«A post of trust» (interactive performance)

On this evening participants of the artistic community will gather to give one another the opportunity to publish a “post of trust” on their accounts.

Participants of this performance will entrust their accounts to another participant for publication and be granted the trust of another participant. In the process, the immaterial laborers and creative workers of Petersburg will attempt to stop acting as “managers of their own selves” and sharing self-absorbed links, enticing advertisements, and tiresome appeals. Instead, they will partake in a “pragmatic” experiment in disrupting communicative conventions. Such an exercise in written desubjectification will not only firmly bind the members of the artistic community with aleatoric, textual ties but will leave an imprint of the presence of the speech of the other in the history of profiles.

Renouncing the private ownership of the ever-more-profitable public utterance and strategically destroying any clarity about “who is speaking,” participants will therapeutically experience the “death of the author,” so necessary for contemporary poetry. At the same time, they will begin to speak “with final directness,” that original goal of the lyrical utterance (after all, this will be both the first and the last thing written from the other’s account). Inspired by meta-Marxism, the battle with private ownership of the means of spoken production, in this way, becomes akin to the strategic destruction of the author and the mediated production of contingency, both of which are required by the logic of the artistic avant-garde. This will allow the participants of the experiment to be convinced that they have nothing to lose but the passwords to their accounts.

• ProArte Institute, S-Petersburg (2015)
  With support of Goethe Institute in S-Petersburg on the eve of the cultural symposium  «The Sharing game. Exchange in Culture and Society» (Weimar, June 2016)
•  KulturSymposium Weimar, Weimar (2016)

«Crowd speaking» (video-installation)

If communism in its written forms teaches us to trust one another, communism as a spoken form teaches us interdependence. Leftist literary figures share their perspectives on the contemporary situation of literature and exchange ideas about how it might be reconstructed in the future. Participants of the dialogue, “Leftist literature” from [Translit] #15-16 articulate their own positions, but in the voices of other, often polemically disposed participants. This experiment in exchanging signs and organizing the spontaneous subjectivity of the utterance aims to show the extent to which positions within a culture are marked by a mutually divergent character and are organized on the basis of the internal politics of literature. But it also attempts to demonstrate the extent to which our views as a whole are indebted in their construction to the speech of the other.

Participants: Kirill Medvedev, Eduard Loukoyanov, Galina Rymbu, Nikita Sungatov

Camera: Kirill Adibekov, Sergey Yougov

Sound: Anton Kyrushev

Curator of the project: Snezhana Vinogradova

Venues:

• ProArte Institute, S-Petersburg (2015)
  With support of Goethe Institute in S-Petersburg on the eve of the cultural symposium «The Sharing game. Exchange in Culture and Society» (Weimar, June 2016)
• Audiatur Festival, Bergen (2016)