convivial tools. He did not want to turn ISSA into another World Social Forum, nor a school exclusive to seasoned activists with a certain vocabulary—although he did commit ISSA to future participation from refugee-led organizations. As the two men smoked and argued, dipping in and out of their first language, obviously familiar with each other’s weak points, I found myself agreeing with both of them.
In a subsequent piece about ISSA for Novosti, a Croatian weekly magazine based in Zagreb, Bakotin wrote, “If the ISSA organizers are serious about the proclaimed abandonment of the current state, national, and capitalist modernity, even at the experimental level, then serious thought should also be given to concrete and convincing alternative models of mass identification based on the interests of the majority. This search is dirty, difficult, and often boring work.”
The Island School, with its roots in the former Yugoslavia, is well-suited to the search for future modernities. After all, this was a place that had sought to transcend the form of the nation-state, only to see it violently reasserted.
The Island School, with its roots in the former Yugoslavia, is well-suited to the search for future modernities. After all, this was a place that had sought to transcend the form of the nation-state, only to see it violently reasserted. Vis, as Horvat pointed out, was not just the headquarters of the Partisan resistance during World War II but the sole liberated island in a sea of occupied ones. After the war, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created. Led by Tito, it united some six ethnic groups across 98,766 square miles of land. Initially, it was a counterweight to the authoritarian state socialisms developing elsewhere; while imperfect, Yugoslavia achieved a high standard of living, universal health care, a 91 percent literacy rate, and a vibrant, state-supported arts scene. In 1961, before Tito’s autocratic turn, he founded the Non-Aligned Movement with India, Ghana, and Egypt, seeking an alternative to the U.S.-USSR divide and self-determination for the developing world. At its height, the Non-Aligned Movement had the second largest state membership of any grouping after the United Nations.
But Yugoslavia ultimately succumbed to a rising tide of ethnonationalism amid the collapse of Europe’s communist projects. In the early 1990s, after Tito’s death and the rise of leaders like Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, the federation broke apart, with devastating consequences. A decade of war and ethnic cleansing left over 140,000 dead.
The Age of Unsettlement
The future of the nation-state was most explicitly addressed at ISSA in a talk by Madina Tlostanova, a professor of postcolonial feminism at Linköping University, Sweden. She referred to the present moment as an “age of unsettlement.” For her, unsettlement is not only a physical reality—such as when someone is forced to leave their home—but a psychological and epistemological condition. Pointing to a future of mass migration due to climate change, as well as her own history of statelessness as part of a Circassian-Uzbek family in the USSR, Tlostanova asked: “Is it possible to not normalize the unsettlement, but to learn to live with it in a generative way?” She wondered if we could use unsettlement as a starting point for developing alternative forms of organizing society.
By the end of the week, discussion around how to bring these dreams into being remained largely theoretical. My experience at ISSA was characterized by a tension between utopian thinking about as-yet-unrealized radical change and the urgent forms of disobedient care, like those practiced by the Pirates, necessary to assuage suffering and injustice in the present. But mentioning them in the same breath was a start. Having seen the often grim, institutional, and inhumane conditions in which people who are forced to flee, or choose to migrate, live in across continents, I thought of the distance between their circumstances and the mobility enjoyed by those of us who had traveled to attend ISSA. How could we reconcile the modesty of what we’d learned with the enormity of the task ahead? I didn’t leave with an answer.
Horvat, however, is focused on a different timescale. He wrote in an email, “When you’re on Vis, especially uphill at the School overlooking other islands up the coast of Dalmatia, you can see that both nation-states and capitalist modernity are a rather recent invention only a few centuries old, and could as well soon be past.” In Poetry from the Future, he discusses the importance of pursuing new possibilities without knowing where they might lead: “To act now means to create the conditions for our own future, not to follow the already written script from the past: it means to produce a crack in the present, a disruption in the imposition of capitalist temporality, the rhythm of power.” After my week on Vis, it seemed that ISSA’s most useful contribution was not its physical school or its imparting of practical skills, however generative, but its ability to expand the vision of its participants. “The new world, if there’s going to be a new world, will not be bursting out of our head, like Minerva out of the head of Zeus. It will be the result of a long process of experimentation,” Federici said in her livestreamed lecture. ISSA could not reach everyone, but nor was there just one right way to live in a collapsing world; there were, rather, an infinite number of possibilities, some of which might be germinated on Vis.
My last night on the island, there was a closing party planned on a beach outside Komiža. But when we streamed outside after the last artist’s talk, rain was falling in sheets; thunder cracked in the distance. I stood with a cluster of other conference-goers waiting for the rain to end. It didn’t. Horvat and the other organizers had disappeared. Some people headed back to the hotel, while others embarked on a journey to an unclear destination. I pulled on a plastic poncho and followed them down a dark road, past a cliff I could barely make out in the darkness. The sea was only a sound.
I considered turning back and going home to sleep: I had a 4 a.m. wake-up to catch the ferry and make my flight home to Berlin. I hadn’t transcribed any of my notes yet, and there was an ache in my neck from sleeping on a bed not my own. But I kept going, as if pulled by an invisible cord. We walked around one bend and then another. I slowly became aware of electronic beats that seemed to synchronize with the crashing of waves. A cove appeared. Along the rocky beach, there was a bar built into the cliff, complete with DJ and strobes that shimmered on our wet ponchos. Everyone looked half-human, half-siren, dancing against the black and endless water. I couldn’t tell if it was the end of the world or the beginning of a new one.