Could you start by describing what the Inspiration Forum is?

The Inspiration Forum is the festival’s discussion platform. Although the core of the forum is formed by discussions, we’re also including other formats, organizing workshops, and publishing a podcast. And in all that we do, we strive to  find possibilities for a more just world in which freer people can live. We want the forum to be a lively debate on contemporary issues that’s open to everyone. This year, for the first time, we will fundamentally disrupt the traditional form of the forum with a participatory gathering that will conclude the six-day forum programme, including a discussion on the good life by festival-goers, IF performers and the general  Jihlava public.

This year's forum will focus on food, space, water, communities and artificial intelligence. What do these topics have in common? What is the meta-theme or motif of this year's IF?  

This year, more than ever, we want to emphasize interconnectedness – not only how current crises and their solutions are related, but also the importance and inevitability of both interpersonal relationships and those with the more-than-human world. We think it’s  stimulating to illustrate this interconnectedness on topics both near and far from human beings. While food is the most ordinary part of our daily lives, a thing as close as can be to what we associate our bodies with, the universe is distant in space and, for most of us, in thought; artificial intelligence, in turn, is alien to us through experience, we do not understand it, and though it is a human creation, we imagine it in opposition to humanity.

And which topics are you personally looking forward to the most, and why?

I'm looking forward to a day about space. I'm always struck anew by how much the universe affects our daily lives on Earth, and I'm looking forward to hearing from astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker, who is addressing what some of humanity has been puzzling over for ages - what life is and where it comes from. She moves at the frontiers of knowledge in physics and argues that life should not be considered as a binary in the categories of animate - inanimate, but rather as a continuum, ranging from chemistry to technology. He explores how new laws of physics could rewrite some of our ideas about what it is to be alive and how we think the universe works.

What would you like this year's Inspiration Forum to inspire the audience and performers? 

Every year I hope that the Forum inspires mainly to open up – to other people, to new perspectives, to unusual experiences and to new experiences. Of course, IF has an agenda; we want to find solutions to contemporary crises that grow out of the values of justice, solidarity, respect and care. But in this search, we try to be as open as possible and not cling mindlessly to the emancipatory prescriptions of the past. 

But lately, I also increasingly wish that all of us on the forum would draw hope alongside inspiration. We don't exactly live in times of hopeful prospects, and the problems we are dealing with are very serious and often unprecedented. But there are solutions (even if only partial) to them - and they hold the seeds of a better future. May the Forum inspire us to look forward to the future!