 Hello everyone, welcome. This is the second event of the review of the series through 9am at 8am. We will move to the listening session and I will talk about the interview. I am an assistant creator here at BNM and I am the team manager at BNM here, who initiated this program which is co-created with BNM Soviet. This series is dedicated to decolonizing hearing and how it can be used to reflect and find methods of resistance to pianists and colonial refugee practices in Europe and in just a little bit please. This first chapter, especially, is curated by the young people of Soviet who I am really happy to welcome here at BNM. It comes after the first event where some of you were already, which was a keynote lecture by Dr. F. F. Anus. The invitation to move them to move me on the post-Soviet departed from the urgency to address the issue of imperialism in post-Soviet territories due to the recent evasion of Euproxia in Ukraine. It's worth mentioning it. There will be a second chapter after this one of the regional disaster series which will be led by the team at Modem in 2023 and which will extend the reflections around the coloniality to broader geographies to take into account the situation of Modem in a western European country. Also, as part of the research for the listening session but also for the program at large, the members of Beyond the Post-Soviet have been invited to dig in a bit to the Modem collection and to lead some research throughout the collection. And for this event, they chose Vlad Karovac's video that you can see in the studio and that Patricia is going to introduce in more details later. It's entitled This Year and That There. And it's chosen because it resonates particularly with the methods and reflections that will be discussed over this event. So I invite you to watch the video after the event if you haven't done so yet. And finally, this event was also planned for the third incoordination with the performance by the leasing session and Yann Lege that is happening at four in the great hall in the time at three's exhibition. So it will be a live activation, another kind of listening session. So I invite you all to join us for the several parts of life at four to maybe reflect on what we will talk about during this listening session in a more meditative environment. And now I leave the floor to my fellow colleagues from here in the past so yes. I will call the place to be closer to the mic. Hopefully our participants online also can hear us. It's like you know Holt here who is sitting there has to speak. So I'm going to show you the part of the collection between the two of it together with Sasha Pivak and Patricia and Katrina Batano Marina Pankratova and Faena Inusova who also present today. So this event how to be anti-colonial as Clementine said at the second event of the program and we call it as a listening session. How do we mean that? Listening we perceive as a practice as a colonial practice and also as a political statement. With listening we acknowledge our that we do not know not knowing the information and our will to learn to hear and to understand. Therefore we also approach listening in the form of care towards speakers, towards different narrations. And to conclude this session we also started with listening and we invited Leah Dostoeva, artist and cultural anthropologist and Vasily Cherepanin, art activist and founder of Cherepanel. Renata Saletschel and who is a theoretician and Tatiana Federova creates an artist to become one moment a spontaneous collective and also to search together and discuss together the topics, the questions that we feel urge to discuss and to listen to and to hear and together as a spontaneous collective of us we were designing and conceiving this event. And I give one, my name is Sasha Tevak. So the colleagues told us that some of you are given up the first time for the program so welcome very much. Thank you for joining again for the new Congress. Welcome. So just to remind you what happened during the first lecture. So the first open lecture of the program, Gloria, will be come fresh as given by Epanel. And she offered us some important clues of understanding what is Soviet and Russian colonialism and also some insights into the history of Soviet and Russian colonialism. Also she gave us some examples of resistance that appeared in literature and art to Soviet colonials in particular in the Daleks. So today the framework is a bit different so as Yulia said we gather as a kind of spontaneous collective which was formed with the participants but also with you today and with the members of the NMT team. And I think that the start of the spontaneous collective was this shared opinion that colonialism and coloniality are not only the fact of the past but they continue to operate and impact influence every aspect of our lives until today around the world. So of course then going more fresh against Ukraine is one of the examples and it carries many signs of a colonial war. For example, it is ideologically driven by contemporary Russian chauvinism and fascism and by divisions of Ukrainians as spoiled and lost brothers who must be brought back to this so-called Russian world. It also takes the form as you know of territorial occupations, war crimes, mass killings and torches of civilians, destruction of critical infrastructure that we see in recent months and also of course of looting and destruction of cultural heritage. At the same time in many parts of the world we also see the alarming rise and normalization of extreme right crypto-fascist and fascist movements whose ideologies maybe echo those of colonialism. So how do we then define and identify colonialism? What anti-colonial strategies can be developed today as individuals but also as artists or cultural workers? How do we detect the camouflage of colonialism and how do we reverse this logic? How do we make colonialism visible and trace what it has done visible? And also what is the responsibility of art and the institutions? We are an institution of art. What is the responsibility of these institutions in anti-colonial struggle? And maybe finally, how do we imagine our future? So what comes after empires and after the process of it? So these are a few questions that we will raise together today through the contributions of speakers and also through a quick discussion. And now we give the word to Patricia. Yes, I think for our online participant we'll watch some stills of the video that is presenting in the Moudan. I'll share them now. And so as Clementine mentioned one of the ambitions of colonialism camouflage is to engage with Moudan and its collection. And as a collective beyond the post-soviet community to do some research but also to do some research around the works by artists from the so-called post-soviet and post-socialist countries of Europe acquired by the Museum's Royalty History. And among the questions that we had in mind is the Yarkov setup and four relations produced which as you can see we will also try to tackle the setup of this meeting. Some work in particular this year and that there by the artist Blatka Orphats caught our attention. It is a video which drew a sequence of stills which translates into eight hours in interrupted performance realized in 2009 in the front of the Oztakulto de Avelte in Berlin. This piece was temporarily installed in the museum. Those in Luxembourg probably saw it at the entrance of this space and for the online audience you can just watch it now. In this video we see the artist manipulating 50 identical chairs in the large fountain. By displacing the chairs she constructs and deconstructs temporary arrangements and structures that can remind us of some well-known social setup like meetings and contours, conference, gathering but also battles and confrontations. Sometimes the structure becomes more abstract and not recognizable but it blurs the relations of power that this setup shows. Yeah, that's it for me. I think Julia will take out the floor for the next. Do a small note. I will try also to have to take care. Yeah, while designing this session we were questioning also spatial and temporal organization of our encounter today now. Therefore I refer to Vladka's work where she also tries to deconstruct it. And while discussing colonial and imperial structures that are still present also with the organization of this event and encounter we try also to deconstruct this spatial relationship that sometimes are offered for us is unquestionable or present and we kind of agree with that. And therefore, first of all, we try to continue this meeting before also designing as a collective but