The Youth Centre CK13 is an alternative and educational space intended to encourage and develop social engagement and political activism of young people first and foremost, entailing a high level of self-organisation and self-sustainability of young people’s activities and their independent initiatives.

The Youth Centre CK13 was founded by three independent organisations from Novi Sad: Kružok, AKO – Alternative Cultural Organisation and the Centre for New Media_kuda.org. The project is a follow-up to the common work of the three organisations on the problems of right-wing extremism, fascism, nationalism and xenophobia. The project has been realized with the initial support of the Schüler Helfen Leben  Foundation from Berlin, Germany.

The Youth Centre CK13 was set up due to the dramatic lack of alternative, out-of-school educational and media centres in Novi Sad that would conceptually connect different needs of the young and be open and available to young people in particular. The governing structures’ systematic negligence of the development of public and independent cultural and youth spaces in Novi Sad since 1980s has first led to the devastation of the areas, and then to the marginalisation of the social engagement of young people. Nowadays, every form of independent social engagement comes under significant pressure of instrumentalisation, where neoliberalism is used to justify its connection with a specific and very narrow meaning of democratization, including uncritical acceptance of the mechanisms of economic normalisation. Thus, every activism in the field of culture, art, society and policy becomes co-modified and estranged from its initial meaning, as a potential for motivation of specific and controversial social changes.

These are precisely the reasons why the Youth Centre CK13 was initiated, to use various methods of transdisciplinarity and networking to create an open space intended for public discussion, research projects, independent publishing, concerts, workshops and lectures. In that sense, CK13 is a point of integration of various social and political initiatives and their common work on researching right-wing extremism in our society, (anti-)racism, (anti-)fascism and (anti-)nationalism, within the research centre, library and archive of the Youth Centre.