VOINA

We work on the thin line between activism and art, this means that we don’t visit geriatric homes and don’t help the poor and weak, like the real activists do. We don’t propagandize Marxism and don’t have long talks about the hard lot of the labour class. Because we are from labour class ourselves. We are unqualified hardworking people, annihilating obscurantism, outdated symbols and repressive-patriarchal ideologies by means of laughter and contemporary art.

All our actions have political underlying messages, but we use art language only. We speak in images, symbols, which are mostly visual. We don’t use the language of political journalism. Politics is just a main theme of our works. In the current socio-political situation in Russia, an honest artist can’t be mute and make glamorous “masterpieces” for oligarchs, who decorate their “brilliant” dachas.

Despite attracting the support of “free-thinking” Russians across the country, VOINA and its supporters remain in a marginalized cultural position. The general public is often confused by their work (as Oleg writes: they are “usually either astounded, stare mute and stroke dumb, or very disturbed”). Not surprisingly, Russia’s cultural institutions have reacted with outright hostility to Voina.

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Gazprom

Башня. Зонгшпиль /// The Tower: A Songspiel from chto delat on Vimeo.

The city authorities in St. Petersburg intend to relocate a planned 1,299-foot glass-and-steel tower for the state energy company Gazprom, saying it has caused too much dissension among architects and residents for it to be built at the chosen site in the city’s historic center.

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Arcadia

Suburb (for example “Fall at Aracadia”) describes much better the actual state of contemporary outlying districs rather than other touted terms: Unlike civitas, exurbs are out (of civilization) or perhaps preceding (vorstadt) even against (anteurbanum). These word games reveal the deep meaning of suburbios, shelters that do not deserve to be named city because they want to be out of it, far from it and finally in opposition to it. There is not civic value in their foundation.

This is the scenario of X-file episode “Arcadia” where individual dissension is not compatible with community. It is denied because they seek desperately to imitate the appearance of paradisal lost Arcadia. The totalitarian aesthetics just becomes an arrange of forms publicly.

The monster of the week is a kind of Golem, a being made of mud, whose duty is to protect the purity of community by enforcing law strictly. Law is against mess that pretend to naturalness, eternalness and changeless: chained to earth (ironically Falls at Arcadia is built on a dump).

The communitarians set a reference frame to be subdued without discussion. I mean: they delegate the most valuable thing for an american, their freedom. In fact that is what they really fear.

Gated communities protect from the rest of world hygienically but, how protect a community from themselves?