Ekaterina Degot and David Riff introduce the project to the workshop participants, its institutional framework, and the logic of the workshops, and the role of self-organization in the project.
This workshop will be a show-and-tell with the students of the workshops after three intensive days of listening to contributions on the contemporary city. Students will present their works, leaving traces of them in the workshop room. 19.00 Presentation of workshop results.
Sergei Bratkov will hold a practical “fast reaction” workshop spread out over two days. The first part of the workshop involves a discussion, in the course of which a task is articulated, the second day the discussion of results.
Yuri Leiderman and Andrei Silvestrov will engage students in their ongoing project “The Birmingham Ornament,” explaining its presuppositions and involving them in the continuing work on the film. The workshop involves an picnic excursion/film shoot to the embattled Khimki Forest outside of Moscow.
Matthijs de Bruijne will hold a workshop on the cartography of contemporary Moscow in the eyes of two very different groups. One consists of art students, the other of maintenance workers employed at art spaces, many of them migrants from Central Asia. The workshops will generate psychogeographical maps of the city whose later superimposition will later reveal something about the contradictions at the root of contemporary art. Workshop language: Russian with translation.
Christian Von Borries will join hold a workshop on Moscow’s soundscapes and the possibilities for auditory interventions in an architecture no less regulatory and hierarchical than the physical buildings that surround us. The workshop will involve both theoretical readings and practical tasks, which will ultimately generate a new collective work, to be presented on the last evening. Workshop language: English.
The workshops with Julian Kutyła and Agata Szczęśniak from the journal and political movement Krytyka polityczna in Warsaw will address central questions: an individual, network, environment, social movement – what "glue" encourages cohesiveness of socially engaged people? Is it possible to move from a "emotionally motivated" informal group to a dynamic institution - with no loss of commitment, collective participation and spontaneity? On what principles the cooperation of dispersed social and cultural environments, artistic movements and “common cause organisations” should be based? The workshops aim to reflect on the possibility of bottom-up action within democracy by means of concentration of the engaged people and organisation of engagement, in order to create a better state, society, culture and art. We will think about what opportunities are given by the formalized activity and what limits this activity.We will discuss what kind of processes take place in informal groups, how to solve internal conflicts, and when joint activity loses its meaning. The workshop is aimed at students, social activists, culture managers, NGOs representatives and others interested in participating (group up to 20 people). The workshop will result in preparing materials for the Russian edition of the “Political Critique” magazine.