also today we invite you to be and to feel as an active participant and therefore we will have like a soft moderation but that means that everyone is welcome to step in to do the point to ask questions or to make a statement. So you're very welcome. And this is how we will proceed. And also our live participants will join us in the discussion. So we agreed to start with the contribution by Marcel to the planning Each contribution will last about 10 minutes let's say so there will be four of them and then we should have this discussion with very soft motivation. So we begin with Marcel I will just say a few words about Marcel. So Marcel is head of the visual culture research center CMRC which you co-founded in Kiev in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic and activist communities VCRC among other things is also the organizer of Kiev Biennial and one of the co-founders of the platform of East Europe Biennial Alliance and it was during the last edition of the Kiev Biennial in 2021 and precisely after a panel discussion on the topic of global social and decolonization in Eastern Europe that I had a chance to meet you and we have since stayed in contact and I think with the group we followed the activities of Marcel and also many publications also the ones that appeared since the full-scale invasion So yes, this is I think this shared interest and shared, really shared interest and shared opinions with you that incited us to invite you to join the collective So now I'm giving you the word I believe that we were supposed to stay, right? If you don't mind Yeah, no problem Yeah, but also just to, oh sorry with respect to our online guests Okay So first of all thanks so much to the museum and to the Biennial, the post-Soviet Union Sasha, for kindly having me here I really appreciate a lot this opportunity to talk to you today because as Sasha already pointed out I am actually coming from the country which has been experiencing and is experiencing an ongoing occupation taxation, kidnap, infiltration camps deportations, mass graves, torture chambers So it's only this constant awareness of these realities that I have which allows me to speak to you Otherwise I wouldn't be able even to speak about these matters So I have to keep kind of a fidelity to this reality check kind of a truth on the ground which allows me to express myself And also for that matter I'm also super privileged of course to be here because I am abroad only due to the special permit from the Ministry of Culture which allowed me to travel abroad and to live in Ukraine So in this sense I also would like to thank the Ukrainian military without which I wouldn't be able to come here perhaps I wouldn't even exist for sure my country wouldn't exist at least in the form it currently does and I'm sure that you here would be busy with totally different agenda if not the Ukrainian military resistance that's for sure So I'm also very thankful for bringing in this topic of colonialism, post-coloniality and decolonization and it is especially important with regards to this war because of its specificity because unlike many other military conflicts and warfare affairs of the last let's say 30 years especially after the fall of the Soviet Union this war is really kind of unique or very specific and so it has of course a kind of fascist genocidal dimension obviously but it has very much a colonial dimension as well So what do I mean by this is basically that unlike many many other conflicts which are currently ongoing and that we had to experience before this war is not simply the war between two countries so it's really pretty mistakable to depict it as a Russian-Ukrainian war we can elaborate that perhaps during the discussion I believe So this war is not also a war between two armies and this is also not a war between the army and the insurgency but this war what makes it really a colonial fascist war is the war of one country's military against the other country's people who had been simply deprived the right to exist as it was stated by the Russian aggressive and the biggest problem I find in this context because we can also discuss the Russian colonialism and Russian current fascist regime but also I think if we apply this context on the pan-European scale what I find really super super dangerous is basically that how come that we all being part of this allowed this colonial fascist war to happen again and what I find really problematic and somehow I think the majority of Europeans mostly the EU citizens are not fully aware of unfortunately because still there is a kind of a tendency in the EU to perceive this war as somebody else's war because the major discussion in the EU about this war is about energy prices and gas and oil whereas I think that the biggest blow-up in a way to the idea of freedom and to the idea of Europe for that matter is that even before the 24th of February this year if we kind of step back, if it's in general possible and look at the European continent as such what we actually see is that all the European countries in principle somehow agreed in advance that the other European country could be occupied deprived of all its institutions its sovereignty, its independence and the rest of Europe could get along with it I think that this is the biggest danger at the moment and unfortunately the EU will definitely pay much higher price for this agreement because it's not just a repetition of the Chamberlain moment and so on and I think that one of the explanations for that is basically very much relies on the colonial or post-colonial premise in a way what do I mean by this? It's basically that somehow because actually what the so-called Russian Federation I say so-called because Russia has never been a federation it's just not true and it can be whatever called but for sure not a federation but what Russia and many, many West European powers actually share is the coloniality or at least the colonial past and I think that it is exactly Europe's kind of post-colonial legacy and its current in a way neo-colonial approach that it's Europe's inability to think in colonial terms and apply them to the present was one of the reasons why Europe agreed on this aggression why this war was allowed to happen as such and what I find here is really problematic and what has been always amazing somehow for me is actually that in spite of all its progressivity post-colonial or decolonial discourse has been so much nationalized across Europe because each country is dealing with its own colonialism digging deep something from its own past at the same time keeping a blind eye towards colonialism in the present and apply it on the same even continent because we have often heard that the realities of the east of Europe don't fit to post-coloniality to colonial discourse that is a kind of a wrong experience it cannot be really inscribed in post-colonial framework that post-colonial western theory cannot be exercised in Europe's east but actually this premise has to be rather reversed it's not the East European experience that is wrong it's rather the post-colonial theory that has a fundamental mistake in its basic origin that it doesn't allow to be applied towards the same part actually of the continent and even more I will go even further that the realities of East Europe are so much central to colonialism on a global scale and so much crucial that it is exactly this reason that makes them somehow invisible within the framework of this theory because this theory resides very comfortably on the typical dichotomy between the global north and global south and post-Soviet especially Europe's east simply doesn't fit to this opposition to this binary division at the same time there has been a long tradition of constant interaction between the western metropoles and the Russian metropoles and both felt pretty comfortable in that regard at the same time if we take a look at the especially post-Soviet Europe's east it is exactly it's even more than colonial because the definitive feature of this region that so many countries not only Ukraine of course have been living under direct military Russian occupation at least for decades under direct military occupation it's not just some global south and this is actually one of the characteristics that differentiates the colonial experiences in Europe's east from the so-called global south context because maybe on economic terms they can be found on the same page but it is exactly these military political conditions that differentiate these contexts very much and if we look from this colonial or decolonial perspective on this region we can also define and