Le Festival mondial de la jeunesse et des étudiants, moment d’échanges inattendus et mal contrôlés
The World Festival of Youth and Students, A Moment of Unexpected and Poorly Controlled Cultural Exchanges

Summary/Abstract: The study shows that the World Festival of youth and students, one of the most important sporting, cultural and above all ideological events in the 1950s, represented a real heterotopia of the communist world, a contradictory, paradoxical space, a discontinuity that interrupted, at the time of the event, the apparent normality of the ideological order. The Festival represented a small space of globalization, promoting dialogue and real exchanges between the politically regimented youth of the East, the youth of the West, living the beginning of the long sixties, and the young people arriving from the third world, who experienced the decolonization process. The international exhibition of visual arts opened as part of the Festival, that too, should have illustrated the ideological unity of the Communist world, revealed the cultural diversification which manifested after 1953 in the Eastern bloc. The article offers information on the participation of Romanian artists at the Festival, on the topics preferred by the Romanian institutions and on the relationship between youth, the creativity of the artists, and ideological issues.

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