 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for all your contributions. Thank you very much for coming here today. Thank you very much for organizing. I think that many people with whom I had a brief chat before, feel that it's very interesting, very inspiring, but also set space in a way today that we share these different stories, different geographies, different voices. And I'm very grateful for being part of that. My name is Alexei Berysionak. I'm a curator and writer. Currently, I'm a fellow of CSA Arts Link and Verily Center for Arts and Politics in New York. And I'm extremely glad to share this space with you, Lea, today in a short conversation. Yeah, thank you. I'm Lea Feldman. I teach at the University of Chicago and recently doing some more arts collaborations. And it's been really a joy for me to be here. You all are incredibly inspiring. And this has really been our, we're talking today about unlearning geopolitics. And for me, as an instructor, the process of unlearning is really crucial to decolonial praxis. It's crucial to abolitionist pedagogy in the classroom. And I'm often thinking about not only what I teach, but how we teach. And so being here with you all and thinking about the kind of connections across spaces that we're creating is an act of unlearning geopolitics, right? Unlearning these given systems and figuring out how to work creatively within them. And so I wanted to open this up to you, Alexei. I spent a little time this week in reading your work, and it's been so incredible to get to know it. And I wanted to ask you about your recent exhibition, Infrastructures and Solidarities Beyond the Post-Soviet Condition. And I wanted to think about this through the lens of unlearning. You're introducing the notion of infrastructures in a way to think about colonial resource production and also new alternative infrastructures and how we can repurpose that. So I'd love to hear more about that project. Thank you very much. I want to maybe actually start also kind of weaving and referring also to ISIS, Buster River, kind of like very touching and kind of proposals. And I think that I believe that I also try in my work to follow this idea somehow, like not to pathologize trauma, like in this very doomed and dark times, but also trying to kind of understand the framework how kind of violence can separate on different velocities as kind of immediate, but also slow violence and kind of to find and articulate those frameworks which enables them, but also those frameworks which help us to think how to resist and how to resist many different things, but also including this kind of geopolitical terms which actually also produce different forms of violence. I think with personally I'm coming from Minsk, Belarus and currently based in Vienna and that's kind of part of different multiple groups who've been part of the social uprising in Belarus in 2020. I think it was both for many of us a process of learning, but which I actually find more important is a process of unlearning in a way, and this is a hope we'll have some time to open it up a little bit in the beginning of this terminology which is kind of implied from the outside, but also kind of proliferated inside of those contexts, kind of really makes things more complicated, like how to proceed and how to imagine different kind of futures. So the way how me and my co-curator of the exhibition Antonina Stébourg, the exhibition which happened in National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania, and kind of that was a subtitle that you shared and the kind of the title of the exhibition was If Disrupted, It Becomes Visible. So we kind of our idea was to speak about different infrastructures that were taking both in terms like something that we referred to as invasive infrastructures referring to many other scholars who've been studying them, but also as fugitive infrastructures. So basically what like different ways of struggles and also different forms of resistance. So kind of the title gave us an idea that actually in the different moments when like infrastructure or infrastructure can be disrupted and it kind of becomes much more tangible and something that can be seen like the way how it works and which can also operate on bodily level, it can operate in the different temporalities and spaces which are not immediately kind of which kind of go beyond human perception. So for us kind of learning and also learning those frameworks which were not coming only from Belarus, but actually from the different geographies from Baltic countries, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia, which found themselves in this very complicated space between Russian imperialism but also kind of liberal market and kind of neoliberalism from the other side and kind of trying to search different ways how those infrastructures can be found but also what kind of different groups and different approaches can kind of inform us how to resist this violence. And maybe I also would like to kind of to maybe to mirror this question back to you and also I'm curious to know like what actually this kind of your educational work but also your curatorial and publishing work, how like what are these notions that inform it, like what the notion of unlearning brings to your work. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm working on this project now with Artists Collective Slavs and Tatars and where we made a book, an art book, which was styled after kind of a reading primer, an alphabet book. It's called Asvukha Starts Back. It's a kind of unalphabet book or an un-reading primer and we looked at Soviet children's books and the project was an idea to how to decolonize the Soviet children's book but also thinking about the script reforms in the Soviet Union. So and it's a sound book. So we are attempting to think about how to give sounds other lives and think about sounds as capacious beyond being confined into different alphabets. That is the way that alphabet systems and alphabet reforms, so there were many alphabet reforms in the Soviet Union both putting scripts into Cyrillic and then now into Latin and various forms of Latin script and that changed readerships, made text inaccessible to people so also it's about access to infrastructure and so we were thinking about how sounds could escape those alphabets and so it's this kind of children's book story and the project there too was to try to translate a complex history that is of the alphabet reforms and the way that levied power