 All right. Welcome everybody to the last keynote of the second day of the reshape intensive in Cluj. Welcome everybody, the reshapers, the partners, everybody involved in the project and hopefully also a lot of people from the local arts community in Cluj for this keynote. Maybe for those that are not that acquainted with the project. So we have five days of an intensive program here, five groups of artists, activists, people trying to reshape the way we organize arts in society are here to develop ideas together and we also developed from the partnership a series of workshops and keynotes to inspire. The title of today is Solidarity on a Planetary Scale. We'll talk more about that, but first let me introduce our eminent speaker, Oksana Timofeva, who is going to, well, provoke our thoughts in the next one and a half hour. So Oksana is a professor at the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at the European University of St. Petersburg. So she has a wide range of research interest and she's a very prolific writer. She has a wide range of topics that she can choose from to drop here in this group of reshapers and the local arts community. So that is a luxury for us, but her experience goes even further. What's also relevant is Oksana has been involved for quite some time in Stodela. If I pronounce it correctly, it's a collective of artists, philosophers, activists, even one choreographer I think from St. Petersburg. This collective has been active since 2003 in St. Petersburg and has taken a number of really relevant initiatives that are very inspiring also for the ideas that the reshape groups are working on. So that is apart from the concepts that Oksana will give to us, another approach for what we could then elaborate in a talk. Because that is indeed what we are going to do. We are having a keynote now, but we are going to make it interactive. Oksana will deliver a presentation, add some questions afterwards to warm up, but of course the idea is that we have a debate here with the group about the ideas that are put on the table. So as I already said, Oksana told me when she arrived on Sunday that she had multiple directions that she could take for this keynote. In the program there is a text about solidarity on a planetary scale, but yesterday somehow after being here and hearing the discussions, you decided to twist that a little bit, I will let you yourself introduce how you see that, Oksana, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for this beautiful introduction and welcome everybody. I am glad to be a part of this very nice, huge gathering. And I have to say that at the beginning I wanted to speak about something different about science and technique and nature, but the spirit and the air of Transylvania pushes me rather in the direction of mystery and magic. Also, when I was still in Moscow three days ago, a friend of mine, a friend of mine, when I told him that I'm going to Kluz, he said, oh, you will like it there. There are so many beaches in the region. He was originally from somewhere around here. So this is one spirit and the other spirit that accompanies these sessions is the one of revolution, Lebanese revolution, for instance, to which many of us, me included, refer to various contexts. There are a lot of people that somehow connect and relate themselves to what's going on in Lebanon and other things. So I will introduce you to this very interesting example. I will, using a kind of a time loop, I will go back 200 and I will refer to another revolution that happens a bit more than 100 years ago and will try to describe a miraculous side of it for which the concept of solidarity will be crucial. I will talk about, so I will still talk about solidarity and witchcraft in relation to emancipatory collective practice that will be thus revealed as a kind of political magic. And I will start from one case. In the 1990s, right after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian tabloid press burst into a series of kind of exposé on leaders of the socialist past. A lot of this attention fell on Vladimir Lenin. As the founder of the state, he became a privileged target of all sorts of attacks. Historians and journalists competed to reveal unknown, weird or unpleasant facts of Lenin's biography. One recent essay suggests that Lenin's encasters came from Western Europe, more specifically from Germany. And there was an article that claimed that someone in the line of Lenin's, perhaps the leader's great-grandmother, was defamed for using black magic and witchcraft and burned at the stake by the inquisition. Given the number of people massacred under the same sentence in the 15th, 17th centuries, this story might plainly be true. My goal is not, however, to do justice to the historical veracity and to investigate whether Lenin was a descendant of that particular enigmatic woman or not. I just find intriguing the very idea that the revolutionary leader could have been an orchestral witch, witch sorcerer or magician. The superpowers, which as a Soviet child I imagined he had, of course, could have been literally inherited from someone who fell victim to the genocide committed under the banners of Christianity at the rise of capitalist modernity. So there are some images, yeah, capitalist modernity. This coincidence does not even look random. In Caliban and the Witch, Sylvia Federici, you know who is Sylvia Federici, of course. She is a great feminist, Marxist author and she did this research on witchcraft and the inquisition and the accumulation of capital. She presents the figure of the witch as a quote, the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy. The heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the oboe woman who poisoned the master's foot and inspired the slaves to revolt. Behind the witch hunt, she uncovers a joint effort by the church and the state to establish mechanisms of gendered control over bodies that imminently resisted newly instituted regime of productive and reproductive work. Inquisition aimed at cutting off all magic potentials that did not fit the scenarios of capitalist developments. The age of reason, as she called it, was chasing out magic queer, female, animistic lifestyles. As physical Federici explains, and I quote again, at the basis of magic there was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between nature and spirit and thus imagined a cosmos as a living organism populated by occult forces where every element was in sympathetic relation with the rest, end of quote. A miracle might have violated the laws of nature but it did not violate the whole of magic