November 2014

 

GR

If you follow the Viennese art scene, you might agree that this exhibition from the Chto Delat collective is a wonderful follow-up to Ines Doujak’s and Oliver Ressler’s project last month and represents an enormous development—not only for this institution but also within the context of a critical art scene in Vienna at large, which is quite advanced, if you compare it to other European cities. Also from the perspective of the genealogy of Chto Delat it’s really great to have this kind of collection of different works here. It’s great to see this history. It is possible to contrast the earlier videos, with their Brechtian, dialectical point of view with the kind of open projects we’re seeing now but I think there is definitely a through line. I want to jump right into our discussion with a very general question on the political situation in Russia because having been there last September, at a conference in Petersburg, I have a sense of what is going on. It’s quite frightening, also to visitors like me. Frightening not on a bodily level but more when you’re talking with friends, artists, activists there, about there being a kind of hidden repression in Russia, which has been going on for years. And there has been a dramatic change this year mainly because of the war in Ukraine. So, I think it’s good to start with this more general issue. And I just want to read some of the introductory paragraphs of the newspaper that was produced for this show. What it says in the second paragraph of the introduction, mainly referring to the installation and the film but perhaps also the whole exhibition, is this: “It reflects what art could be at the moment when familiar politics and everyday life start falling apart. The events of recent months have thrown Russian artists and creative workers into a completely new reality, a new cold-war atmosphere, an escalating search for enemies, ever tighter repression of all dissent, and an open military confrontation with Ukraine, leaving thousands dead on both sides. What seemed the stuff of nightmares yesterday is becoming reality today. Artists who want to address present conditions have wound up in a very complicated position. How can we carry on creating, speaking, and living when we are all frozen at our computer screens in hopeless anxiety, trying to make sense of the bloody mixture of contradictory and manipulated information, seething hatred, madness, and desperation, while the chance to be heard is ever more limited. Most things we liked to speculate about, relations between art and politics, activism and participation, simply stop functioning. Worse, they become irrelevant in a suffocating climate of nationalistic paranoia. And we face this desperate situation while audiences vanish, activist groups implode, and actually getting anything done becomes impossible.” I won’t continue reading, as I think the excerpt is devastating and depressing enough.

 

Dmitry Vilensky

Catastrophic enough.

 

 

GR

We will get to the question of catastrophe later. But maybe you could start by talking about your personal experience on this general level in Petersburg and Moscow.

 

DV

Gerald, you and I have had an ongoing discussion for at least the past seven or eight years. And the situation has changed. I remember when we started, everyone was so excited about Argentina, Latin America, and then Occupy. And right now, we have a very special feeling. For us it’s an open question because the most dramatic thing is the impossibility of communication and translation. It’s not like we are coming from a war zone. You’ve been to Petersburg: everything is nice, it’s quiet. Right now, the economy is going through a bit of a slump but we’ve lived through so many economic slumps. Certainly, the cafés are open. And then, of course, you have the background of quite a violent reality outside. But everything looks normal. In this situation, for us to come from a location where so many things are changing, it’s strange for us to come to Vienna, where everything is normal, nothing has changed, and people don’t feel threatened. Of course, they follow the news. At the same time, people ask about planning an exhibition two years in advance, which is nice, and normal, and how it should be but right now we feel that we’ve also collapsed so many times with this project. This was not just because we follow dramatic, very rapid political developments but because something crucial happened. Precisely those things which were in our lines of work and might have been continued: while there are many things you can’t just put aside, since they’re inside you, they belong to your methods, your approaches.

Nonetheless, something changed fundamentally. We had started talking about this social democratic, progressivist idea that there’s a multiplicity of struggles, and how are they globally connected, and so on. But at a certain moment something went really wrong. Previously, we could fetishize failure. All leftists like to do that, which is absolutely fine; failure is a very important political concept. And we contributed a lot with our collective, with a newspaper on political sadness published in 2006. It’s quite okay and it’s important to comprehend. Our group also went through the trauma of Perestroika, when we saw the most massive democratic mobilization, and the outcome of this mobilization was not just frustrating but completely depressing and in many ways catastrophic. For us, the possibility of speaking, of being contemporary, is also a generational issue, one which we tackled in the film The Excluded. You see young people, and maybe we as a different generation are able to have that certain distance which allows them to reveal their concerns and anxieties. But we were kind of facilitators, and it was the first time we had worked with verbatim dialogue, so it’s real text which they did together with us. It’s edited but it’s their voices; they’re not actors. They are people who articulate their own thoughts, which we developed together. Yesterday was quite heavy because Chto Delat has been compared to other political practices which celebrate opaqueness and incommunicability, whereas we’ve always insisted on possibilities and opportunities for communication: between languages, between cultural differences, between completely different political stories. That we can talk, and that’s important.

