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Galántai, György is an artist, researcher, cofounder of Artpool, art director of the Artpool Art Research Center and curator of Artpool’s website. From 1963 to 1967, he studied painting at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest. From 1970 to 1973, he was the initiator and organizer of semi-legal exhibitions, actions, and happenings in an unused chapel in Balatonboglár, which he had rented from the Catholic Church; his Chapel Studio was finally closed down by the police. Subsequently, Galántai’s artistic activities were restricted and tightly monitored.

In 1970, Galántai abandoned painting and began to experiment, primarily with graphic art, visual poetry, sound poetry, and performance and mail art. In 1975, he created his first metal sculptures. He has also made prints, paintings, kinetic and sound sculptures, actions, and performances. He is the author of several multimedia installations and communication projects.

His view of art bears close affinities with the spirit of Fluxus, defining the task of art as inventing conceptual objects, creative situations, and spiritual spaces. In spite of this, the idea behind the Artpool project is to create an active archive: the way in which it operates also generates the material to be archived. As an artist, Galántai was already involved in the mail art network when Artpool was founded, so the network offered a natural framework for this kind of operation and provided sources for growth. Artpool issued calls, organized events, released publications, and extensively documented the events of the local neo-avant-garde scene. The active archive concept can be seen as an open artwork in itself or an activist kind of art practice.

During the socialist era in Hungary, Galántai organized underground exhibitions, so he was considered a “dangerous element” by the authorities because he allegedly spread western propaganda. He was monitored by the III/III department of the State Security Services, who opened a dossier called “Festő” [Painter], which focused solely on his activity. In 1998, he made public the content of the dossier on the internet: http://www.galantai.hu/festo/default.html.

Galántai, György received a fellowship from the DAAD in 1988/89 and was guest artist at Arizona State University in 1990.

Ștefan Gane (b. 1924, Bucharest, d. 1988, Paris) was a Romanian architect who asserted himself in the Romanian exile in France from 1985 when he set up in Paris the International Association for the Protection of Monuments and Historic Sites in Romania. This association was established in order to present to political decision makers and international public opinion the project of the communist regime in Romania for the destruction of Romania’s architectural and urban heritage. The actions taken by this association focused on dissemination of information on the demolition of the city centre of Bucharest, as part of the project devised by the authorities of the totalitarian regime in order to reconstruct it according to the communist architectural vision. Ștefan Gane was joined by a series of personalities of the Romanian exile community who, together with him, wrote letters and memoirs to Western officials (for example, to the President of France, François Mitterrand), to international organisations such as UNESCO, and to the editorial offices of foreign publications. They also organised protests in the streets of Paris, the goal of which was to inform and mobilise public opinion in the West to such an extent as to trigger an external intervention to hamper the destruction project planned by the Ceaușescu regime.

Prior to his emigration to France, Ștefan Gane worked as an architect in his hometown. In Bucharest, he started to express his dissatisfaction with the communist regime in 1977 after the earthquake, which served as a pretext for the destruction or mutilation of many historic monuments. His dissatisfaction was related to the Bucharest systematisation programme of the Ceaușescu regime. Against this background, Ștefan Gane started to pursue a cultural opposition activity directed against the arbitrary policy of the Ceaușescu regime aimed at annihilating an essential part of the national past. In this connection, between 1977 and 1985, when he emigrated to France, he secretly photographed a series of historic monuments that were destroyed or mutilated by the Communist authorities. His purpose was to preserve the memory of some national heritage monuments and gather testimonies for future generations about the Ceaușescu regime's policy of transforming the urban landscape and destroying what did not fit the communist vision of national heritage. After settling in Paris, he publicly and openly expressed his views on the demolition project devised by the Ceaușescu regime. He died of cancer in Paris in 1988, and was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, where a number of prominent personalities are buried.

His activity, however, was continued by a former colleague from the Faculty of Architecture in Bucharest, Sanda Budiș, who joined his actions from 1985 to 1988. On 10 May 1988, she founded the Association for the Protection of Villages, Monuments, and Historic Sites in Romania based in Switzerland. Among other activities, this association dealt with the establishment of partnerships between Swiss and Romanian villages, which were organised by Opération Villages Roumains (OVR). OVR was founded in December 1988, in Belgium, with the purpose of adopting and saving all 13,123 Romanian villages, which, according to Ceaușescu's announcement, should have disappeared from the map. The OVR action managed to take on a considerable scale in just a few months, with the creation of committees of this association in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Denmark. Basically, OVR followed an already existing model in postwar Western Europe, aiming at creating partnerships between localities with a similar economic and geographical profile in order to create local development opportunities through joint efforts as well as transnational solidarities. Although there had been partnerships with localities in Eastern Europe, OVR was without a correspondent in the Communist bloc, considering the magnitude and speed of its evolution.

Hristo Ganev (1924 - ) adopted the communist views at young age and became a member of the Labour Youth Union (LYU). During World War II he participated in the communist resistance movement and was the youngest partisan of the Chavdar Brigade. After the establishment of the new authorities, Hristo Ganev was among the young people who were sent to the Soviet Union for training in the field of cinema. In 1954 H. Ganev graduated in film dramaturgy from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow. His graduation work as a script-writer was the biographical film about the life of Nikola Vaptsarov "Song of Man" (1954) (director Borislav Sharaliev). The movie was assigned, one of the first of the nationalized in 1948 cinematography. The aim was to create an epic and monumental idea about the poet – worker and communist. The film was screened though there were also negative reviews on the part of the censorial bodies: although the film was mainly made up to the standard of the aesthetics of the time, the script-writer and the director tried to present "the poet in more intimate and human light" (Станимирова 2012: 63).

