 Welcome everyone. Today marks the start of the annual Art Prospect Festival and the Arts Link Assembly. I'm Susan Katz, Program Director of CC Arts Link based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The conversation today is going to be in both Russian and English, and you can choose which language you want to listen to by using the round globe at the bottom of the screen. The Arts Link Assembly is a series of online talks and webinars featuring artists and arts leaders from around the globe, addressing some of the key issues facing the world as we endure the pandemic and beyond. The Art Prospect Festival is a public art festival, a sighted temporary artworks based in St. Petersburg. This year in response to the pandemic, the festival is taking place on site and online in 23 cities in 13 countries. With commissioned projects by over 50 artists. You can see the full program and learn about the projects at artprospect.org and also on the CC Arts Link website. I want to thank all the artists who contributed to work for the festival and the amazing Art Prospect team who put everything together on site and online. We're thrilled that an artist and good friend Kendall Henry, Director of New York's Percent for Art Program, who has participated in the Art Prospect Festival since its creation in 2012, will discuss this year's festival with several of the participating artists and curators. If you'd like to ask a question, please use the question and answer button at the bottom of your screen. Thank you. Now turn it over to Kendall. Thanks, Susan. You know, I'm very sorry that this pandemic is happening. You know, the festival has always been a highlight of the year. Coming together in St. Petersburg or in the past, Bishkek and other places like in the Ukraine. But, you know, we make do with what we have to make do with. And so, so today, you know, to sort of launch off the fettest, the fettest, the festival, as we usually do, we have this talk and we're going to hear from a number of participants, and I'm going to ask them to give a quick introduction before they give their presentations. And let's have a conversation. This is a very open and relaxed conversation. So please, if you have any questions, this is us just a whole bunch of friends having a bit of a chat about the world we live in today, about the things that the issues that we're facing. And, and until we get to meet again, you know, this is one of the best ways and we get to engage and, you know, and thanks to CEC for being very creative in having us do this this way and still keep the festival alive because I think again, this is so important, particularly right now. So I'm going to ask Lyra to sort of start and by, you know, giving a bit of an introduction and giving us a whole overview of this year's festival. Hello, everyone. I'm honored to introduce the team of the Art Prospect Festival at the assembly. This year, the festival has been created by six curators, and I'm one of the six curators. And other curators include Elizaveta Matveeva, Natasha Ergens, Taisya Abih, Veronica Nikiforov, and Ekaterina Sokolovskaya. And this year, the topic of our festival is Trezhahant. And our seventh festival is no different from the previous festivals we had, Art Prospect festivals we had, since the topic of the festivals is always broad, but each work of art created by artists for the festival always fits its time and environment and space. And this year, each artist finds treasures in this borderline space between private and public space. The works you're going to see at the festival, they're placed in the windows on balconies in gardens and private gardens, and viewers can visit them. And in various places where you can actually keep distance in the mountains, in the courtyards, there are some works that you find on the car windows. Each participant has their own definition for Trezhah. For some, this treasure is an ability to speak publicly about depression. I'm talking about Anna Tereshka and Nastya Makarenko and their drama piece. Or Trezhah is an ability to understand the city as your fellow friend, like in Sasha Zubritskaya's work. Trezhah is to have your personal space. This is what Fyodor Hirashige tells us when he emerges as a mushroom on his balcony and engaging into a silent dialogue. Trezhah is an ability to move in space. And this is what the characters from the chroma-key play do. Trezhah is being able to create art using everything you've got without having a chance to exit your house, like in Silesinova's work. Or Trezhah is being able to invite your friends into your garden. These Trezhahs can be seen at our festival. The festival has two dimensions. One is intervention. And if you download an app, you'll be able to see a map of dots. And when you click on these dots, you'll learn more about the works of the artists and about the schedule. And the second dimension is augmented reality. It exists in the Gaza culture house in St. Petersburg and you can go there. And if you use your telephone and read the special signals or symbols in this Gaza house, you will be able to discover Trezhahs for yourself. Please follow up with our public program. And you can become part of the dialogue with the artists in the Instagram, in Facebook, and on the festival's website. So this year we are having our festival both online and offline. Thank you. Thank you, Reira. I just want to reiterate, yes, please, you know, check out the website and participate as much as you can. And I think a lot of it is going to be streaming on CEC's Instagram feed. So keep an eye on that. So to begin our presentations today by our artists, I'll ask the artists to just give a brief introduction as to who you are. And, you know, walk us through what you have proposed and what your presentation, what your project is for this year's Arts Prospect Festival. I'm going to start with Alessia. Hello everybody. My name is Alessia Ilyanog and I'm an interdisciplinary artist. And with this Art Prospect Festival, I'm presenting a project. And I will share my screen now. And I'll be more specific about the project or Wolf or Skrull. It's the title of the project. My project, if you give a brief description, is a practice of street art in the digital layer of the city's public space. And to tell you about it in detail, I probably need to, I need to show you the lens I use to work in my project. And first, I'd like to say that I see a city and public space through the lens of a term, digital scene. Digital scene is the era, the time we live in. And you have to understand what you have to understand about it is that the digital and the analog are integrated closely and we can't separate them from one another. So if we look at the city through the digital scene lens, we see it as a hybrid space where we leave our digital and analog