being and thinking. Now I would like to, you see this animistic conception relates, now I can explain what is the connection to the initial title of my talk, Solidarity on the Planetary Scale. I meant the inter-species, inter-think, inter-everything solidarity which is, I will explain also later at the end of my talk what is this thing as all about but it has to deal with also what is called the non-human which is not precisely the non-human because it's also kind of human, it's nothing more human than animistic lifestyles because everything becomes kind of human and so on. So now I would like to introduce my own theory of what is called the non-human of which craft well and not really a theory but a brief nose towards a theory that might be then accomplished by someone else or by anybody, maybe by myself, I don't know although this is not an easy task. In a sense it is conditioned by my personal experience of being a child so scared by the darkness that the only way out of the horror seems to me to let myself to be fully observed by its anonymous faceless object and to identify with this, with the darkness. A little child might want to become a magician when the world that is in the beginning was first so loving and imminent, ceases to immediately obey all the child's needs and start to live alive of its own. Her mother who was just here reading a fairy tale now goes out for work and staying alone in her bed so lonely the child helplessly waves her hands without being able to get the mother back. At a certain point it turns out that the desires of the child is not the one and the only law for the adults and that they observe the laws that are indifferent to the desires of the child. A catastrophic but at the same time necessary and constitutive rupture between myself and the world which shapes the experience of our early childhood gets deeper and deeper with the understanding that something goes wrong either with the world or with myself. Everyone has his or her own way to deal with this existential mess. I propose to differentiate between the two paradigmatic strategies of individuals to locate their experiences of being in the world between the desire and the law. Religion and magic. Religion helps one to conform to the world and places the desire under the law. Magic in contrast invites one to make the world conform to her desire and places the law under its arbitrary rule. Accordingly our culture knows at least two types of spiritual practices. A child limits herself with a dream to meet on her way a good magician in the forest. You meet a good magician and becomes religious, establishes a relation of gifts, of gift with God and expects that God will grant her wishes or God's. Another child wants to become a magician herself, maybe even becomes one, establishes a relation of contract, of exchange, of exchange, not a gift, exchange with the devil and gives him the soul or provides another service in order to be a master and grant any wishes herself. The one becomes a magician who is ready to make an inhuman effort in order to bring the world to conformity with her desires. She becomes a witch out of injury, resentment, weakness, despair, melancholy, envy, jealousy, loneliness, irreversibility of death or poverty. And when I was young and super poor, I wanted to obtain by sorcery 500 rubles in order to buy a sweater. And I remember this very well. I remember the sweater, it was so good and I was just looking around and thinking about this 500 rubles punk knot. I was searching for it everywhere. I thought it must be somewhere for me, but I didn't. One also becomes a magician out of boredom just to avoid being a Philistine. The main source of magic force is her belief in herself that she acquires maybe precisely at these moments of lost and catastrophe and desperately wants to do at any cost what others cannot. To awaken the dead, to return a beloved one, to revenge, to turn the time back and to redeem a fatal error in the past. One becomes a magician who learns that something is fundamentally wrong or that the world is unjust and that this order of things can be miraculously reshaped, a witch needs superpower and certain skills that exceed those of ordinary humans. Which craft is forbidden? Because the very fact of being a witch is the power of the impenetrable, the natural bara waavilum, because the man's power is reads from different forms of source. Fighting the enemy is considered a weapon of criminal principle. But the W judging is a means of control, which causes the with their own bodies, which is therefore alien. They partly belong to another world, or one might say she has another world, or even nothingness itself behind her back. Therefore, it is said that witches do not have a back side. There is nothingness behind. And this is why it is so difficult to hunt her in some of the legends. The moment she turns back to you, she disappears. I agree with Fidirici that the persecution of witches comprised a massive gender violence at the center of which were mostly women, although many men too were burned. Here, however, I would like to make a difference between real victims of inquisition that were accused in witchcraft, and the witch more generally, or like a conceptual persona, the magician or the sorcerer, the bordering figure whose body is neither male nor female, neither animal nor human, neither young nor old, neither alive nor dead. It is perfectly queer, witches can transform into birds, frogs, snakes, etc. There can be anything, but nevertheless, the world always remains intolerant to them between something that is and something that is not, that is nothing, their bodies bear within them that active part of the non-being that we call desire. Seen a naked woman flying on a broom at night, a non-human being might think that this desire is kind of sexual, but it is indeed more than that. Witch's desire is ontological, so to say. It must be strong enough to provide a superpower necessary for transforming something that is not into something that is. The non-being into being, or the other way around, to trigger rain, to race, etc. Such transformation is called a miracle. At this point, I would like to back to the figure of Lenin, the witch, that infinitely inspires me, among many things, what he definitely inherited from his alleged great-grandmother, whom I do what, healing the sick, performing abortions, cooking love potions, or whom may have lived alone in the woods, talking to the beasts, whatever. So was his insistence that miracles are possible? It is possible to make something out of nothing. That is, to transform something that is not