and consolidated power within the Soviet Union for example one of the things that it did was inhibit revolutionary movements among say pan-Turkic groups for example across the empire by putting all the languages into different forms of the Latin script and then Cyrillic script so we were thinking about forms of solidarity and how they are mediated through scriptural histories in that sense but it also relates to this notion of infrastructure and I think one of the things I found really compelling about one of the projects we were talking about was the use of telegram and telegram channels as a means of kind of disrupting again the kind of hold on the print press and also the restriction on internet usage and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about that project Maybe I also kind of come back to the exhibition in a way that me and my collaborator Antonin Estebu kind of while doing research for the exhibition for us this notion of anti-imperial disruption was quite important and I believe that we were speaking about anti-imperialism as a kind of certain praxis which has a history and I believe that also your work actually speaks a lot about different legacies in the geography which was shaped by Russian Empire, colonialism and for us for example it was very important to see how different anti-imperial practices can be resonating with contemporary moment and find vocabulary how to speak about that and for us while working at the exhibition one of the objects that was also which was an object which was a railway control cabinet was very important and this railway control cabinet was an object part of the infrastructure kind of a display of infrastructure that was attacked by both hacker group kind of originating from the Belarus 2020 cyber partisans which I believe that you might have heard about because the group did many different cyber attacks for the whole kind of digital realm of the Belarusian state but also this control cabinet was attacked physically by many many so-called Belarusian railway partisans so for us it was actually very interesting to see how and kind of following the research by prominent Ukrainian researchers with Lanna Matvienko to show what this notion of cyber war which was also quite central to the exhibition how it implies different how it puts together both digital and kinetic violence and also different temporalities of those violence into something so that object for us which was as we kind of put in the exhibition essay was something that kind of formed this kind of anti-imperial disruption since then we were speaking about many different ones and maybe also I think that's also interesting to mention I think in this context now here I believe that also as we are following many many debates now which kind of try to see how the colonial frameworks might or might not work in the context of Eastern Europe, socialism, post-soviet and I think that this is also very interesting to speak about it in terms of either the colonial anti-imperial because it's also very complicated topic which needs a lot of preliminary remarks to that and I think that also like maybe referring to the second part of the title which was kind of beyond the post-soviet condition so I'm actually also curious from your side from your experience and kind of coming back to this notion of unlearning geopolitics how what is your kind of in your research how you would approach these very terms that imply both space and time and what would be your relation to them Yeah I think that's a really good question and the way you were framing it as well in terms of building solidarities I think is really important one of the projects I'm involved with right now is a collection of anti-colonial manifestos and the idea there is to bring many manifestos like in some ways what this assembly is doing together over the course of the 20th century across space and time from the early 20th century say revolutionary Armenia to Mexico and to put those into conversation and I think you know one of the things that we share in our work is trying to rethink the term post-soviet and term post-socialist and what that term I mean that term comes out of a moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War and this kind of marking of the rise of neo-liberal capitalism to universal dominance and what kind of blockages in turn that formation creates right what that geopolitical concept then when it takes on life and how that inhibits forms of solidarity and inhibits ways of thinking about connection so I wanted to kind of throw that question back to you and how your work is trying to reimagine alternative possibilities beyond the post-soviet you talk about alternative futures that can be projected from rethinking the post-socialist and I want to hear more about that I would maybe put it in the following ways that I think that especially with like especially after the invasion of Russia to Ukraine I think for many people like it would kind of manifest the end of like actually both post-soviet and post-socialist but and then there were I think I mean also like historically there were different attempts to question this notion for various reasons but I think that for it became like very obvious now that of course we are somewhere else and this is I think a big challenge also like to find the proper vocabulary but there are of course very clear reasons why this term is problematic now and I believe that many like my colleagues and many artists, scholars, thinkers, philosophers activists are really doing a lot now and I believe this is like very important moment to kind of trying to figure out how those legacies but also futures of movements in those geographies can be somehow finding different ways how to align with different anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles and of course it's not an easy process it's a lot about learning and learning it's a lot about kind of aligning with different movements which might need space to understand why they can be kind of working together and what is kind of anti-colonial anti-imperialist agenda to that respect and I believe this is extremely important now when we follow different like kind of this geopolitical catastrophes which are kind of also have the same root now like the colonialism from where it is struggling so I believe that this kind of alignment between I don't know between Kyiv, Belisi, Gaza many other places is something that is very challenging and absolutely important, essential for this moment Thank you