traces. We have printed cards, we use GPS in our mobiles, we post our photos with geotags in social networks. So public space also changes within the city. And today I see public space not only as a physical space of your presence, but rather as something that we pay our attention to. Because we may be sitting in a coffee house, but our public space will be Skype. This is the public space we are in, if we are calling something, for example. This is why I see public space as an Instagram space in my project. So the city, we have two cities, Vladivostok and St. Petersburg. And the reason is we first had this wall for scroll project in Vladivostok. And this year, thanks to the Art Prospect Festival, we are launching this project in St. Petersburg during the festival. To create my project, I took three steps. First I created digital objects. Then I selected objects for geotagging. And after that, I placed them in the Instagram stories. I worked with algorithms and neural networks, because I was interested in this machine mistake. I took 3D images of various spaces. And I transferred them into text. And using an algorithm, Markov's algorithm, I generated new messages. I selected the messages that were most poetic. I also walked around the city using Google Earth service, and I made pictures of the city. But I was looking for spaces where you could find something atypical or an unusual angle. And I had a 2D image that I later turned into a 3D image using a neural network. The neural network was looking for a volume in this 2D picture. Thus, the machine was trying to create a new object. In this video, you can see how many spots are involved in this wall for scroll project. We have 21 spots. The spot is a digital object that is linked to the Google Earth spot, to a real object. And you can imagine how someone walks around St. Petersburg visiting locations of the festival. And they might be passing the spots that are covered by my project. And later on the Instagram, in stories, they will see my digital interventions. They don't have any specific aim or goal behind them. They're only showing a message from an artist to the viewer. What I like about this juxtaposition or this clash between the message and the viewer, it is very much like street art when you walk around the city and you see a writing on a wall. You may ignore it or you may see it. In my case, you might just scroll it. You might leave it outside your attention span. Thus, my project as part of street art remains anonymous. It is site-specific and it adds some new aesthetics to the street art. To finish, I would like to talk about the street art into the digital layer of the city. To conclude, since we're talking about pub spaces today, the project in Vladivostok was a result of my Vladivostok project. These three objects got most of the people involved. We had 24,000 views of the project. These three objects were most viewed during the project. People would watch them for six seconds. They didn't swipe these images. I think it has to do with the fact that these objects are located in spots where you have a lot of cars and you have traffic jams there. When people are sitting in cars in a traffic jam, this is the time when you can send your artistic message to them and it gets to them while they're sitting in a car. Thank you. This is basically it. Thank you so much. That's an incredible project. I can't wait to talk about it in a few minutes. Next, you have Nadia. Talk about yourself and your project. Hello everyone. I'm very happy to welcome you. First of all, I'm very happy to greet everyone and to welcome everyone at our online art prospect. I'm happy it's happening both often online. I'll tell a few words about myself. I'm from Minsk, Belarus. I'm an artist from Minsk, Belarus. I have very similar forms, installations, performances, installations, paintings, research works. I don't think I have some framework or set-up. I do works about self-reflection, about feminist agenda, memory. And this is probably... This is an attempt to... All my projects is me wanting to be a mediator. Someone who carries information for working physically as a mediator using myself as an object. Oh, Nadia is muted. Nadia, you weren't muted. I'm sorry, I think I pressed twice by accident. First of all, yes, I'm very fast. Okay. Should I repeat it first or not? I'll correct it. Or do I have time to hear something? That's it. Great, thank you. So, the project Trash Art Cache is also part of my kind of mediation. The Trash Art Cache project is a mediation and I'm a mediator. I'm trying to convey information through public space. And I'll tell you how it's happening. And why did I have this idea? Maybe this is something from... The idea has to do with the Belarusian context. And it used to be relevant for former Soviet republics. One of the reasons why I had this idea is that they started to use garbage containers as a carrier of very critical messages first of all related to the political situation. Trash has now been used as carriers of some very critical messages. And it has to do with the political situation in the country. And one couldn't help but noticing it. It's a bit different from the graffiti. There are a lot of graffiti on trash cans. And they're more and more creative. And they sometimes would appear randomly. And that's why I thought that this past moment which was preserved on the trash can was everyday practice, ritual that we still follow. Even when we had to stay in lockdown we still have to take out your rubbish, to take out your trash. So you have to go there everyday. And it doesn't have to do with internet space which is also very important. So preserving something human, some public connection. And thus I looked at different contexts of the context of the Belarusian thing. Unfortunately we don't have a systemic history of contemporary art in Belarus. Over the past two decades we have some spontaneous projects one of the projects is for portal. They publish wonderful articles. They start talking about contemporary artists. They try to dig into the history. They try to register it. But they only last for a year or two. And later they become abandoned. I mean any contemporary artist or anyone interested in contemporary art has no chance to learn about many important projects and many important works. And you can't even learn the names. You don't even know the names. So I thought it was a very good way to let people know about the key projects that have to do with trash cans. Belarus artists who somehow express themselves on trash cans also present the graphic works and installations on several trash cans in Minsk that are located in courtyards or in public spaces like the Academy of Fine Arts yard. We placed QR codes on those cans, on those bins. And this QR code leads you to a website and from that website