into something that is, to bring something into being from the non-being. As noted by Ronald Tabour, a researcher who is working on political theology and also political theological motives in Lenin's writings and politics. In his study, Lenin's religion and theology sees in the notion of the miracle a crucial dimension of Lenin's approach to revolution. So he said that Lenin used to say that intelligent people do not believe in miracles that happen all of a sudden. However, at the same time, Lenin developed his alternative conception of the miracle, insisting that people can perform them if they are enthusiastic enough, if they are energetic and capable of making a supreme effort. Such miracles do not simply happen and cannot be ascribed to God or other supreme being. They are performed by real people themselves. Because notably, in this perspective, Lenin famously said that a revolution is a miracle. There is this nice, well, this nice, I don't know, funny comparison, you know, Alistair Crowley was saying every man and every woman is a star. For Lenin, every comrade is a kind of magician on one very important condition, which I explain in a minute. So in 1917, Lenin wrote that, I quote, there are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and the lightment of forces of the contestants that to the lay mind, there is much that must appear miraculous, miraculous, end of quote. And there are so many quotes like this, Lenin really, really uses this word miracle quite often when he's talking about the working class, the revolutioners, the people, the people. According to Bohr, Lenin's word usage of miracles lays its emphasis on human energy, effort and enthusiasm. Yet it requires stupendous moments for such miracles to occur, moments that evoke superhuman effort from those who did not know they could do such, end of quote. I would like to put an emphasis on Bohr's choice of the word superhuman, superhuman. There is a clearly Nietzschean moment evoked in Lenin's politics, human all to human being is a subject to overcome, to sublate. In this interpretation, a key notion of Lenin's equation of revolution and miracle is the tension between organization and spontaneity, between the so-called party avant-garde and the spontaneity of the people. Organization and spontaneity are the two terms of a dialectical opposition and what appears miraculous is their synthesis, their coincidence. So the party and the people, the organization and spontaneity, they contradict each other and then at some point they coincide and a miracle happens, a political miracle happens. That is where not a political technique, but a political magic begins. Here a crucial difference must be made between Lenin's magic and the magic of a lonely child from which I began, or a naive wishful magic of myself bewitching 500 rubles for a sweater. The novelty brought by Lenin's magic is that miracles are possible when they are performed not by a person, but by a collective, by a people. The condition of possibility of a miracle in a materialist sense is the collective dimension. A superpower held by the magicians of revolution comes from solidarity and comradeship. That are the forms of collective engagement different from friendship, love, sisterhood and other things that normally attach us to a singular individual or singular individuals who has name, face and something which cannot be replaced. I love this particular man or woman and she cannot be replaced by someone else and a friend of mine is this particular person. It's totally irreplaceable, but with comradeship things are different. No, a friend or a beloved one are pinned down by their identity. In comradeship identity vanishes. I love this person, but my comrades are treated anonymously and equally regardless of whom they are. And you know this feeling, well, who is a comrade? I have quite many friends on Facebook, they are called friends there. They have names, nicknames, whatever. It's not necessarily that I know them personally, but they are kind of Facebook friends, Facebook friendship, but some of those friends are comrades. I never saw them. I just know these are comrades. And they have like, and the comrades is an irreducible multiplicity. They are so multiple because behind that comrade, I don't know, in Cairo, there are like 5,000 of other comrades in Ibshep and so on and so forth. It's always this funny kind of multiplication of subjects, regardless of whom they are. Lenin and other so-called professional revolutionaries worked in the underground. This was called conspiracia, not to confuse with conspiracy, it's a different thing. According to Lars Li, in that particular historical context, conspiracia means the set of rules by which you do not get yourself arrested by the police or the fine art of not getting arrested, Lenin's words, the fine, conspiracia is the fine art of not getting arrested. Well, when I say this, this is all very relevant to Russia or Turkey, to our context of a current political not-so-very-happy disposition, but I may be explaining it within the discussion. Sometimes people forget that Lenin was an underground nickname of a person, actually called Vladimir Ulyanov. Bolsheviks in conspiracia lived fake social lives under different names, constantly changing their passwords, families, appearances, or even genders. What connected them was that they were all comrades. According to Jody Dean, another brilliant researcher who just recently published a book called Comrade, and with whom we were in conversations for quite some years about this topic, she says that a comrade is one of many fighting on the same side. This is one definition. I have to compliment this theory with some details that relates to the metamorphic and miraculous moments in comradeship. Comrades are replaceable, as I said. They are replaceable. Sounds awful, right? I was once, well, I will say in the discussion again there will be another example. This aspect of the masquerade makes politics a theater. Now it's me. In two minutes there will be some other comrade. This is a kind of masquerade, or I can be hiding from the police wearing artificial moustaches, something of this kind. It makes politics a theater, but this is a very special one, like Antonina Artos' Theatre of Cruelty. Here, ancient masks are back as they present a show, a ritual of a direct and instant communication. The mask is more important than the face behind it. If there is one, it directly communicates the effect. We must, and the effective substance that goes, that migrates between comrades behind the masks is precisely this solidarity, is an effective