distinguish all the variety of anti-colonial strategies the occupation attempts which are basically of a global importance but what I find really problematic is that even after the crash after the crash of the Soviet Union somehow the attitude from the side of the EU especially from the western side of the western part of the Union towards the Europe's east was kind of was sort of framed as an eastern partnership policy which is basically the continuation of the so-called Ostpolitik approach which in turn is basically the continuation of what Edward Said of course called originalism what I mean is that the idea of united Europe being based on the premise of overcoming the political division of Europe and inscribing Europe's east into a general framework instead simply so after the crash of the Soviet Union this idea was transformed into the policy towards neighbourhoods it was not our common house policy it was some neighbourhoods which are typical colonial discourse which are under civilised which are barbaric which have lots of traces of totalitarianism they are not ready enough you have to catch up what I believe Habermas framed coined as Nagolinde revolution catching up revolution that you have to run fast like in Alice in Wonderland you have to run very fast in order to be there where you are so in this sense and by the way also just one last note that this is also very much applied to this idea of what is now in the general European discourse called pacifism which is a totally wrong term like it reminds me of the term crisis when we don't know how to approach the situation we usually use some terms which are just hiding the realities so all this idea of non-escalation not provoking the Kremlin not to support not to supply weaponry so much crucially needed for the country at war it's actually the basic premise of this idea is very much colonial one because this is the idea about who has the right to violence and as we know from the colonial history it is exactly the colonisers who can be armed and defend themselves not the colonised colonised simply are deprived of this right to apply violence especially when it's needed and here I see actually the task of the cultural institutions to be honest that if we reconsider and reconfigure the colonial framework as such and if we also try to expand it towards the rest of the continent we would have and we would come up with a totally different theory of coloniality and decolonialism and for that matter with a totally different idea of Europe as such I could come here and look forward to the discussion thank you thank you Vasily so I just also to give a remark on the way we proceed today so now we listen only listen and then we start the discussion after all our guests will come to work and I would like to introduce our next guest it's Leah Dostliva and Leah I remember I came across your article in VLOG magazine on the colonial approach to Russian culture and after that you decided and you agreed to take part in the online event dedicated to the colonial vocabulary together with Alevtina Kahitze and now finally we have an honor to have you here present and to meet in person thank you for that Leah you are an artist and a cultural anthropologist and also one of the recent focuses was tracing uncovering the traces that are hidden and if I remember correctly one of the last project and interest of yours also is to dig into the soil which is covering the traces and raising that but also preserving it like a focales and I give the word to you too Thank you Thank you for having me here and I also want to thank Sinc who already told what I wanted to talk here I mean theoretical background because of the previous one oh yes oh my god and maybe we can somehow oops and you probably have somehow just stopped from moving by itself yeah ok so after 24th of February I think this idea that the colonial approach also could be pretty much applied on this so-called post-Soviet situation is now becoming kind of mainstream because before it was super controversial thing to say every time you are trying to say but look this is also colonial dynamic in here look this power structure and super colonial you will be mocked and ridiculed and some wise white heterosexual would advise you to read some books actually and educate yourself so yes thank you you already mentioned it and also I wrote some articles about it because I mean after the full scale invasion started we also had to do some explaining have to you I know to spread this narrative a little bit wider and this project I'm going to talk about actually I started to work on it long before the full scale invasion started which is also a problem you will see because I mean I've been working with collective and historical trauma for some time and when I was working in Isalacia you also might might have heard this name in Isalacia they were based in Donetsk and Donetsk was occupied they moved to Kiev and in their premises Donetsk now is the daughter of January prison we don't know how many people are still there and what is happening there as we speak so it's also a very problematic story and I was working with them as greater a few years ago they want to go back to east because they felt that they belong like more in eastern part of Ukraine than in Kiev and so when I worked with them as greater we were researching is it working down is it working try maybe someone yeah so we were researching we were doing some research and this book I found into Bakhmut Museum of Nature History and it's called Trilobites of the Donetsk Basin and it's super boring book about trilobites trilobites so how do we oh yeah those guys like some 500 million years ago they used to live in the ocean which used to be at this place where is like Donetsk now yeah so I came across this book yeah this is like where is this called I mean this book is what I meant boring just about trilobites some fossils you can find in Tochol but also in limestone also in fossil schemes some drawings but I mean what was interesting about this book is the year of application is like 1933 it was the same year when Soviet Ukraine was dying actually I mean it was holding for years here is a monument in Washington and I mean what had happened there Soviet Union had this idea of instrumentalization so they built coal mines heavy industry in this eastern region right and also they had this idea that we don't need any private property we have to employ this project of co-activization so they kind of started to basically take all food from people from peasants mostly which led to restoration and which led to around 4 millions people who died because of that it's kind of pretty hard to estimate real amount because we don't know how to do that so I mean just imagine some guy educated person from some computer's book I come to the region where these coal mines are in order to discover to research to find some traces of ancient history and he can do this because he's a part of this like Soviet knowledge structure and when Soviet state started to industrialize itself they started to dig up this coal and the slime storm there were trilobites right in this coal and the slime storm so and this guy just came there to actually do his work most embedded there he's just recovering some traces of ancient history and in exact same region more or less at the same time people were dying from starvation and they were buried in mass graves like everywhere and why I mentioned that I started to work on this project long before the full scale invasion started it's because actually of mass graves because when I decided that I want to work with this for me mass graves were a part of history you know it was something that we read about in books we can find some photos in archives nothing like recent actual experience or useful and I applied to this project for some grants I received some I'm fine I'm like young life academy is this project I applied more than one year ago since the war started yeah this I think is most famous pictures from Howard Moore Alexander Wimperberger Austrian engineer who came to archive and made some pictures I mean it's the most nicest one I've seen because I'm not going to show you any drastic pictures but when I was already working on this project some creator who writes a book about projects he likes he was like okay I'm mentioning this project in my book I put some pictures of your works in there but I think it would be nice to add some archival pictures could you send me some I answered that sure I could but I won't no no no send me some people like it oh my god I mean it's it also was before the full scan registry so I mean