The second half of the 1950s and the 1960s were a time when bright talents in every field of the culture were blooming; at the same time, the pressure of the authorities on the intellectuals was increasing. The movie "Life Flows Quietly By..." (1957) directed by Hristo Ganev's wife, Binka Zhelyazkova, was banned by a ministerial decree. The long story of the discussions of Hristo Ganev's script (initially called "Partisans" but later renamed "Life Flows Quietly By...") shows the mechanisms and institutions of censorship in socialist Bulgaria. The following joint films of the director Binka Zhelyazkova and the script-writer Hristo Ganev also posed inconvenient questions to the authorities about the moral crisis, the exchange of communist ideals for high party positions and everyday life comfort and criticized the search for enemy amidst your own ranks, the conformism, and the compromise.

In 1971, Hristo Ganev and the writers Blagoy Dimitrov, Valeri Petrov, Marko Ganchev and Gocho Gochev refused to uphold a telegram written by the Union of the Bulgarian Writers (UBW) stigmatizing the Nobel Committee for awarding the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Because of their clear stand, the four members of the Bulgarian Communist Party were expelled from the party and the non-party Blagoy Dimitrov was expelled from the Writers' Union. They were all banned for five years from working; that was a period during which Hristo Ganev earned his living by shooting advertising productions for the television. Yet Hristo Ganev remained true to his ideals; his joint films with Binka Zhelyazkova ("Life Flows Quietly By...", "We Were Young", "The Swimming Pool", "The Big Night Bathe", "On the Roofs at Night") are steeped in faith in the idea to which they had devoted their youth and in sorrow for the idea having become mercenary. In their movies, the two artists clashed views and moral values and exposed the moral degradation of the system and the use of power for personal benefit. Their films are distinguished for vanguard directorial decisions as well as for dramaturgical construction with strong dramatic characters, bright and memorable situations, impressing details.

Hristo Ganev has rendered great services to the development of the animation cinema as an ideological and graphic paradigm. In his animation scripts, Ganev treated the "theme of the moral crisis and the maze in the time of the socialist imperative of the "active positive character". Using the symbolic language of the conditional, non-linear, fragmentary and suggestive building of the plot, absolutely free of ideological matrices he was able to express his view on the meaning of life, on the decline and betrayal against the ideals." (Матеева 2014) The expressive vision was mainly achieved with the help of the director Anri Kulev.

During the entire period of state socialism, Hristo Ganev was notable for his work as well as for his civil stand in defence of the freedom of speech and art; he publicly supported banned works from various spheres of the culture; he declared against the repressive measures against the intellectuals by directly accusing the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

After the political changes, Hristo Ganev continued to treat in his animation scripts themes that interpreted existential problems of the modern man: freedom and compromise; the damages caused by the consumption force, egoism and complacency eroding the value system; love and loneliness. Even today, Hristo Ganev's films find public response and win great recognition.

After the political changes, Hristo Ganev received a series of (state) awards (Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Bulgarian Cinema and Culture of the Ministry of Culture, 2007; Stara Planina Order, 2010; honorary diploma and the St. Paisii Hilendarski Annual State Award, 2011; Ivan Vazov Medal of the Union of the Bulgarian Writers, 2014). One could not forget Hristo Ganev's speech when receiving the Paisii Hilendarski Award: "My long and variegated life during monarchy, socialism and democracy taught me to meet punishments and awards with slightly skeptical distance. I know that often they were both undeserved." (by Дончева 2014: 37)

Filmography

-           Man's Song (1954), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev

-           Two Victories (1956), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Borislav Sharaliev, Veselin Hanchev

-           Life Flows Quietly By.../ Partizans (1957), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

-           We Were Young (1961), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

-           Feast of Hope (1963) Documentary, directed by Hristo Ganev

-           Devil in the Church (1969) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Ivan Veselinov

-           The Little Man (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov

-           Hypothesis (1976) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, director Gencho Simeonov

-           The Swimming Pool (1977), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

-           The Big Night Bathe (1980), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

-           Bagpipes (Gayda) (1982) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev and Nikolay Todorov

-           Safari (1984) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           The Merry Rascal (1987) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           Beggarly Trio (1988) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev

-           On the Roofs at Night (1988), scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Binka Zhelyazkova

-           The Tender Monster (1994) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           The Tenth Circle (1998) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anna Haralaptieva

-           The Slim Man (2001) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           Poet and Pegasus (2003) Animation, Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           The Rag (2007) Animation, scriptwriter Hristo Ganev, directed by Anri Kulev

-           Love With Rain (2015) Cartoon, Hristo Ganev scriptwriter, directors: Asya Kovanova, Andrey Kulev

János Gasner was a legendary guitar player of the underground scene. He played in Art Deco, Sziámi, and Európa Kiadó, and after the regime change he remained an artist of great importance in alternative culture. He was also a graphic artist and designed several posters for underground bands. For some time he made his living from graphic design. Gasner was also involved in samizdat production in the 1980s. Gasner was attracted to the flamboyant figures of the underground, whom his friend, performer and artist László Lantos “Tricepsz” defined as “urban Indians,” like Bada Dada (Kisbada), Pillangó, or Dixi, memorable people of the scene, excessive in their exhibitionism and bizarre in character. By contrast, Gasner is described as a calm, moderate person. Some call him the Hungarian Ian Curtis (Joy Division).

Joachim Gauck, a Protestant theologian, worked for many years as a church functionary in the GDR until he became part of the Civil Rights movements, joining the New Forum. Thereafter, he was named Chairman of the special People’s Assembly committee charged with overseeing the devolution of the former Ministry of State Security. Following German reunification, the Federal Government tasked him with securing, administering and researching the records of the State Security Service. Until the year 2000, Gauck held the office of Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. From 2012 until 2017 he was the eleventh President of Germany.