“I'm going out!” (“Я выхожу!”) is what Raman Bandarenka wrote in the neighborhood chat group before leaving his apartment on 12 November 2020. He lived at the “Square of Changes” in Minsk – a courtyard amidst prefabricated buildings that had become a hotspot of the Belarusian protest movement – and wanted to see why masked “security forces” were there removing symbols of resistance to the regime. After getting brutally beaten and taken to the police station, the 31-year-old succumbed to the injuries later that evening. Thousands in Minsk bid farewell to Bandarenka with a funeral procession on 20 November, and “Я выхожу!” has since become a widely used protest slogan in the ongoing demonstrations throughout Belarus.
On 13 January, we presented “Your Past Is Our Future?”, a pilot of our programme “‘Я выхожу!’ – Berlin meets Minsk” with an online discussion on the current situation in Belarus. A big part of the further planned programme had to be postponed due to lockdown.
As part of the event series, a new issue of the magazine pARTisanka, edited by Tania Arcimovich, will be published in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer.