The title Truth Against Love suggests an intention to provide an unusual insight into the course of student strikes in selected art academies that took place at the end of 1989. The goal of the research is to throw a light on the significance of what happened in the given institutions and put it into the wider context of the nationwide student strike considered to be a distinctive moment of the so-called Velvet Revolution.
The take of the research shall be confessedly selective and interpretive. Instead of authentic testimonies of the participants, it shall focus rather on the “administrative” dimension of the students’ strike as mediated by period documents though acknowledging the complementary nature of these two forms of memory in the production of historical and political “truth”.
It was already in 1990 when a few of the leading actors of the student strike wrote a manifest that mentions “the stolen revolution”. They expressed this way their dissatisfaction with an insufficient investigation into events of November 17, 1989, and a frustration from moving the political struggle from the streets to the conference rooms. The Truth Against Love project does not pose a claim to “the stolen revolution” but tries to oppose what could be called the “privatisation of sense”.
It happened in Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic already in the 1990s and maybe even earlier hand in hand with gradual general delegitimisation of the state-socialist regime. After the initial enthusiasm of democracy and capitalism, the ideological vacuum that appeared after the myths of Communism disappeared was filled with a state of mind that Václav Havel labelled “the stupid mood”.
Fragmented and particular explanations offer, at best, only a complicated guideline of how to perceive the contemporary world, and, at worst, frustrating half-truths. As the later development shows, “the crisis of grand narratives” is not to be overcome so easily without succumbing to naive and potentially dangerous simplifications. Privatised sense cannot be reinstated. It needs to be seized.