substance. This idea just came to my mind. We must understand that we live in a society where individualism is recognized as a supreme value. Everyone must have an identity, where identical in that we have all be clearly identified. I'm a 40-plus woman, whatever, a university professor, and comradeship, in a sense that I'm trying to develop here transgresses this rule. It breaks with the identitarian ideology. This is destructive towards an individual, autonomous person. In comradeship, there is no individual, but a set of appearances that runs from one figure to another. Comrade is the one on whose neck you can put your head. To whom, I mean, on whose neck, when your head is cut, he can give you his head. To whom you can give one of your hands if she has none, and the decisive moment when the enemy attacks. Friendship and love would not sustain such a disturbing act. They are too innocent, too kind for that, too human. It's worth mentioning that witch hunt historically coincides with the birth of humanism in its classical sense, and then the idea of autonomous personality, autonomous person, individual develops, whatever. In comradeship transcends the borders of humanity, which immediately puts it next to sorcery with its secret alliances, talking to the beast, and of course, breathtaking naked night flights. Viewed from a feminist perspective, witchcraft comradeship have a potential to transform our natural bodies and ways of enjoyment towards a new material and, of course, spiritual alliances with many different things. This points to Timothy Morton's idea of solidarity with the non-human people, non-human people. In his account, solidarity is not something specifically human, but the default affective environment of the top layers of the earth crust. It is very cheap because it is default to the biosphere and very widely available. So it's not something difficult. It's difficult among humans, yes. This needs some work to do, but among the bee and the flower, it's not difficult. It's basic. Solidarity is the simplest thing to get for free everywhere, at least, yeah. This approach falls out of post-humanist mainstream, and it brings ecological thinking together with the communist perspective on the human species as a non-racist, non-species species potentially. That must be achieved at some point. And this is a very important, important goal, so to say. The thing that worth to think about seriously. And I was also thinking about it recently. So here is about the planetary scale. So planetary means not necessarily human. Here, I can refer to George Bataille's ideas of two economies. He was saying there are two economies. One is the so-called restricted economy, which is what human beings are doing on earth, their businesses. And then the non-restricted, the general economy, the unlimited. This is the planetary scale, where the destruction somehow is always bigger than the accumulation. What the sun does, what the wind does, and what the air does, as well as all other living beings, living and non-living beings. So sorcery, or witch, as well as the shaman, for example, as Viveiros de Castro says, is a diplomacy of this dimension. The witch can be the one who is like a medium, an intermediate person that connects the restricted, the human, with the unrestricted, the general. I was thinking about it when I was taking part in the performance organized by our art collective, in Berlin last summer. Last summer it was, or maybe not even the last summer. I'm very bad in so many things happen. It was a learning play entitled Go and Stop the Progress and dedicated to the problem of conviviality, a term introduced by a Croatian-Austrian philosopher, Ivan Ilich, to designate the creative intercourse of persons with their environment. At the day of the rehearsals, one of the performers came with a dog. They joined the process and went very well with the movements of other participants. There was a lot of movement in this performance, a lot of choreography. Of course, somewhere saying that the dog organically feels somehow choreography of the play and must therefore be taken part in the performance itself and somewhere more skeptical, reminding that it is still an animal and it can get scared or too excited when the audience will come. The risk was taken and the dog successfully performed, which was not surprising as in, and this is my conviction, animality is performative, artistic, theatrical, or one might say theater acting, playing is animal. Look at the non-human animals. They never stop performing, playing, performing, whereas human animals only do that on the stage or in some special sites, on special occasions. In this performance, I had my own line. I had to read the philosophical lecture lying on the table. The table also echoed a psychoanalytic couch. It was a mixture of a lecture and a confession. The action took place outside and having my eyes open, I saw the blue sky and many beautiful big birds in it. They were my audience as I did not see others, so in a way I was lecturing to the birds, but it did not look like they were listening to me. We are so much influenced by humanism. We cannot really understand that it is somehow possible to talk to birds. Divine. Doesn't this mean that I should finish the lecture or is it the last call or something? Yeah, the birds. So I am thinking about the Saint Francis the seizie who was talking, preaching to birds. We can pretend that we are talking to birds or moving together with dogs, but we do it for the human observer somehow. Among many things, this is what, yeah, we are playing for the audience and animals, they are not. They are, I would say, playing for real. They are just playing there, whatever happens, not for the observer, but just for real. Among many things this is what we can learn from them if we manage to change the rules of the universalist game without its complete abolishment. The proof of the fact that we are all animals speaking different languages and that the translation is possible must be found not in the practices of inclusion, through violent repression, but in arts, in performances, in some interactions between species that are difficult if not impossible to formalize, like friendship, comradeship, love, and care. Now this sounds a little bit utopian as the entire capitalist system is based on the slaughter system, but things can change and we ourselves are that things that can and do and do change. So comradeship is not an easy thing to do, as well as sorcery, it can evoke forces that an individual cannot control. Therefore they become destructive, like in Goethe's story of a sorcerist's