We build that one community of people who can really change things. Unfortunately, right now I don’t know how much we can change in Russia. At the same time, it also brings us into a much more defensive posture and another type of articulation. So right now, people of my generation really remind me of that confidential project in Soviet times. Of course, we have much more space. We can sit in Vienna. And tomorrow we can sit in Petersburg. I am very happy that this film is not just showing in the West. It premiered in St. Petersburg and a few weeks ago, a very special demo version was premiered by one of the most progressive Russian Internet portals. It was very important to give access to the film. So it’s not the version how it should be but at the same time, people get access. Many things are still possible. At the same time, there’s a general feeling of closure in there. This film also helps a lot to reflect the situation because—they speak about the war but I think that the main dramatic factor was that people’s mobilization during the election two years ago, which we reflected in a few films. Frustration: hundreds of thousands of people on the street again, unorganized again, again the kind of fetishization of the square, and what? And then comes that amazing depression, depoliticization, emigration and young people really dropping out.

 

Nikolay Oleynikov

That was also a dramatic change between 2011 and now because we jumped from a situation that was completely different to what we have now; it was a revolutionary sort of feeling and right now we have war. Between war and revolution, just one year passed. And it’s such a change within the society, everyone detects it, it’s in the air. It’s something that you can almost touch. And to come back to the work that you both referred to, the feeling of the time is what we’re trying to reflect with our film, which Olga directed. With our exhibition as well, we’re trying to find this sensation, this feeling. The feelings and sensations have become an increasingly relevant issue for us because the political constructs that were previously the basis of our work no longer function in the same way. During the last twelve months we’ve been more dedicated to bodily practices, for example, because one of the group’s participants, choreographer Nina Gasteva, brought a lot of bodily construction of temporary communities, of common bodies. These practices also pushed us to develop something about feelings, bodily functions, and bodily contact.

 

Olga Egorova

I’d like to add something about what has changed. I remember that a year-and-a-half ago, Dmitry and I were doing a lecture performance about heroism here in Vienna, at mumok, and in preparation for the project we started to ask people, “What do you think about the future?” And they said at that time that the future has to be something like right now but a little bit better. You know, “Like now but better.” Not everybody said that; that was just the common opinion. But now when you start to ask people in Russia about their future, how they see their future, they say, “Please, stop asking us. We don’t even want to think about our future.” It means that during this year and a half, they ate our future, you know.

 

DV

Ate?

 

OE

Yeah, ate our future. And this is why we did this exhibition and why we have the time capsule because as it says in our newspaper, for us the time capsule is some kind of hook to the future. You know, we have to find the point in the future, you have to feel that the future exists.

 

DV

I’ll make one short remark which maybe helps you to connect because Nikolay also mentioned bodily practices. Chto Delat is sometimes known for our intellectual activity, we have super-brilliant philosophers and theoreticians and so on, and they play an amazing role. At the same time there is also an ongoing debate inside of the group. And actually—to speak for myself—I sometimes also feel that we lost the language that had allowed us to comprehend current developments. And that’s why we get stuck and stutter and say, “Yeah, we should create something different.” To be frank, there is a certain disappointment in some of the intellectual speculation that we have on the left, not because it doesn’t work but because it isn’t aesthetically and theoretically and practically grounded. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s why the body becomes very important.

 

GR

That would lead us into the internal structure of Chto Delat, too. But none of the philosophers are here, so I won’t walk into that trap. (laughter) It’s also tricky because, you’re quite philosophical artists also, so I don’t see that there’s that much of a dividing line. But I would want to follow up on this question of eating the future. That’s where a bit of a critique starts, from my point of view. It’s connected to philosophies that you’ve been referring to in recent years, especially the Benjaminian philosophy of history. The main figure is the “angel of history.” I have a problem with this recurring projection concerning the future, both on the negative level—“they ate our future”, which I think is understandable but on the theoretical level I think there’s a problem. Also with this jump from the catastrophic present moment to the time capsule as being the only hope. Here I have a political and a theoretical counter position that I want to explain with Benjamin, again. This wonderful last text of Benjamin has many interesting aspects. One is, of course, the angel of history, this figure of an angel who is blown towards the future, with his or her back to the future but the storm is blowing from the past, and the angel is incapable of closing his wings because the storm is so big. And what he sees are the Trümmer, he sees the debris. And it’s being piled up, of course, and you can imagine this is the time when Benjamin dies fleeing the Nazis, and the Holocaust is going on. This is what this meant. Before Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, Benjamin had this critique of progress. And there you would agree, I think.