you can go to other sites and learn about the project itself and learn about the Belarusian artists who worked with trash bins and trash cans and etc. So for those who are in Minsk and in Maladecna, another Belarusian town you can go to those courtyards with trash bins and learn about Belarusian artists. You can do it online as well. You can use the QR code on the photo of an object or use a link on a website and you can go from the art prospect platform. This is basically it. I mean it's a very simple project as such. Are you going to show us some images there in Aria? Yes, I'm a bit distracted by it. I'll show you some. I took just three pictures for you to have an idea of what's going on. I mean how does this message look like in public space? In Belarus, what you see here are names of Belarusian TV channels and one of the... it's a very classical thing. It's a very classical thing. It's a very classical thing. It's a very classical thing. It's a very classical thing. There are channels and enforcement bodies, as trash cans and trash bins. This project shows this trash art as means of anonymous expressions. This is how a QR code on a trash can looks like and it leads you to a website. And this is how a website sees it as a fragment the works displayed. You can see an exhibition and a work from 1997 by Andre Dureka and other works and interpretations of these objects. This is how it looks like from your PC, but I guess people will be rather using telephones. Oh, this is basically it. Thank you so much Nadia and next we're going to hear from Annie. Could you introduce yourself and take us through your project? Hi everyone, I'm so excited to be here with you and thank you to CEC ArtsLink and Art Prospect for having me. This is a really interesting topic especially as an artist that works and collaborates with other artists and community members to produce work in public space. So it's been an interesting time filled with lots of interesting innovation. My name is Annie Albagli. I am an artist that is based out of San Francisco on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Aloni people and I'm currently an artist in residence at the Marin Hedlins at the Hedlins Center for the Arts in Salceledo, California. And in 2018 I was fortunate to participate in CEC's back apartment residency and produce the work Fido Bar or a memory for a remedy for Art Prospect of that year and it was an archive of Russian folk ingenuity. It explored how a society regulates medical care in the absence of necessary infrastructure and how communities' relationships to the environment might change when they become more reliant on it. But for this year I produced a score, a breath score that is activated through an anchor image at the Gaza Cultural House. So because this is a sound work I'm just going to have some video and images playing as I talk. So I'm going to share my screen right now and I'll talk a little bit about how that work relates to the work that I made. The first image is of the work installed on site and my project is very simple. It is called a breath together and it is the score of my friends and family breathing together and this project began a little bit after San Francisco went into lockdown and I began to see how serious this time was going to be and maybe how isolating it was going to be away from people that I loved, people that I work with and so a byproduct of us being together inevitably whether or not we're conscious of it explicitly is our breath and us breathing together air moving in through us around us in these rhythmic cycles. It's something that binds us to a space in a moment and now it's something that we maybe fear, push against, we're worried about because of this virus. And to contextualize this a little bit further in California here you can see an image of my running shoes and the light is completely orange. It's covered in ash because the air here is overrun with the smoke from wildfires. So breath and and air is mediated even further during this time. So I wanted to as I was soliciting these recordings I was also thinking about how can we be together in a way that isn't too reliant on language. I think right now I don't know about you but I'm at a loss for words and I want time away from language. I want to notice the nuance of people's bodies in a very simple and pared down way and maybe that's something that's also a byproduct of the pandemic where suddenly like our lives are much more pared down and rooted in where we are rather than like the noise of all the things we used to have to do in places we used to have to be. This image I also wanted to share with you other images of of the air in San Francisco. This is the iconic fog of that surrounds my studio which is pretty heavy. So yeah so I wanted to think about being together without language and breath and a score around breath was one way to do that. I also was thinking about the new found intimacy that we're having in these digital platforms. So as in 2018 maybe we were going to meet in a lecture hall and we would all come to the same place now through Zoom and these other technologies that we're using we're seeing different contexts of our bodies and ourselves so you're meeting me in my house you know you wouldn't have I wouldn't have brought my house with me to Russia. So I think it's interesting so it's both a visual context and it's also a sonic context maybe you can hear my dog crying outside my door in the background you know so these are all things that build and become part of me now within the context that you're hearing me talk and I think that also happens a little bit in the score itself where we hear like the sounds of birds or animals or vehicles that help contextualize these these different bodies and where they're producing this breath from. I am also thinking about this in relationship to view our participation and when I was making this project I was becoming very aware of my own breath and so I'm hoping that with each experience of this project that it's different for each person obviously but that they're also a contributor to the to the sound itself and that they become aware of their own breath and invoking St. Petersburg within the within the project itself so I guess that is a breath together. Thank you Annie and and where can we hear the score? Maybe you can answer better but that is at the Casa Culture House in St. Petersburg. Okay super great thank you and last but not least we have Nastya is going to give us her presentation and an introduction. My name is Nastya Babitskaya I'm an artist from St. Petersburg I work mainly with the fragility with anguish that we experience when we encounter when our public space interacts with when our private space interacts with public space and I would also wanted to share my own feelings I had during lockdown I'll