apprentice, who then, when his old master leaves, initiates a powerful magic processes that he's not able to stop because he does not know how. Reflecting in the questions of what does it mean to act, George Bataille comments. Now the sorcerist's apprentice, first of all, does not encounter demands that are any different from those he would encounter on the difficult route of art. Finally, I'm coming to art. Indeed, oh well, I've already touched that, so no worries, no worries, art is always here. And indeed, art is the thing that must be immediately addressed with regards to both witchcraft and comradeship. I would like to refer to the works of my comrade, Nikolai Olenikov from the group who I love a lot, especially when he depicts weird monstrous collective bodies breaking the continuity of nature for the strangest interspecies alliances. Here are some of his work alliances. So this is a canvas among numerous objects of the two-room installation in Tito's bunker in the mountains near Sarajevo, which is called Liberation, the Burlesque Museum 2015. There is a canvas in a modest wooden frame with a big courbet-like vagina from where a realistic brown bull had with the yellow tag in the year emerges. And then he's talking, the bull starts to speak and we kind of believe, immediately believe what he is saying or he's saying strange things, okay. So a penis ends with a mad dog's head, another picture which is breaking, barking while its entire body is being masturbated from the work Romantic Collection or a person's face is replaced with an animal head, with a flower, with something or someone else. Who are so other pictures? I just found some few and then I, I'm asking my comrade, who are all these characters, queer characters? I ask and he replies, they are folks or they are people, people. These monthly people gathers transgender dancers, bulls, philosophers, horses, cats and dogs, girls, wolves, roses, fingers, spirits and ghosts, vampires and other kinds of living dead and of course undead creatures. Brecht, Lenin, Gramsche or Hegel rise from their graves and take their parts among this utopian group of people, of the people. In this impersonal multiplicity there is no one. What does this no one mean just to conclude this talk? The structurally impossibility of the one to be. I'm now making a line to a previous talk by Soraya that I attended here in this room two hours ago, three hours ago. When she was talking about her experience of initiating an organization, a political organization from the zero point of the one person who at the beginning had to pretend that she is many. So she was sitting there writing that we are the group of people who want to go to Tahrir Square to be the bodyguards of the women who can be there sexually raped or whatever. And in the other very nice aspect at the beginning they were wearing workers construction workers uniform, which is also like I like this theatrical or political theatrical part of this organizational thing. So structural impossibility for the one to be. A comrade is never alone, not in the trivial sense that there is always someone else around who does not let her feel alone. No, being never alone means in a more radical sense that you are always many and your name is Legion. That is how you succeed in this fine art of not getting arrested, persecuted, burned alive by the inquisitors of all times. When we are many, we are equal, we suspend our identities, thus facing nothingness and turning back to the police officer in order to disappear for them. The anonymity. We can for example all wear the same costumes or wear the same mask and erase our names from the list of those who came here. So comradeship as anonymization creates a magic shield against the witch hunters that could catch people one by one, but will never manage to destroy the whole set of alliances of the great of the great sorcery in their species alliances. And here I just wanted to say that the witches are talking to birds, but this picture, I just love it. This entire talk was purpose to just to show you this picture that you already saw, of course, but this recognition is always a pleasure. Oh, this is from another work by Nikolai Aleinikov, the bull. And this is also the same bull. You see, he's saying you may, maybe you won't even believe me, but the story goes like that. And then he goes and telling the story about Tito's bunker or something. And yeah, here is the end of the talk, which is just one of the famous Russian meme when you do something, the magician. Yeah. Thank you very much. About solidarity on a planetary scale as it was in the title, but with a different twist than we explored many, many different aspects and elements. And well, I must say the approach that you had with the idea of political magic and miracles, it really sparked my imagination because in my best moments, also in the reshape project, I think we all want to have a revolution. And it reminded me in fact of something which you might as reshapers also recall when you had to apply to become part of the project. We had a number of questions for you. Load up your CV, give us your motivation, that typical questions, but we also had the question, do you do magic? So that was one way for us to try to scout the right people to create this revolution with us together. So I see a connection there, but also I was challenged and provoked by some of the ideas that you put forward. And in fact, what you say is with Lenin, the miracle, it can only happen through this collective approach. And in this collective approach, it's also a process of anonymization, of a masquerade, of a conspiracy defined art of not getting arrested. So and the replaceability. And somehow it's difficult for me to relate that also to the process which we are in for several reasons, because it's not something that I associate with art, because to make it in the art field, you need to be visible, you need to be branded, so that is already something. When we asked this question, do you do magic? We were looking for good, well, sparking personalities. And we have a good group of strong people here. And I find it difficult to think about us here being together as replaceable people. So that is something which is challenging me. And maybe you can explain a little bit more what you mean, because I think, yes, if you mean building a revolution, you need specific people with specific skills and an attitude and certain assets. Can you elaborate a little bit on this idea of anonymity? Yeah. First of all, there is, of course, the idea of anonymity in comradeship understand in a communist way is a super heretic for any kind of democratic, I mean liberal democratic discourse, just but on the one hand. Yeah, it's hostile to the idea of a certain individual as a highest value. So it goes against the grain of contemporary ideology. And in this sense, it's like almost a crime to say that comradeship is about that. And it had this connotations in the Soviet years, and some people who are now like under, who are now older than me, they still remember, they were adult when the Soviet Union was still there. Most of them just hate this word, comrades. Yeah, they would prefer to be called something different. But at the other hand, there is a very complex dialectics between the irreplaceable and replaceable. But to continue with the line of replaceability. And a nice example. A nice example is to be found in a comedy film done by Ernst Ljubic, which is called Ninochka. Have you seen this, this wonderful film? Oh, this is so great. Just tomorrow, whenever you have time, you will laugh. It's so good. And it's a comedy on fascism. Oh, no, no, not on fascism. Sorry, it's a different one. On fascism is also about comradeship and solidarity. It's even funnier. But here there is one scene, one episode in Ninochka. So the plot is the following. Something happens in Paris. And some treasure is stolen, whatever. And one very important functioner from the Russian state arrives in Paris to deal with local people from the Soviet embassy and to make a research of what happened there. But they do not know those who are in Paris. Few men, like three or a group of men, they do not know who will come because they were informed that a comrade will come from Moscow. So they are at the railway station in Paris, waiting for a comrade to come. Then the train arrives and there is a crowd of people coming. And they are trying to see, and they discuss who can be a comrade. Then there is one person, all gray, boring, like really serious face walking in such a way that they are thinking he is a comrade. And they say, oh, maybe he is a comrade. But then when they are about to approach to him, he kind of making his hand like in a Nazi's way, like a Zika LV. And then they realize, this cannot be a comrade. And at some point, like a beautiful woman, like amazing woman played by Greta Garbo approaches. And she turns to be a comrade. And they were like super surprised. I think this comic moment shows this funny dialectics. That was an interesting theory by Aleksandr Kolontai, who in the beginning, in the 20s, was working a lot in elaborating a certain ideas for the future love, how love will be under communism. And he had, he described some historical conceptions of love, some historical forms from like love medieval times, like bourgeois marriage, whatever. And he was talking about love comradeship. Love comradeship, which is a little bit look like if a contemporary reader reads it, it looks like a bit like this, what is it, polyamorous, free love. Can you maybe say that you have different levels of comradeship? Because when I hear, you also talk about your collective. I understand you're a limited group of nine people. So that is one level, but you're also quite active in really building a community around it. So you also explained me over dinner that you keep the collective also limited to a number of people. So you're playing with these different levels of comradeship? Yes, yes. This is very precise, what you just said on the practical level. Okay, right. We have, like Stodiel's group has a core of nine persons that almost never changes. And this is somehow, this is a unique comradely constellation behind which there is a platform that is always on the move. Everything is changed all the time. So there are various groups created around and the core remains. I did not think through philosophically how to explain it, but somehow, yeah, we have an example of how it works. What I think is very interesting about your collective is indeed that, well, it's, you can see it as a practicing solidarity, but from so many different levels, for instance, knowledge production through, you have a newspaper, you stimulate collective reflection that is one thing, but you're also quite active in education. So in several ways, you are really building a community. We borrowed a lot from Lein's book, which is called Stodiel's. And you know, he's having this book, this is a tiny booklet where he is talking about what is to be done. And among many things, he says a newspaper has to be published. So, and this is the goal of the revolutionary organization in a way to make, while being in conspiracies, to provide as much information as possible. And this is where conspiracy is opposed to conspiracy. Conspiracy is about hiding information, conspiracy is about spreading information. We are not in the underground, but we learned this principle. The newspaper is a material object that immediately somehow spreads everywhere and connects people. But connecting people per se is not an interesting thing. Sometimes it's not good to be connected to too many people. The most, the more important thing is to find your people, is to find comrades, which is again, you have to find it and you never know who it will be. Maybe it will be like a dragon or a bird will fly in and this will be a comrade, this guest as a bird. So, this doesn't mean that a comrade is that important. Maybe the bird is important because now, at this precise moment, this bird will take you and bring you to the place where you are needed for the course, for the revolutionary course. Animals are important. We have some animals who are very comradely treated in our environment and our group. All right, let me maybe open up the discussion to the room because so many ideas and concepts were introduced that resonate with what the groups are working on. So, maybe if you have any questions or elaborations or comments. Yeah, it's connected to your question. Maybe because I identify with a lot of the things you present here, but also slightly different, I have this concern about extractivism and it's maybe connected to this idea of being replaceable just to dig a bit further into that. Extractivism? Yeah, I will get to it. So, it's connected to this idea of being replaceable where from my own experience, being active in direct action and activist groups, you are, one is highly replaceable. It's about having a certain amount of bodies doing a certain action in a certain space or at least within my limited experience with that. And what I've seen is that it leads also to a sort of negligence when it comes to people getting burned out or when it comes to people no longer being capable of doing an action for whatever reason possible and that being really easily you're out, you're no longer a comrade if your body cannot be present for any reason. So, and to me that really is very similar to the extractivist tendencies of current neoliberal capitalism where we just take the resources being at oil or being at human bodies or being at knowledge and we just burn through it and the moment you're no longer serving the goal well enough you're put aside. So, I wonder within this proposal of of comradeship and and replaceability within that which can be also a magic. Where is the space for care and is and what is possibly the relation and the difference between comradeship and kinship where the specificity of relationality is maybe more visibly present? Yeah. We were discussing in St. Petersburg we were working on these issues quite recently this summer where in the framework in our art school, school of engaged art we were we were preparing a big performance on on comradeship which was called the how is it said the community with the limited responsibility right economic term so the limited something so we we made it like a community with a non-limited responsibility and not the community a comradeship the the word which is used usually in Russian this economic business language comradeship with limited responsibility we decided to put it like the comradeship with unlimited responsibility which is not about exchange but is about about gift so this is this is not about care because care is a little bit kind of yeah care is well a difficult question I I must say I don't quite trust this word it's everywhere this care I'm I do care I don't even when you you actually you you sometimes when the subject is supposed to care it's it's another way of saying I don't care but but I pretend to care here and it brings a huge personal and emotional component into the situation it brings psychology into this situation that brings affects emotional dimension we each somehow corresponds to this new sentimental turn everyone is is personally like endlessly how to say yeah don't you need that same don't you need it emotional aspect also if you're calling up for solidarity commentary scale also there is an effective as I said solidarity is an effective what did I say about solidarity that was an idea that came to my mind when I was talking affective substance substance yeah but it it is somehow alternative to the sentimental dimension which are in contemporary within the contemporary neoliberal environment masks a deep alienation between individuals that are created by this alienation so being care showing that we are really like separate I I am here you are here I do care I don't care about you do and don't you know the language of the unconscious does not know yes does not know no so the yes and no they always coincide if if I say I do I probably don't at the same time and and my idea is that and there is this this presupposition of the idea of the other that the other is really the other who is somewhere there and I am myself identity I am identical with myself but no one is identical with myself I am the other I am the other and and the first I talking about our collective practices the first thing we are trying to do when we are for example establishing a longer project school project we are trying to break these borders of individuals we are trying to learn people to be a part of a collective body to be replaceable in this new sense replaceable means yeah I am I can replace the other in I can replace you if you cannot do that right now but many senses well so to be a part of a collective body to to try this symbiotic to try the solidarity which Timothy Morton's describes as one that comes naturally the cheapest one the the not organic but but like planetary interspecies inter bodies somehow to yeah to to break this to to transgress a little bit this dogma of of a separate individual yeah maybe try to get back to the room also to see how these ideas resonate with what you have been working on and specifically I'm thinking of yeah yeah just um just something that it would be really interested to hear more from you about um is around the kind of realm of the digital and how within an animist belief system of of the kind of spirit of the technology or how Harroway talks about this and how this starts to um shift our sort of you know like nature human da da da da da da paradigm I didn't quite understand the question I would like to him more about this so you obviously have researched a lot but it maybe didn't come through so much but you mentioned sort of it but I would maybe a bit more about this element of it yeah within a digital kind of digital for me it was like an area that you were sort of touching upon but didn't articulate and I I think it's interesting in relation to what you are talking about I don't quite know how because I have only just like it just if it is maybe it's a maybe it's a glass of wine conversation I don't know yeah would be nice to to give me a little bit yeah to give me a hint what what because I I do not have immediate ideas about the digital in in this relation but we we are trying to in this work last year of work so to say in our school we gathered a group of young people younger people who didn't live in the Soviet Union and for whom the word comradeship was absolutely not obvious they were faced with the challenge to talk about comradeship and solidarity in like contemporary disposition and they were trying to apply it to their own lives so they were saying like how is it when you are always online when you are having like for example a collective page on facebook or wherever you know what you you can have a collective page where one never knows who wrote a poll who did the post the posting yeah because it is let's say that the page is called I don't know a black cat so a black cat writes tomorrow we will gather at the at the square of the red square Moscow and the black page replies yes yes let's let's do that and so on and so forth and this subject becomes so the black cat is is a collective which is at the same time which acts as an individual and which actually explains what is an individual individual every human being also non-human being is a collective I have a collective of myself of whatever they are not myself they are each of them is from somewhere is from somewhere else but there is this this this funny gathering and when I am about to make a decision there is this the competition you know Colonel Lawrence was a nice etologist who did the research on animals or animal behavior and he was compared to to the animals