as you mentioned I like to work with this traces in general traces of something traces of something hidden and also here is soil this idea of soil as a source of knowledge but also as a method to hide it like to literally hide it because people were buried in mass graves and for as long as Soviet Union music existed it was forbidden to even mention what it happened and when I started actually working on this project I mean I read this book I also checked these places where this guy was working with the map of Holodomor because some like burial places are known and they are on the map of Holodomor Museum online you can easily check it and I found some spots which are overlapping I mean technically this his research happened like few years a year before Holodomor started but I mean sometimes it's even same village same village where firstly this guy came to discover some beautiful ancient history and then some people came to bury presence in mass graves yeah this is in Poland in Poznań it's still happening music this show is in view for few days still so if you are flying to Poznań like tomorrow yeah what I tried to do here is to put together the simultaneous notion of human history and violence but also not human history and also violence because what Soviet Union did to nature is also pretty much violence because it was raped, excavated beautiful step landscape landscape was turned into you know this post industrial landscape of sort yeah some pictures I mean I created textile sculptures of Srila but it's because it's how they work yeah and about races I decided to put this picture in the last it's from today it's from my teacher Fid it's remains of Russian rockets gathered together in Harkiv I mean races thank you Lya I think we move slowly toward our next speaker Tatjana Tchedova who is online with us you are an artist a performer but also a curator based in Moldavia and we came across your via the Kajat platform based in Bucharest and so your artistic explorations focus on the loss of its identity and formations of a new identity for a Moldavian woman facing social, political and economic problems you will show some videos and photos about your own projects but it's also worth mentioning that when we met you you started this suddenly became a Patricia I think it's the connection so maybe I will just finish now please go on, now we see and hear you and if it stops then I will finish where did I stop? it stopped when you were saying why we were interested in Tatjana's practice and in her thinking of the peripheral context more or less okay good so yeah the project I was mentioning the project corridor which reflect on the position of Moldavia a country that we used to be considered as a peripheral but which became central which position became central after the full scale invasions on the 24th February as a humanitarian corridor so please Tatjana can you hear me? I'm sure now it's okay yes so I want to present myself I'm artist from Republic Moldova and I was born and raised in the Soviet Moldova but my formation as an artist happens in 2000 and 10 years of my research is focused on the topic post-Soviet what does interest to me Dina Tolstanova the Tertian of decolonial discourse in one interview said that for her this is matter of self-indification so I agree with that from one hand I feel myself post-Soviet different and on the other hand contemporary globalization adds new components to the definition of myself I explore the traces of the reverse side of the Soviet modernization project but also the traces the establishing of neoliberal globalism and the challenges associated with it it can be said that my current self-indification is an artist from periphery who comprehends that the experience of living both on the periphery of post-Soviet space and the periphery near the border of you all it's necessary to explain a little bit that after gaining independence of 1991 and after the armed conflict in Transnistria in 1992 Moldova remains divided in two parts Republic Moldova and the recognized state of Transnistria and I start my presentation with the drawing from the serious Soviet ruins found object to speak and show my context where I live this series of the watercolors is attempt to collect and archive materials related to the post-Soviet and this object I found in one of the Moldavian village on the right bank of Transnistria on autumn 2001 and it is the staircase of rural house with a concrete carpet painted in the colors of the flag of Moldavian Soviet Republic and it was absurd for me to see that the owners of this house continue to walk on this concrete carpet till now but the paradox is that this flag of Soviet Moldova is still existing and the recognized state of Transnistria located on the left bank on the Dnistria also you can see other drawing from the same Syria in Russian and Ukraine it's Solbal sea but in English salt paint so this found object it's a package of the salt attracted attention when the salt was disappeared in Moldova when the way in Ukraine was started the result that the largest produced rock salt in Donetsk region was stopped walking and the Soviet design of this packaging which has been circulated in the post-Soviet space till now became the starting point of walking with this object and the pain that was in me in that time and I think I was will be a product of the Soviet Imperial heritage as one of the post-colonial other I am from Ukraine Moldavian family and my mother is from a small Ukrainian village Cherkese from the family Shapovalenko near Odessa and my father was from Moldavian village Mikhaus from the family Lefter when I was growing up I did not feel that I belong to the Moldavian and Ukraine culture in the family we speak Russian and the Finnish Russian school and I I was more attracted to the Soviet Russian speaking culture than the following national tradition despite the fact that it's my childhood I often went to relatives in Belgrade Nistrovsk and Ukraine and also to Moldavian village I felt like a Soviet person not tied very much to national truths as a result I am Russian-fied Moldavian so I started my identity and one hand I cleared to see the Russian language was instrument for common language to communication but other hand we see a big influence and expansion of this language as a result of restitution and subjugation local language and culture there are still discussion in scientific circles where the USSR was colonial empire and Sergei Abashin who is engaged in postcolonial study in Central Asia views the USSR through the optics of both modernization and colonialism emphasizing that we must simultaneously see violence and subjugation and the same time some form of emancipation and reform for example comprehending their reconstructing the past through the gender optic what does emancipation in the Soviet time mean today in my artistic research I focused on understanding the artificial construct of identity of the Soviet woman was created in the USSR how it was formed what tools were involved through the my essay who is the new woman artistic book factory Red Star and the publication in search of the body of the textile industry I will touch on the subject of emancipation of the Soviet woman considering through the prism of the colonial patriarchal project the project of subordinating women to the Soviet state the woman unlike the woman model emancipation was the object of the policy here some images from the book factory Red Star and publication I research the exploitation of labor with industrial and post-industrial politics still nowadays in period of neoliberal politics and I would like to show also an artist book Soviet passport which I made in 2014 this document circulated for quite a long time to the Soviet space in Ukraine till 2002 in Belarus 2004 Georgia 2005 Republic Moldova till 2014 and Transnistria till now this document is circulated people who could vote, receive pension and even travel in 2014 I photographed people with passport both in Moldova and Transnistria and interviewed with them you can see here one citizens from Transnistria who received a Soviet passport in 1996 already where the USSR didn't exist many of the people I interviewed most of them all generation and some of them are nostalgic for that time not realizing what a colonial instrument this document was for example this last model of the Soviet passport was started to circulate in 1974 the date is quite very significant only from that moment the peasant can receive a passport we are able to depart to the villages and enjoy privilege on the equal basis with everyone else here are some photos from the Syria Lenin