share my screen now I'll talk a bit more about my my project it's it's called vacation can you see my screen now well I'll tell you the story behind it the idea can you hear me I go back to to the to the photos I hope you can see them now yeah yeah so the idea of the project I had it during the first week of May when we have our public holidays and we were already in lockdown and once I had a stroll took a stroll in the area where I live and I heard them on the loudspeaker congratulating people on the Victory Day and the next phrase was a warning telling people not to go out not to to be in public places and asking people to stay at home in lockdown and isolate themselves so I stopped there and listened to those contradictory messages coming from the loudspeaker and they were a bit menacing at least I felt the menacing and I thought that during this time I mean in early May we have public holidays or banking holidays and it's like a short vacation and usually the weather is fine by by by early May and people would go to the countryside with their friends and families or you know take short trips and go somewhere this year everybody had to stay at home and people had this forced lockdown vacation and they they had to stay in this space in this house space so the first part of my project was done in in my apartment and so you can see the wallpaper with an ideal beach that could be an Instagram background and to show something that doesn't really exist something false something phony my project also includes a video where I used I used this sound from loudspeaker and and using the objects that you see in the photo I wanted to create this what if some even paranoid atmosphere with this little swimming pool for kids a pool for kids feeling helpless feeling strange bizarre I relived my childhood experiences so this in-house space for many people was the only available space the only space available and as Anya has said apart from being the only available space it became visible to everyone we all see each other's apartment you can see my room behind me and we we had audiences all of a sudden our private space has become public space and this is what the second part of my project tells about it is shown at the festival as it shows how private space enters public space and you can see in the photo my house my house and the facade of my house with my windows and they're all blocked with this wallpaper and you can't really guess what's happening behind this wallpaper and I also wanted to say that by demonstrating your private in the public space you're not necessarily demonstrate or show something real you might be showing some constructed reality or maybe negating the realities that is happening because during quarantine many friends of mine would post their previous travels their previous photos from their previous trips and travels trying to negate the existing reality and showing that the things they lacked I'll show you a bigger image my neighbors they had some folio some reflection paper glued to their to their balcony okay okay so I guess you're not gonna are you gonna try to show us the bigger image there or okay well we're gonna move on so I want to thank all the the artists and Lara for presenting and so one of my first and I just want to reiterate that if you have any questions please put them in the questions and answer section and we'll try to answer them as we move along so one of the things about the the many years of the art prospect festival is the one of the the aims of the festival was you know like bringing people into these public spaces and experiencing the public spaces through to artwork and it's a public art festival and so one of the key components of that is you know the public space and I want to start with Lara with this question but I want everybody else to answer it is in developing this this festival and curating the festival how have you had to redefine the public space and and you know a couple of you sort of touched on how your private spaces have become public spaces and and you know thinking about that how have the how has has you thinking how is your thought process around the public space change throughout conceptualizing an idea for this project and and and how has that evolved and but they are really thinking about the festival as a whole how have you had to rethink public space when thinking about these projects well thank you for the question can tell it was this redefining rethinking of public space I think it happened not only as part of the festival it is rather a global global rethinking redefining that is happening with time with technology evolving and this year we had this well it happened faster it's it's sped up due to pandemics and we as curators could not help but noticing these changes and we suggested to the artists that they should you know work with the existing reality with the actual reality and here I think for the festival what is important for the festival is each and every artist's answer to this challenge because the festival is a conceptual framework it sets up a very general field for thought that each author each artist finds the private the unique definition of this state each artist intuitively or consciously can formulate it better in a more precise way than the festival does it in general yeah have I answered your question you definitely have definitely have so so the follow-up to that well I'm going to come back to you on that but I'm curious about the others how have you had to redefine public space when thinking about your work I'm going to call on you Annie well I think like it just to echo some like a theme that arose from everybody's or most presenters is the intimacy that becomes public but I think also what's happening now is because so much public space is unfolding online where we're meeting there's more of a democratic proliferation of artwork and access which I think is an interesting by-product and it's interesting also the intimacy is infused in that in a weird way so it won't I mean I will say you know like there's a lot more solitary making which is difficult and it's really hard when you get the zoom face you know from being on zoom too much but yeah I think it's more the intimacy being public and also this issue of access is very interesting to me and I'm interested to see what will happen with that post-pandemic and Nastya you have to sort of the same kind of situation with Annie in terms of you know you're introducing people to your private your very private space and it's becoming public and and so how has that how is that how are you dealing with that how has that been part of your your thinking process I wanted to focus on the fact that this demonstration of your intimate of your private into the public does not always help you to understand and to learn about the person's reality what you project through internet or what I project on my windows within the festivals project might not add anything might not give anything to the audience and to the one to the person who demonstrates it your in-house space has been always this territory of personal comfort and when you dissolve these borders between the private and the public this safety and security notion is being dissolved as well and I haven't yet defined for myself how am I how am I doing with this thought how do I live with this thought what is important for me I mean it's important for me to be secure at my home but even showing my project in the courtyard it's very interesting to see how are my neighbors react my neighbors judging from my previous project they see courtyard space as a territory they need to feel secure and any intervention into this space as like like my project is they feel those interventions as an attack or they read them as a danger and they want to protect the territory and the courtyard territory let alone the apartment territory so I think that this dissolving of borders and demonstrating your private in the public space is a has a you know is viewed in a twofold way I mean it's a dialectical question how do you treat it I don't think I have an exact and precise answer what we do understand we understand it's an inevitable process that is going on now yeah and you know and you know the two of you Annie and Nastya you sort of there's a reoccurring theme that I heard when you were talking about your presentations and there were words like depression and vulnerability and and isolation and anguish and fragility and you know this I think is a lot of what people are feeling right because we we sort of most of us if not all of us was in some sort of lockdown which meant that we couldn't communicate physically with people which meant that you know there was a fear of actual death if you sort of you know interacted so how has some of those topics of depression and vulnerability and isolation and anguish how is that why do you think why did you think you needed to sort of illustrate that in in your work you know how important was it that that came out in your work I can just briefly say that for um I'm really interested in like the fragility of the body I mean I think it's always been there and now it's like top of mind for all of us and so feeling like the softness of the body and being reminded of that as we like move forward with practices of care and concern for one another I think is is really important right now so do you want to add anything to that Nastya yeah yes I totally agree with Annie and I wanted to add that over this last six months and now what is important is to talk about people's feelings as I've mentioned already some people found themselves in this solitary situation for the first time you know being with their feelings with their emotions and they were not ready and they are not ready to accept it and they're trying various ways to press it to suppress it and to kill these feelings and it often leads to um to worse uh uh outcomes this is why I think that uh demonstrating it through art project is an important step towards you know self therapeutical uh mode uh being able to talk about it with yourself makes you able to talk about it with other people okay great thank you for that and and so part of that too is you know reaching out to as many people as possible and you know like Larry you mentioned that um you know when we're rethinking the public space you know we we go to the digital format we go to social media and and those platforms to sort of engage within these spaces and um Nastya your your work and as well as Liesl's work you know depend on you know that that realm that that sort of space and um one of the things that we try to think about is how how do we reach people within those spaces and and what is that message and and I just wonder if you could talk about you know what are some of the expectations or what are some of the ways that you how should I say how how is the reach been uh for for in in in these spaces because I'm in in one of your your projects Liesl you said you reached 24 000 views and and and that sort of was a highlight of of understanding that the communication was happening so how important was that in in those platforms it's a question to Liesl I guess well I was talking about I think I got confused with the numbers I I just wanted to say that if we're talking about you know private and public the idea is not a new one and social networks once they become popular they became popular before pandemics and before zoom and before those endless online conferences we started to show ourselves to post ourselves in the social networks our private lives have become public being a researcher I study the city and in my project I'm looking at the changes of urban public spaces through technology and if we're talking about and I'll repeat that if we're saying that we're using these digital spaces as public spaces even when we are physically in public spaces it means that digital space digital reality and digital spaces they take the same place in our life as the physical ones and we need to see them as equal and our digital bodies our digital meetings equal our physical bodies and our physical communication speaking about involvement and engaging people in the project what I find interesting when you're working in the street as an artist when you're making a work in the street you may have feedback in the same only in the same digital space you can see photos documentation of your work in the in the viewers accounts people may send you a link to a photo they made and I use the tools that you normally use for example on facebook to place adverts and they allow me to analyze their reaction towards each of my digital objects and it also allows me to do some research to study how people read certain messages how they read spots how they see spots and try and understand why a certain message reached out and the other one did it and people would just you know swipe or and why would people be engaged in some objects and maybe the message has reached the audience and after Vladivostok project I can already have some analysis and evaluation because we've had this project finished in Vladivostok and the trend is that people go everywhere by car people seldom walk on food and my messages were best seen at the spots where you have traffic jams so people being in the car they can you know see my artistic message in the st. Petersburg case well I cannot comment so far because we've only launched it we're launching it today uh October 15th and it'll be interesting to see uh what's the difference when you try try this project out in different cities um how this digital message in the digital space in public space uh can be perceived in a different way uh depending on the city I will probably add on my behalf to to follow up for me it was also part of my work it's a research uh and I'll be able to to evaluate um after a couple of days and to assess you know the how many people use the QR codes to go on the website and for me it is an important uh uh this this uh our information about artists not being accessible uh it's not it's not accessible even without pandemics uh even with this global accessibility oh um when I when I talk to my colleagues um kept saying yeah we have a lot of platforms it has become more democratic but we don't have time to digest it we're we find ourselves in this internet field and it's it only makes it more difficult to uh to take art in I mean it's it's uh and what happens when you uh stumble upon art somewhere where you don't expect it to be um and and when you have to do something extra to go uh somewhere uh when you can't go to a gallery uh and you can find uh something some information about art uh where you would never have founded had there been no pandemics okay and and so that that brings me to my next question so we are in a pandemic we are um we do have to isolate for at least for a period of time there is a a bit of isolation like some of you mentioned there is you know the vulnerability and all that uh so what has all of this situation and I want everybody to answer um including you Lara what has this uh told you about yourself as an artist what has it taught you about your practice how you make work and and the message in your work right this is so what has all of this talked about yourself you know maybe you've discovered that you don't like to be isolated and maybe you discovered that you know what has it taught you about yourself your work and the message that you put forth in your work okay Lara you start which give you time for your others to think about that answer if we're talking about isolation and the message the message that I personally took from it or this time has given me it's very simple for each and every one of us and for me personally uh what is important for for me it is the community support that is important uh for what I do uh we work with communities and I work with communities and when I found myself in isolation when all my projects were canceled basically I was ready to do you know to raise chicken I started to study to study breeds I mean I I looked into breeds but I was lucky I saw that this new situation offers new grants for communities and for community work and I found opportunities to apply for grants and to keep working I think this opportunity for a dialogue in this new setting this is something that really supports me as a curator and as an artist so I'm really grateful thankful to everyone who finds strength and will to be in touch to keep in touch and to support each other in the dialogue thank you I'm going to call on you next Annie cool interesting thing um well um I guess I'll start with like an anecdote which is that I remember the first time that I met with my collaborators after being like isolated for a while and we met outside at the beach and we like spoke for I think like two or three hours outside and I remember leaving that meeting like I was buzzed or high because like suddenly I was with people again that I cared deeply about and so I think that is something that has always been present in my life is like care for community and collaborating and like it was just felt to such an extreme after having been like in isolation for a while and I'm curious I read this article on efflux in March by Franco Barardi and he talks about how are we all going to kind of be sick of all of this technological mediation that when the pandemic ends like that we will kind of forego that because we associate it with sickness and we like kind of only work together kind of more in person and that's more of the focus and I guess I I felt like I mean who knows what will happen how our lives will proceed from here but I felt like a kinship with that idea I think one thing that this has pushed me to do in my practice is collaborate more with the environment with non-humans in my work and at the headlands because it's part of the park service there's been a lot of opportunity there to kind of do a lot more research into the different ecologies that are there and environments so that's been a very interesting thing and I've also taken place or been a part of like a lot of seminars online which has been also very interesting to have a lot more international perspectives more consistently in my work so that's been a big positive thing thank you last year I agree both with Lara and with any but as an artist I feel fine to work alone and to to make my projects on my own on the other hand I'm working with sculpture a lot and exhibiting it is exhibiting it in digital space and to look at projects on the internet I don't really fancy it and I get bored at a point so I missed this opportunity to have a physical contact with art to have a chance to discuss it with the people that are next to you so I kept studying various websites for fairs and projects to be in the context whether it was a positive experience or not I can't even tell now I feel that being physically able to be present being present at exhibitions physically is very important even with the digital projects or there are some projects you can only see with your smartphone but when you do something with your hands I as an artist would really miss an opportunity to have a chance to show my works to the people in a physical form thank you you wanna go next Narya well what I've seen in my own practice in terms of changing my practice had a lot to do with this you know internet hype a lot of things being available online there were some works that played with this idea when the person loses this chance to talk to another person and to express Hima herself emotionally physically in space would place it all online put it on online all online and there was a moment when I realized that I can't speak about myself it became more difficult for me to work to do projects that had to do with my body with my emotions with my physicality for the first two months I wanted to keep silent to keep mum to do nothing and go back to some manual artistic labor and to work in this isolated mode so it was an important stage of accepting people accepting myself accepting the fact that everybody needs to speak about themselves and we need to co-habit in this space and we need to limit ourselves or accept the fact that we need to speak about to speak about our feelings about our worries about the way we live through these days not to disappear into this isolation and to you know to keep saying to keep being sane and I think that the project that I've realized within the Art Prospect Festival it is in a sense a continuation of this attempt not to speak about myself so I'm using the space which is not private I'm opening access to something telling about something I it would be difficult for me to create a work that would be speaking about my own space so this is the experience I had the things I was used to do and the things I focused on what I used to focus on using my body my physicality became more problematic for me so this is my personalization moment this is my personal experience and Nadya I'm going to be coming back to you with a question from the audience so hold on to that but Lisa let's hear let's hear what your thoughts on how this has changed your work your practice and your message I will probably have a different story to tell because this isolation if we're talking about psychological pressure it hasn't really affected me I used to work with this welfare scroll project for Vladivostok so it was all digital and I kept you know sitting at home working on this project I used my computer I didn't have to go anywhere I could you know focus on my laptop sitting at home what is interesting if we're talking about new practices that I have picked up I suddenly needed to do more manual stuff and I started to do embroidery I took a plastic bag that I had at home and I decided to make an embroidery on a plastic bag and while I was doing it I had this feeling I needed to document my my life my time in the process of doing it and I I knew that I was uh uh dedicating my time to this process and each moment each minute of my life is in this embroidery in each little stitch and uh uh this is uh this became a starting point from a new trend in my work I decided to make this plastic bag serious with embroidery and it also led me to uh to the thoughts of personal data and how I could display this data in an analog way so I've been collecting my personal data in a table and I uh embroidered them with using a code and I think this project would stretch for for a year so this self-isolation and being confined uh led me to a new artistic practice the saying goes necessity is a mother of invention so new work comes out of being in this isolation which is fantastic um I just want to remind everybody that we we are taking questions and so if you have any questions please you know pipe them in the questions answer period um and I have a question for for Nadia and it looks like a yeah so the question is um everything changed in Belarus in August the protest happened in public spaces both online and on the streets despite dangers of the pandemic activists women in particular have been unneed unyielding despite violence and arrest you yourself have been arrested and imprisoned how do you see your art practice in this the question is about our context that goes beyond the pandemic problem so the safety and health security and pandemic is no longer relative relevant because despite those dangers people are protesting and the situation I went through only confirms my stand and my understanding and the stand of many artists and people of culture in this situation the majority gets politicized can't help it I consider myself I don't consider myself a political artist and even reacting to certain events happening in my country or in other countries but what's happening this year in Belarus is so complex so violent and I can't I can't find any analog analog to it I mean I I can't pair it with anything you can't help but react regardless of your wish you any work you do is becomes an activist work and I heard it from someone else when I described my case and I asked do I need to write in my application that I'm an activist and the person from another country he said well you're all activists in Belarus now so I wanted to make a work that would not reflect reaction reaction you can't make a work that wouldn't reflect those reactions and this is a similar message we're getting from outside what and regardless of the fact whether we touch upon some political issues or not attract attention of the law enforcement and this is what happened to me I I'm not at all active I mean close to activism and I'm not politicized and I mean I'm not political in my expression it's just a general artistic reaction to what is going on but my works yeah I had some works that do react to the to the things happening I hope I answered the question you did but I actually have another one and I'm going to ask you first but I also want others to think about this again and there's a sort of keep repeating this idea of working as artists in this time and this time depending on where you are has many different meanings there's you know the conflict in Belarus there's the racial tension in the united states there is you know all these there's the environmental issues in in the west so everything so my question to you is what advice would you give other artists who is trying to deal with these issues in an artwork understanding that there are consequences to somebody or that you're creating you know what advice are you are you able to what what what wisdom can you impart on others who who may be in your situation and again this goes for every one of you I'm going to ask you that question but I want to start with you Nadia to be frank I don't know if if I'm able to give some some well thought through advice it hasn't been much time since it happened to me and for me it's always a question I understand that there is this effect that works and I understand that my piece of advice would be do what you find important tell what you find important and if your message your statement is gonna help someone or or will be will come in tune this work might bring consolidation and support I heard a lot of people telling me during this time between the moment I made my work and the moment that I was in prison I mean it's always a risk the risk is can be bigger or smaller depending on the country and on the situation well you need to understand the scale you need to understand what are you ready to cope with because there are people who are so eager to express themselves and make their statement transparent and loud and they know they're they're going to be punished so to say for it and they're ready to go for it and and they get what they actually can predict but in certain situations you you can't even foresee that your statement will sound louder than you thought it would and then you have to live through through a challenge and you you see things being done against you and you find them unfair but whenever you do something try to envisage and try to understand what are you able to endure everybody lives it through in a different way or experiences it in a different way before I was detained after a performance it's a working performance what I felt and what I experienced was that in any case you're saying something