The crisis at the heart of the Slovak cultural sector deepened yesterday as representatives from different fields announced they had united to declare “the beginning of a strike emergency called the Cultural Strike.”
At a press conference close to the Danube in central Bratislava, the Cultural Strike’s organisers presented three core demands, covering “the provision of professional and competent management” at the ministry of culture, a “halt to ideologically motivated censorship” and the “immediate financial stabilisation of the sector, with an emphasis on improving the financial valuation of workers and their social security.”
Speakers at the event included Martin Šmatlák, the rector of Bratislava’s Academy of Performing Arts, and the Slovak National Theatre actress Jana Kovalčiková, as well as representatives of student bodies and workers at the public broadcaster STVR.
At the time of the announcement, nearly 1,300 people were said to have signed-up for the strike alert, with at least one person from each of 135 different cultural organisations said to be involved. The organisers said this included almost 250 people at the Slovak National Theatre (SND), 100 people at the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) and 68 people out of 220 employees at the ministry of culture.
In its first stage, the strike is intended to be an “alert”, during which there will be “no stoppage or interruption of work." Participants will be able to highlight their involvement by wearing clothes showing the strike’s logo and inscription, and by placing visual statements of support in work spaces, across social media and online.
While this first phase is not intended to impact artistic productions, the organisers say an “escalation of pressure” could later see direct public interventions, such as disrupting productions with “the sound of a siren, by reading out the strike demands in the middle of the production or during show times in museums and galleries, by switching off the lights and sound for a symbolic time… not only on stages, but also in galleries or museums, in shops and so on.”
Coordinated by the collective Otvorená Kultúra! (Open Culture!) platform, the announcement of the strike follows months of growing animosity between cultural workers and Slovakia’s right-wing culture minister, Martina Šimkovičová.
A member of the Slovak National Party, Šimkovičová has been in position since October 2023, when her party joined a new coalition government led by the populist prime minister, Robert Fico.
With many in the culture sector opposed to Šimkovičová’s policy interventions and her brand of social conservatism and staunch nationalism, a January 2024 petition, initiated by the well-known Slovak artist Ilona Németh, saw over 189,000 support a call for the minister’s resignation. Undeterred, Šimkovičová pressed on with her interventionist agenda, culminating in the dismissals of the directors of both the SND and SNG in early August.
Rather than succumb to government control, however, the sector has rallied, with many workers joining street protests reiterating calls for Šimkovičová’s resignation. With the cross-disciplinary, multi-generational unity of the protest movement notable from the outset, plans for a nationwide strike began to be developed at large scale meeting at the SND on 12 August.
Representatives of the Cultural Strike will now seek to meet with the chairmen of Slovakia’s governing parties to open negotiations, with the aim of creating “a culture that is open to all!”