and peasants from family archive as an artist I work with archive especially with family archive integrated from my father artist designer and photographer and died very early when I have 60 years old if we review the back we will see another year in 1949 in Moldova the mass deportation of the peasants which lost a housing and land later became the property of the collective farm and in 1964 the big hunger in Moldova so I research the fate of the peasants during the 20th century and nowadays and to return to nowadays I would like to show some images from the curatorial project corridor the exhibition was open on 5th June and exists till now it was a response to the started way in Ukraine and Moldova has became a transit zone a humanitarian corridor that through which the refugees pass more than the population of Moldova itself and I create this humanitarian corridor as a physical space with the supporting of the artists from the post-Soviet countries in order to comprehend the common past realize the present and think about the future and as a part of the exhibition I wonder who is the stealing our future and the question was asked to the visitors of the exhibition also the artist and the results of interaction the collective library was created and also response-based publication also we have a panel discussion with the cultural workers from the Armenia Ukraine and Belarus and answering the question what will be common future and what comes after empire after the post-Soviet I remember one remark from a researcher from the online meeting probably it was in Kiev in the frame of what who said that this outbreak of the war in Ukraine the post-Soviet time has ended and we at the beginning of something else and with this I would like to end my presentation saying thank you for the attention yes thank you very much Tatiana for this insights into your practice and into your curatorial projects so we move on to the last speaker who is Renata Salets so we actually met Renata last September in Paris during one assembly related to culture and cultural policies and Renata works as a philosopher and sociologist she is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia and also a professor at the School of Law and Birbeck College sorry in London Renata you also helped numerous visiting professorships at Cardoso School of Law in New York, at Humboldt University in Berlin, at Duke University in Durham and many others your work is interdisciplinary and Renata focuses on bringing together law, criminology and study of political ideologies and also psychoanalysis and I think that what pushed us to invite Renata to join the collective is our discussions that we had with you in Paris but also afterwards on coloniality and in particular on the coloniality of mind and also on the role of apathy as a driven force for the rise of dictatorships in Eastern Europe and also apathy in the face of neoliberal ideologies which arrived in Eastern Europe so we'll give you the word Renata please. Thank you for the invitation I'm very glad to be part of this panel yes I will address a little bit it's kind of of our mind, our thinking I was raised in the former Yugoslavia which broke with Stalin in 48 and therefore I cannot speak from sort of like kind of living in a colonized country similar to other speakers however we did have socialism and in some way what I want to address today is that we have sort of kind of moved in a new direction of let's say colonizing the minds of the people then what happened in the past my research in the past when I started actually as a researcher was focusing on controlling people's minds with the help of ideology and in socialism this control I think differed significantly from how it works today now today we have much more a broad ideology on the one hand kind of the ideology of neoliberalism the ideology of choice which permeates sort of let's say our world but on the other hand what is really important to tackle is that we have a shift in our understanding of truth now we live in times of social media where secret algorithms are very much determining which information gets visibility and of course we also live in times of intricate web of state propaganda which often creates cacophony of voices where truth and facts are easily obscured and manipulated and here of course with the start of aggression in Ukraine we have seen this attempt on the side of the Russians to truly manipulate the question of what is true and what is not now this kind of a polarization which is sort of happening today where some people believe something is true and something not have been very much kind of let's say provoking feelings of identification with one group we often live in kind of an information bubble but the problem today is not simply people are trying to passionately persuade others to believe in something that they believe quite often we also observe a phenomenon that you know conspiracy theorists or people who are sharing fake news lies on internet actually do not believe in what they are sharing in my last book A Passion for Ignorance which just came out in paperback these days by Princeton University Press I was analyzing this phenomenon because my question was what are the gains when you are sharing lies and of course you get two gains first is that you get clicks you get confirmation from your own group a certain kind of recognition and then you get a recognition people who believe in something else are sort of angry when they respond online with being upset and so on from wounding another you get another kind of an emotional recognition which people are you know craving in a strange way now what is truth and what is lie has been very much part from the start of the Ukrainian Ukrainian war in Ukraine and I remember when at the start of the war there was the opposition expressed by Marina Oceanikova employee of the Russian television who on the main Russian TV channel interrupted the evening news by holding the large hand written poster declaring no war stop the war don't believe the propaganda now Oceanikova before she did this gesture she told to her friend that she was a child of an Ukrainian father and a Russian mother and she felt anger and shame for having for years spread Kremlin propaganda so she finally started to speak against the war but after this protest when Oceanikova was detained and initially she received a relatively mild punishment later she was threatened with a much bigger punishment which is why not long ago she escaped from the country now when the first punishment happened social media quickly started spreading the information that the whole protest was staged the idea was that the Russian regime wanted to show that dissent was still allowed and that people opposing the government get lenient sentences now simultaneously however a counter argument started circulating on social media which stated that the Oceanikova protest you know was actually kind of a fake and it was sort of like part of Russian propaganda itself so suddenly after this protest we had a debate whether protest was staged or real and in a way this debate overshadowed the message what Oceanikova was trying to which Oceanikova was trying to convey so we can see that we are living now in this debate what is true and what is false which steers more passions than a certain kind of let's say a gesture which very much touched the truth of the war now an important change in regard to truth happened now in the past in the Soviet times you probably remember Vatsal Havel who later became president of Czech Republic was in the 70s very much speaking about the need to live in truth so in his essay The Power of the Powerless Havel speaks about the greengrocer who privately did not believe in the communist ideology but publicly every year on May 1st he obeyed the party and put in the window of his shop the required poster which declared workers of the world tonight now greengrocer did this just out of the fear and the habit but privately he had different beliefs so Havel imagined that one day the greengrocer would stop putting the slogans in the shop and would speak the truth he would tell openly that he does not believe in the regime and you know Havel further imagined that other people would follow and this attempt to live with truth this kind of gestures of disobedience would shatter the world of appearance and lies which for Havel were fundamental pillar of the system so if more people would stage a dissent the regime would be threatened Havel however didn't imagine that more than two decades after his death it would be in the interest of power to make matters of what is