when you can't help and help it you might find it scary or dangerous but I cannot say that every artist should do that in this situation when like with what is going on in Belarus nobody is obliged to do things and I don't think that artists must react it must always come from within and it will it must be as honest as possible I like that you end that it must be as honest as possible I think this is very key to you know any artist working in a way that will really speak to other people particularly when there is social issues involved Alessa start with you what advice well I agree with Nadia a lot and I think that an artist acts because he or she needs to say it and you you cannot not do it and if you have this urge if you have this need to say it you do some work you create a work you don't really think about consequences but I think it's a very like silly a crap thing when you have this self-censorship because of your fears yes honesty is is of paramount importance and I will simply support what Nadia has said you can't demand anything but if you want you yourself want from the you know from the bottom of your heart you want to make a statement make it don't think of anything else think about your statement think about your message here reoccurring theme here this is good Nastia I wanted to add that it is very important to think about your message and to be honest in my experience I probably never found myself in such drastic situations but I've been part of an exhibition that supported Yulia Tsvetkova she is now being charged for distributing pornography because she she drew vagina and she showed like female body in her pictures in the drawings she made and I what I noted since there's been a precedent of charges being brought against an artist what one needs to do one needs to find human right defendants lawyers that could help you give you a piece of advice if if anything happens and you also must go public as public as possible ask media to write about it make everybody know about it I wouldn't compare it to protest in Belarus but well artistic or creation is one thing but maybe finding legal support and this is a piece of advice I would give again support legal or otherwise is always good thank you Nastia any what's your thoughts and advice for folks who wanted to delve into this whole realm well I yeah when I mean it's very interesting to hear about this especially in the context of politics and to talk about it because when the pandemic first started I was really like one of my first questions was how do people protest now and the answer has been really clear that when the issue is as dire as it is people will just take to physical public space and in terms of this answer that I've heard like you know your unique talents I think that that can manifest itself in many ways depending on I think when this started I asked myself what do I have to give and what do I feel comfortable giving so that those were important like an important question to frame how I can contribute during this time and I also think that artists are unique in that they can navigate many systems under the skies of art and it can be a sort of I don't want to say sneaky way but a way to to to be productive and influential without going through like proper systems and I think that that is something unique to the artist especially during this time. Thank you Annie and Lera I know you're full of advice and so I look forward to what you have to share with folks today. Well thank you Kendo for this very important question. I feel that each artist has given now a very honest advice piece of advice and I could only add that it is very important to be together to keep together and going public is very important we've been talking about safety and security many times and I think that being public is a tool that helps you enhance your safety and helps you make yourself more safe so support each other stick to each other simple but pure gold as expected so we only have about three minutes left and I just wanted to take this opportunity to really thank the CEC art slink for putting this together not just this talk but the entire festival I think this is something that we really need now this is something that is important now it's important for all the artists who are participating to have a place to speak have a place to congregate and connect ideas and exchange ideas and other types of conversations so I want to personally thank for CEC for putting this together. I also want to thank the artists who spoke today and particularly at this last question really sharing advice because I have noticed and I'm sure a lot of you have noticed is that some of us are not doing well and some of us are struggling and on many levels and I think artists are really key in getting us through that and you know as some of these projects illustrate that you know sometimes we just need to hear that we're not in it alone this is a common theme that I've been hearing for the whole day is sort of this connectivity togetherness you know trust in oneself and I think that's all important and I just wanted to say that I also want to put a plug in for for tomorrow this is there's also another talk present it's called a presentation of the publication miracles or misunderstandings socially engage art in the countries of the art prospect network we get field report reports from Azerbaijan Armenia Belarus Georgia Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Moldova Tajikistan Uzbekistan and the Ukraine so I encourage you all to log on to to that one as well tomorrow and really you know look on to the art prospect.org website and participate as much as you can in experiencing some of these projects some of them are really really cool and and hopefully next year maybe we will get to do this as we usually do it in person in real life and and yeah so I just want to again thank you all thank you for inviting me to participate I miss you all very much I miss the traveling let me tell you I'm suffering over here with the traveling but but again you know we'll get through this we will get through this and before our last minute I just wanted to ask if Susan or Natasha or anyone else wants to to say anything in closing. I just want to say thank you Kendall for moderating this conversation and thank you to all the artists and it was really wonderful to meet you and see you and that's for us I think the saddest part of not having the art prospect person our prospect festival live here in St. Petersburg or in other cities is not getting to see you and talk with you and meet you but I'm really glad that we could bring the group together at least virtually on Zoom and thank you for participating and we look forward to continuing collaborating with you so good night everyone and see you some of you tomorrow bye everybody thank you