2+2 Practicing Godars / 2+2 Практикуя Годара или История семинара "Общежития" from chto delat on Vimeo.

A film by Chto Delat /// Что Делать фильм, 2009

I was inspired to make this film after the police forced me to delete video footage of the OMON raid on our seminar in Nizhny Novgorod. I was struck by their brazen confidence that they could erase things from people’s memory as easily as you can delete a video image.
This film is meant as a response to their challenge. It shows that we can not only document the crimes of the authorities for posterity, but also shape our own space of interpretation. We can recreate our own histories, in which the deeds of the police will be remembered as shameful acts against society. —Dmitry Vilensky

materials for the screeenplay

Editorial

In these pages, we (artists, researchers, activists) try to rethink the experience of collective creative living here and now. Living for the sake of knowledge, art, and action.

Here we describe and elaborate a method for working with reality. The general method applied here, in this newspaper, was first tried out in kitchens, in blogs, and on the streets.

Most of the texts and drawings in this issue were not only created collectively. They were also lived collectively—for nights and days on end, together. These include:

• The collective hunger strike of our Petersburg comrades, inscribed in the historical moment by their radical interpretation of this experience.
• The production of a new activist film. It re-enacts and ponders the thrilling events of the collective experiencing and socialization of leftist knowledge in our communal seminar in progress.
• The wave of protest actions in support of a Novosibirsk artist.
• The resolution to write a collective political communiqué.
• Engagement instead of escapism.

This method is applied by merging all these elements into a single juncture in a particular place, into a concrete historical moment that we have collectively experienced and acknowledged, and by analyzing this moment in medias res.

This chronicle attempts to place several events that impacted our coalition of activists, artists, and thinkers during May 2009 within the broader context that generated and shaped them. We might have begun our chronicle of this “merry month” much earlier—for example, in July 2002, when the first version of the Russian federal law on “extremism” took effect. We should at least return to the equally “merry” autumn of 2008, when the Interior Ministry’s organized crime unit was reformed as the Department for Extremism Prevention, the so-called Center “E” whose operatives have played a key role in many of the events we mention here. This reform took place amidst public avowals by high state officials that they would not allow “extremists” and other malevolent forces to take advantage of the growing world economic crisis to “destabilize” the country. The past autumn and early winter were also marked by a wave of attacks on Russian social activists (e.g., Carine Clément, Alexei Etmanov, Mikhail Beketov) that culminated in the murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, in January of this year. Meanwhile, in what might be seen as another salvo in Russia’s “history wars,” the Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office raided the Memorial Society’s Research and Information Center in Petersburg on December 4, making off with hard drives containing archives on the history of state terror in the Soviet Union. While that case ended, in the spring, with a court victory for Memorial, other episodes of police and prosecutorial abuse did not. Anti-fascist Alexei Olesinov was convicted by a Moscow court of “group hooliganism” (for a minor incident outside a night club) after a trial his defenders denounced as a farce of justice. In echoes of the Loskutov case, Yakutia trade union organizer Valentin Urusov saw his conviction for drugs possession first overturned and then reinstated. A senior Moscow police official’s supermarket shooting spree, in late April, provoked the rudiments of a public debate on the urgent need for reform of Russia’s law enforcement agencies and belated revelations that such violence and abuse (albeit sometimes “milder” in form) were standard police “procedure.” Events since May, however, have suggested that this reform could be a long time in coming. Center “E” and other police agencies have continued to intimidate, arrest, and prosecute activists and bloggers, “monitor” potential “youth extremists” (whose ranks, in Petersburg’s Primorsky District, were revealed to include fans of the defunct pop band Kino), raid anti-fascist concerts, and disperse public protests. Finally, continued violence in Russia’s North Caucus region—typified by the suicide bomb attack on Ingushetia president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, in June, and the kidnapping and murder of Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, in July—remind us that the “state of exception” now engulfing the rest of the country has been inspired to a great extent by Moscow’s own long-running “war on terror” (against separatists and so-called Wahabist fundamentalists) there.
Here are some facts that drasticly interfere into our life and provoke the composition of these issue of newspaper:

When we peruse the timeline of the “merry month of May” 2009 in Russia—a laconic chronicle of arrests, detentions of activists, intellectuals and artists, but also of protests against these actions of the authorities—many difficult questions arise. Of course, the fragmentary and brief comments given below do not claim to be a definitive diagnosis. The incomplete and sketchy quality of these comments is rather a part of the problem itself. A fuller analysis will be possible when there is a systematic understanding of the post-Soviet political experience, which for now is a thing of the future.

From May 28 to June 10, 2009, several artists in Petersburg organized a plein air session outside the Smolny Institute (Petersburg city hall), where they painted the horror (of Russian reality) from life.
From May 28 to June 10 those artists were on a hunger strike.

It would be best to quote their words first:

“The beautiful views of St. Petersburg conceal a grim reality: summonses to prophylactic interviews, intimidation of civic activists, and cops acting with impunity in the streets. It is the duty of artists to reflect reality, no matter how horrific, by exposing its darker aspects. [...] The illegal mass detention of the May 1 street demonstration organized by Petersburg artists, along with the arrest of our ‘brother in art’ Artem Loskutov in Novosibirsk on an absurd charge leave us with no doubts, and no choice. We, the artists of St. Petersburg, are forced to declare a hunger strike with the goal of appealing to the authorities to observe their own laws and our constitutional rights, and to cease the repression of artists. There must be an end to the criminalization of contemporary art.”

We, the researchers, artists, and activists who initiated and participated in the “Communal Life” seminar, which took place on May 9, 2009, in the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the National Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA) and was subjected to an illegal raid by the Center for Extremism Prevention (Center “E”), call on everyone to protest the crude violations of constitutional rights and liberties that have become the norm in today’s Russia.

Screenplay working group: Nikolai Oleynikov, Oleg Zhuravlev, Dmitry Vilensky and Kirill Medvedev

I was inspired to make this film after the police forced me to delete video footage of the OMON raid on our seminar in Nizhny Novgorod. I was struck by their brazen confidence that they could erase things from people’s memory as easily as you can delete a video image.
This film is meant as a response to their challenge. It shows that we can not only document the crimes of the authorities for posterity, but also shape our own space of interpretation. We can recreate our own histories, in which the deeds of the police will be remembered as shameful acts against society. —Dmitry Vilensky

The Radek Community emerged from dissatisfaction with the Moscow art scene. It arose within Avdei Ter-Oganyan’s School of Contemporary Art (SCA) project, which was an educational institution, habitat, and tool for transformation rolled into one.

This essay will not be about the Street University. I’m tired of retelling the story. Anyone who has heard of it, regardless of their opinion of the experiment, knows that its “self-organized classes are held in the street” and its “actions are aimed at putting the public back into public space.” But what is the Street University really, with its disorderly organization, its surplus capacity for generating myths, and the constant disappointments and charms this practice provokes in its participants.

The Kiev Arts Council (Khudsovet), founded in summer 2008, unites a number of young artists, architects, translators, political activists, literary theorists, curators, designers, and journalists—a total of nineteen people.* The Arts Council functions as a curatorial group and, at the same time, as a discussion and self- (mutual-) education community. The projects of the Arts Council are based on communication, which the participants perceive as something intrinsically valuable, as a source of pleasure, and as an opportunity to go beyond the limits of alienated fields of specialized knowledge.

In light of the developing situation around the Subvision project in Hamburg, we find it necessary to make following statement with regard to our participation.