truth and what is lies so confusing that people would be passionately debating more whether the protest against propaganda was real or fake then you know about the lies that propaganda is spreading so what we see in post socialist authoritarian regimes like the one established in Vladimir Putin's Russia is that this demand for kind of a consistent narrative ceased to exist Peter Pomeranzo a Keo born writer and TV producer now living in London has pointed out that Russia became governed by political technologists at the start of the new millennium now the problem was not only that truth can be brutally censored but also that people no longer cared about truth so life became a kind of a reality show where Putin was the main star like a performance artist who changed from one role to another sometimes he looked like a businessman another time like soldier then bare-chested hunter spy tsar or superman now in this Russian reality show what is truth and what is lie became irrelevant but the propaganda machine also worked hard to instill doubt and confusion into other regimes in the world for example with meddling in elections among them US elections so we can see that in a number of ways in the last decade ignorance about truth and facts have been effectively encouraged on the one hand by authoritarian regimes so authoritarian regimes today actually profit from this doubt now we can also say that capitalism profits from what have been called the merchants of doubt we have seen for example intricate propaganda mechanisms undermined scientific discoveries it started with smoking then climate change COVID-19 and similarly for example like Russian government claimed that there was no war in Ukraine others around the world for example before the war happened were denying that something like coronavirus exists and they perceived everything related to COVID-19 as fake now another very important point about colonialism today is also that we live under the perception that if you work hard you can get to any information or that something like knowledge economy exists that we are kind of driven by the idea to have more information better technologies and so on there have been quite a lot of discussions in knowledge economy I will not go into it now but some have pointed out that actually we are not living in times of so called ability to find new information or even knowledge economy but more something that have been named ignorance economy which is that there are so many ways of knowledge being prohibited not only through censorship and state propaganda but also being impossible to come close to with patents with all kinds of let's say legal mechanisms which are preventing people actually to have access to what science for example has established or you know kind of knowledge economy on which let's say our economic development actually relies so on the one hand we have prohibition or kind of let's say censorship that observes that we can observe in many parts of the world nowadays on the other hand we have the type of hierarchies in regard to knowledge that are established on Google or other search algorithms where secret algorithms are working in the way that we don't know and pushing some knowledge higher up than another and then on the other hand we have all kinds of let's say secret data power pet computer complicated software and you know the trademarks the copyrights which are limiting access to knowledge so in the conclusion I would say that speaking with about colonialism today we should actually go beyond thinking about sort of like occupying the lands or you know enslaving the people you know sort of changing the culture which are all important studies and they have been very much part of the studies of colonialism in the past I think that more and more we should look at also the new type of colonization of the mind the playing with the truth or let's say the playing with the doubt in regard to truth and also you know be very much critical of the way capitalism today uses new types of strategies to limit access to knowledge and to information thank you. I think it's the time to open up discussion and first I would like to ask audiences here and online if someone wants to put a question or remark I have a question I'm sorry just to remind you the play of this dancing chair so when we we speak we have to be close to the microphone I had a question for Vassil I think especially even though Tatiana also gave an example of that I was wondering if you had concrete examples of cultural institutions like investing in the in the discourse to take great orders towards colonel like the persistence of colonel practices in the U.S. U.S. sorry I'm sorry but actually it's not a proper game because we have too many chairs and too it should be the opposite it should be like lacking in order to work it properly so it's it's very hard to point at some so there are obviously some practices within a number of institutions which which have been conducted for quite some time even before the 24th of February so for that matter for instance what they can name is some institutions in Riga or in Warsaw for instance the Museum of Modern Art and some others but the problem is that this kind of you know that it's a paradoxical situation because somehow what has been revealed after the 24th of February we had known this even before but at the same time it came by surprise it caught us by surprise it's really a kind of work of how the unconscious works we all knew that but at the same time we somehow were not aware of it but so in this sense I think it's a kind of a challenge for many many cultural institutions across Europe because it's basically not only the matter of it's not only the problem of some particular Ukrainian context like we have here applied to other countries like Armenia or even the Baltic countries or even the Baltic states right in many many cases and I think that it's this kind of it's rather something which is also inside many inside the modus operandi of many cultural institutions in the EU but also elsewhere right this kind of ignorance but also sort of symbolic identification with with the discourse that they had been sticking to at the same time it appears that it's not really something that is so it's not really working but at the same time it's very hard to abandon it right so I think this is really a kind of a collective endeavor that has to be applied in order to overcome this but I don't mean here just to be really clear that like we in the in the wild post-communist east know how it works and you over there don't know right I think it's also something that has to be worked through collectively and I think that you know what worries me to be honest here is is that so one of the features of this change for me I would say is the willingness to step beyond your own institutional borders what is the extent that you are ready to go beyond because I mean this also showed after the 24th of February when really many many cultural institutions were rather willing to work inside their bubbles but I think it's also the question of how we treat institutional politicality of ours institutionally speaking right so what kind of gestures are we ready to disturb our publics and authorities that we are also financially dependent on in order to push something further right so at the same time for me honestly speaking I mean I'm not really I don't really understand why so many cultural representatives in the west are afraid to do so because they don't risk anything at all pretty often so for me it's really kind of a miracle why but at the same time so it's also pretty often it's also especially with regards to the museum framework right it's also the question how to reframe your own collections right because for instance I know many cases when after some debates and discussions like with regards to colonial discourse applied to the history of art right for example it's a pretty colonial term so called Russian avant-garde it's really doesn't really exist right because it was not Russian and avant-garde is not even national in for that matter so and for many reasons it was like the question oh but how we would frame Kandinsky you know it's also like but it also is not a symbolic price but also very much a financial issue but so it's really a kind of huge kind of elephant like mechanism that you have to shift to certain level and so I think we are just we haven't even started I would say this process which needs to be conducted properly but I think it's really very important that it's not just a general idea of having an open museum hosting discussion right but to really work through your own background but also together with others to involve as many others as possible and to really to be honest with yourself right I mean also all of us what is possible and what is not so maybe just two really short remarks first positive one I think that there is a potential mostly within artists and art institutions to make some change in this decolonial process because I mean academia as a whole body is has its own limitations it's something very rigid very you know it's really hard to move something inside that and as artist sometimes I mean I always in between academia and art so I can speak from post positions I mean it's easier to with art and with artists and artists it's really easier to say something sometimes so I see a potential here and second remark I mean in order to what also Vasyl mentioned so in order to have this productive dialogue not when we like teach vast and reverse this power dynamic but when we work together we need to start being perceived as partners not as someone that who are underdeveloped or who you know just recipient of knowledge and not unable to someone who's unable to provide knowledge right and maybe some anecdotic example here about Vasyl Yermilov in MoMA I like this story my friend and colleague Tatyana who is with Ukrainian Institute I mean visited MoMA some six or five years ago and noticed that painting of Vasyl Yermilov who also was labeled as Russian artist despite his Ukrainian and he worked in Harkiv that this painting was put upside down I mean literally upside down and she like left a long comment in this book visitors came home, nothing changed and I mean she was speaking about like this for five or six years I don't remember I would at least twice a year wrote an email and it was totally ignored nothing changed I mean it was still upside down because every time and every time she left her remarks it was like automatic reply like we are grateful for your contribution you are helping us to make our museum better I mean blah blah blah nothing ever changed and she also mentioned it's one day she said and like send them research I mean with examples data like proper information and also she had been ignored but when the full scale innovation started she suddenly changed it and I mean it took a war I mean actual war to change painting in a right position I mean just think about it think of this example of knowledge production of how do you perceive someone as part you know when someone starts dying I mean yeah I will stop and what do I do yeah yeah I also wanted to add on that I mean I think we have a perfect example in the room when we were sort of brainstorming on the kind of conversations that we would have here we were asked by the collective if we were up for taking sort of the part of the institution in talking on how we have failed or how we can improve or and of course we're struggling with this question because we are individuals but we also represent an institution and an institution I mean it's a it's a machine made out of power games of politics of and also wonderful things of course as well but but so yes so you know we didn't feel like as individuals we feel like we have a position and we can contribute and what we are trying to do the small somehow to make some change day by day but as an institution it's much more difficult to be as you were saying sort of honest honesty is not really I cannot associate honesty to institutional world somehow when Black Lives Matter happened we did not make an institutional comment because we are friends with the American embassy outrageous but somehow we all did it individually but somehow there was no public sort of interaction and this is kind of I think the limit of an institution and maybe more on individuals or more like in a collective discourse but it should be more on the individuals that make up an institution rather than the institution as a machine that has no face then I will ask you because for me all these power games but just sit here just because I don't think that these power games or political approaches are something that we have to separate ourselves from it's quite the opposite that it's really very nice instrument to have an impact on something but just really wondering so if you think that if you had a statement with regards to BLM you would be deprived of friendship I don't think this who at the time was representing the museum did but why? so is it somehow anti-American economical reasons but BLM is not anti-American quite the opposite it's super I mean it's super raw American sort of movement right I mean what America stands for for centuries right absolutely but somehow it was I mean sorry is it not what America stands for? well I mean at the time it was Trump that was running the White House he was quite happy to see that happening you know so no he wouldn't want you would lose influence with the American government if you stood with BLM so yeah unfortunately these powers shape our institutions I would love I would love but maybe because I mean otherwise it's it will never work if we if we make concessions step by step we will find ourselves in a totally different position in some years and you would say that wow we were so naive and stupid why did we do that you know but it's really like sort of invisible you make a decision here and there and then it's somehow but maybe you did that I mean the museum for instance maybe now after Trump it would be different so you never know really you know but that's the nature of politics right that you have to really to test the limits because otherwise it's there's that fight that we have to have I mean but it's just my name no no no not at all I think that in this case I would probably recommend anarchist theory where we try to de-hierarchize those places those institutions for example saying that one institution isn't allowed to say something because of another creates a power dynamic and we have to work within ideologies of or anarchist theory to try and flatten those hierarchies yeah so there are solutions it's just that it's another thing we're not looking at no no but that's a great way to to remember there are ways around this and another thing we're blind to sadly but I think the example of the black squares that were shared during Black Lives Matter is also very significant in how you know institutions are very it's very easy for institutions to go into discourse right like it was so performative all of these black squares that were posted by institutions in America under Trump but at the same time COVID was happening and the black staff and the indigenous staff of institutions if they were part-time they did not have health insurance so also I think like I don't know if this is like more of a general question I guess and maybe to go back to what you were saying Vasil about the ways of sort of yeah thinking very politically about this production of knowledge what are actual like effective ways of showing support without it in the end just benefiting the institution and not the actual artists and cultural workers you were talking about financial strategies but I feel like what are institutions in western Europe able to do that would be helpful to eastern Europe very good but they will be helping to better the institutions themselves but also they will be helping others help yourselves too yes but going back to what Gannata was saying so her book that by the way I don't remember the title but I want to buy it so maybe after if you can a passion for ignorance passion great title by the way great title but I mean also the fact of saying I'm gonna clean my conscience by posting a black square and on what you say is it really relevant because if that justifies and then it's like done I did my job and we can move forward then maybe it's better you don't post that black square but then you act on it so yeah it's also the hypocrisy so it's a big question but it's also the paradox because on one side I feel like the institution has such a big network to actually do something but on the other they are not really free to do that something as an individual and the other ways like an individual is not going to make change alone but he can say more I mean in in a western privileged situation where we can say what yeah but so it's a very difficult battle also to be truth and to be part of an institution to be an individual like it's it's difficult I wanted also to suggest that maybe we involve the online participants if maybe you would like to comment on the topics that we discussed now what do we expect maybe from western institutions or maybe you would have some other comments or