he was saying okay human is like having many many rulers at one at one ship let's say at one on why he called whatever so there are many rulers that that compete when there is a crucial moment of making decisions and then one wins for example I have several like my reasons saying no no you should not kiss this person and my my heart is saying no no you should do that so they compete one is taking a decision and there are some others like also also trying to compete whereas in animals he says Lawrence a little bit conservative he's saying in animals there is always the main and the others and the others do not compete so they know what to do at every single moment this is not true animals we are animals but but yeah I went somewhere else but I started from the digital it's what I like a lot and this again what like if it it it was introduced by Donna Hervé to whom you referred the comradeship is close to comradeship in the sense I mean is close to what Hervé is calling making kin making kin the kin that is not from the very beginning that is not organic that is not natural but unnatural alliances that then that then but but then they are understood in this theatrical way the theater is what I really like we're running a little bit out of time maybe thank you for your speech I would like to add sorry I'm a little bit to share to speak publicly I would like to add some facts from inside because I'm also connected to the Rose culture of house where is which was founded by Stadella's group and I have connection to the school and I'm running the house at the moment and I know about processes you are talking and sorry and I would like to make an example about relations between others me and the other and human and non-humans and kin making also it's a party of dead men's could you could you tell about it a party of dead or I can explain but I'm a little bit too nervous for that there exists a artist group which also based in Rose culture of house at the moment it's called party of dead part of dead men's and dead men and the main idea of the group in is that opposition opposition circles so tiny and anyhow we have to extend it and using humans and non-humans methodology and magic also and part of dead men's invite all of dead men's to participate and they make demonstrations on the street in St. Petersburg for example in the first of May and also they reflected to your speech the same speech in St. Petersburg and they founded institute of personal and political magic and the institute looking for energy of dead men's in St. Petersburg yeah I love them it's it's my favorite the the party of the dead they and I was also this is a mutual inspiration I inspired endlessly inspired by the practices and I have an article called the theater for the dead also inspired by the Daesh counter you know the Polish director who who was working with in the 70s and the idea is that their idea is that that is always more they are much much more than they are the absolute majority and they are anonymous they they lose their names and when the the party of the dead goes to the demonstration they they also make the masks like like dead people and and thus they represent those who who died with whom this absolute injustice happens happened there is nothing more unjust than death and the art this is this is both art and politics in such a radical composition that I really appreciate it yeah all right I give you the honor of the last question sadly I like all the all this part with becoming other and becoming different which is a great metaphor I think but if I would like to come back to science then I would ask being a nihilist and I do not believe that the thinking of the human is the center of the universe and the universe runs like the humans think about it and if we have this inter species inter everything we connect everything in the world for this solidarity my question is is there injustice or struggle at the planetary scale or just for some species is there injustice and struggle for the different parts that you are trying to or just to some parts of it like the human species definitely knows injustice and we talk about injustice some a lot of animals also but if you make inter planetary scale like stardust and rocks and where is the injustice in those parts like that's my question oh Jesus such a such a deep philosophical question that philosophy starts from the question what is what is justice and then and then it immediately you know the the Plato's dialogue republic and then the political theory basically emerges and also like the entropic principle is introduced deeply into into politics and then so because they only discuss what is just between humans and they come to they start from an idea that justice is the power of the strongest and then they and then Socrates proves that this is not true justice is something else but but still and this line continues up to now it's it's like a direction that one that that justice is always discussed in these terms but recently of course these these notions are are all criticized radically criticized from all the from all every corner and especially the postcolonial and feminist and post post humanist discourses did a great did great things to to change this disposition and there are new notions like like climatic justice or how is it called the ecological justice something not not only in between humans but also injustice which is linked for example to the extractive economy which you mentioned the extractive economy is when you you put you need to break a certain thing and to get something from there be it oil or nut from the shell or the meat from the body of the dead animal or being a truth from the shell of I don't know affections or our illusions this is an extractive approach which also can be treated but but it's a moral question and then the justice is not not only moral question but also like a political question it's important to keep this this distinction and try and and to try to discuss justice politically without falling into the more the moral discourses because when we are within this morality thing we we are pray to pray to ideology we are within within this system not not kind of not in a magical situation of reshaping the the order of things how to say this opens up a lot of other complexities which will will not embark on because our time is over I want to thank you Oksana for thank you very much for your inspiration and also you for your attention and I hope now we can all see each other not only as revolutionaries but also as witches and magicians and maybe also comrades in some respect thank you very much