questions so please I think I have one maybe for Renata and also jumping on what you were saying why it took us a war to react and to change and what can be learned from that and in relations to the coloniality of the mind what do you think Renata why Ukraine wasn't on the I would say cultural agenda of Europe in the past years and what we can learn for the future yes I can start first yes I definitely agree that the culture in Europe did not pay enough attention to Ukraine Ukraine has been going through democratization they had incredibly important street movements which toppled the previous regime and also in some way I would say that we were not definitely paying attention to what happened in 2014 with the occupation of Crimea and that was the biggest mistake I think not simply culture but really politically the idea was that just to close the eyes and kind of observe it as if it does not affect Europe and in some way there was also wrong perception that Putin will stop with getting Crimea and he will not go further which was I think really the major problem of politics in Europe since political elites were continuing dealing with Putin and of course especially Germany hoping that economy will somehow appease his autocratic tendencies you know having with him an economic exchange buying his oil and gas and that was I think really kind of a terrible mistake of Europe which we are kind of living through now culturally I think that there was also inner kind of let's say struggle going inside of Ukraine in regard to Ukrainian language when I visited Ukraine myself twice I saw that I was there once before the occupation of Crimea and after just around 2018 and I myself was let's say surprised when my book Tyranny of Choice was translated in Ukraine it was translated into Russian language although it already existed in Russia it was translated before in St. Petersburg I asked my Ukrainian colleagues why they did it and they said that majority of people at the university are actually reading in Russian and that they would have a better chance to promote the book which was for me a sign that Ukrainian language at that time was not yet so fully present in the academic circles that's like a little anecdote but I think that the use of Ukrainian language really started you know sort of like I would say later also in the kind of let's say academic circles being used as a written a language for the intellectual elites or being let's say widely in the university I'm sure that my Ukrainian colleagues can maybe add to this but I think that actually inside Ukraine there was an important struggle going on to elevate the Ukrainian language and also in a way to kind of get out of what we have been debating today the kind of the cultural colonization which has been going on already since the Soviet times Yes, thank you Rinata I see that Faena raised her hand so Faena Janusova who will also by the way participate in the program with the workshop next year so would you like to comment? Yeah, please Thank you very much, yes I'm also a part of a collective the artist from Uzbekistan based now in Germany so when we talk about how to be anti-colonial and I think it's important to mention that today's praxis a lot of initiatives they're talking about decolonization and also in Central Asia but this initiative they're organized by Ranaway Russians or people who pretended to be experts of this region but not by from native people yes and it's very difficult question also for me and also for the institutions because I think it is necessary to look carefully at who is behind this all initiatious or also who they are representing or it is important to give all voices yeah Thank you Thank you Faena I think that we have time left for one question or comment if someone wants to do so we also have words I will address it Marina so I'm also a member of beyond the post-Soviet group I'm a historian based in Paris and I had a question for Lya so she mentioned Golodomor and my question is how's the memory of Golodomor is working out in Ukraine Yes totally yeah that's what I was intended to say is we will stuck here forever I mean I already together recently we like make few projects about this and wrote some articles so I don't know do we really want to talk about it or maybe I just mention it briefly I mean it's no maybe it's maybe we put in contact maybe we can discuss privately because I mean I don't see how do I spend half an hour yeah I think I'm looking at the time and we need to wrap up we also asked all participants for today to think about one word that we will kind of we're collecting a part of kind of vocabulary this vocabulary also it's not the vocabulary you look up the word you take this word and you can think about and expand and have this word to act we already got some words some words we have a word from the last time from Epanus and it was the word C because C it was important entity or it's important for Estonian identity C the access of the C and C is this kind of world fluid but also C was also military occupied and they didn't have access to it which was insane it's a part of your identity you go to the C and then it's restricted so it varies this memory of occupation this trauma but also it's a freedom to act quickly and to penetrate to unite and this is kind of my interpretation also thinking about this word so I invite you Tatiana and Rinata to give the word yeah I give the word apathy could you say just in two words explain a little bit the choice in regard to what is happening today in Ukraine my fear is that sort of apathy closing your eyes and the observers in Europe and elsewhere might be kind of the next step of how we are going to you know help and react to the occupation thank you, thank you Rinata Tatiana my words it's peripheric and for me it's quite strong words because I live in the periphery between the spaces and also in Europe and for me it's also interesting that I live not in the focus but in the east it's a periphery view that you are not focusing in it but it's something else not in the focusing thank you I'm not sure whether I would go into details but I would say that from my side I would name because I was like really doubting devastation devastation it's also it means so many things at the same time right I mean parallel to kind of an all encompassing word for so many phenomena currently on the ground in Ukraine but it's also the question of the future I mean not only me but many traditions and cultural practitioners are struggling themselves with like how to work with such an unbelievable unthinkable level of devastation I mean because it's not just genocide it's really like ecocide I mean the black sea during the last more or less 10-15 years will be simply a dead sea it's just the only if you think for instance of the demining process of Ukraine because now it's more or less like to Austria's like with regards to the Ukrainian territory which have been mined only the demining process would take like decades it's something really that we all are even cannot even come to terms with and are not really like cannot really grasp entirely what kind of moment we are in I think it also means that some of us will collapse I don't know how I'm supposed to say something after what you said yeah but anyway for me my choice is obvious it's traces but also remains I couldn't decide between two of these words so traces I think it's pretty obvious choice because it's how I work because I mean power structures and colonial bodies they like to operate that way that you don't find anything after they pretend that that it's like supernatural order of things that how the things are and we have to find some traces in order to oppose this I mean because now we have our active word but I mean in general yeah thank you thank you so much thank you and we will continue and I think that maybe we can take a question for the title of this event how can we be anti-colonial, how we can become anti-colonial this is the question and the mode of safety that we can take with us as cultural workers, as institutions what does it mean what means we need to to get there yeah I think this is something we need to take to take home and to continue and the problem will continue next year and I'm involved in two workshops one by Farina Inusula who is here with us and one by Alistina Kahitze and then we will be continued by the Dan team and getting back to maxi word context more Europe, Western Europe, Western Europe but we're still hoping to have links between Western Europe and Salvatore Inida to study forward dynamics to prepare for the next thank you guys thank you bye bye bye bye you