But also, you should not forget that there is another figure in this text, which is the tiger’s leap, the Tigersprung. The main point of this whole text is that Benjamin argues against the continuum of history, of the history of the victors, which is a progressive, linear continuum, which is also the continuum, by the way, of social democracy. Benjamin really criticizes social democracy, maybe even more than the fascists, in this text. The point is, there is a problem with this linear idea of historiography. What he comes up with is this picture of the tiger’s leap: that there is this leap from the now-time, Jetztzeit, into a revolutionary past. This tiger’s leap breaks out splinters of a revolutionary past, maybe even a failed revolutionary past but takes these splinters and actualizes it in the present time. And there is no idea of the future in the whole text. It’s just the question of how to combine the past with the now-time. In Oliver’s and Ines’s work in the last month there were also many discussions regarding the problematic aspects of utopia that, of course, you put up a certain projection into the future and forget the fight in the present and the past. So then maybe to open up this criticism into a question: where do you think these struggles and desires and hopes of the now-time—even in a totally catastrophic situation, and not only in Russia—are to be found, both in politics but also in your work?

 

DV

Actually, for us, I would say that’s a certain feeling of closure because if you had asked me this question previously, I would have said that our political embodiment and politics were pretty clear. We participated in social forums. I could have immediately started to talk about the multitude, and new forms of production, resistance and class struggle. Which is happening, of course, I have no doubt about it. But again, although it’s something that’s very hard for me to formulate right now, something has happened. Right now, that is a big challenge for us. Of course, we keep our affiliation with certain campaigns in Russia and internationally, for example migrant rights, anti-fascist work, that set of issues which are still unresolved, and which have different dimensions and involve different approaches. At the same time, we also insist that there is a certain front of struggle which turns into ideology. That’s why we always understand our dealing with institutions clearly and consciously, and aim to transform cultural machinery, as far as we can, into something else, and also provide real examples of utopian—or sometimes dystopian—constructs: how micro-collectives can operate inside of it. Very much inspired by your speculation, in fact, and not only yours. Because Chto Delat is not just a collective, it’s a new type of institution with its own financial structures, with protocols of participation, protocols of non-participation, with our own network and its own temporal structure of collaboration, which we can build. But because you always rely on quite a long time span, it becomes something completely different. It’s not just a temporal cooperation. Everything has been developing and been kept growing and in motion; some things collapse, of course but maybe they should. At the same time right now, to speak in a very humble way, for us in particular, events in Ukraine also demonstrated something about a certain type of popular networking or mobilization. We always identified with these things, they were holy for us—from union syndicalism to antifa, all the things that were completely holy for us, like self-organization, courage, militancy, mutual support and bodily solidarity—and we’d always viewed them as belonging purely to a leftist kind of politics. But what did Maidan show us about these things? That they have nothing to do with left or right. That type of politics can be practised by pure fascists, and then it’s much more dangerous, you know? And of course, Maidan was a very complex phenomenon. Even speaking from our perspective during the uprising and protest in Russia, the situation, the most terrible situation was when leftists had to stay in a coordination committee together with nationalists. It was a big dilemma. Can we get together? Is that what democracy should look like? Of course, if you want to talk about democracy, the majority is nationalist, the majority are homophobes. How do you deal with that? And you want to effect change. So you sit together and some people say, “No, I won’t sit with any person who has a homophobic point of view.” Okay, it’s your choice. And many people made their choice. Then you leave and you can build something autonomous and whatever and pretend that you’re influencing real politics. But what happened in Ukraine, particularly, was that there was no space. If you came from the leftist side of Maidan, you were seriously at risk of being beaten or at least pushed away. Of course, there were amazing examples of how people  from the anarchist side went undercover and fought with police together with the ultra-nationalists. That also happened. It was a much more complex picture, so I’m simplifying a little bit. Then, certain categories really lost their political orientation. And for us, it was also a very big issue. How do you participate in something real? What is real—real struggle, I mean?

 

NO

We do still have a real political struggle, what Antonio Gramcsi would call the importance and necessity of cultural hegemony. Which is a very important thing for us . . .

 

DV

Nikolay, I would really . . .

 

NO

Let me finish. We really feel that art production is important even when it’s not possible. And for us, it belongs to our politics within our group to continue doing an art piece as an art piece because we think it’s an important practice and it’s totally political. It is grounded in politics; to make art within the time of the catastrophe is a political gesture for us and it’s a struggle. You are always struggling—with being mute, being unable to talk, being unable to speak with the same language that you did in the other time, just a year ago. And, again, we refer to this muteness in our film. Those who feel themselves excluded, for example, those people, they all talk about their own being excluded from the society—and they consider the society rather deaf, not listening. Society—you can talk about majorities but there are several types of majorities, right? So you are excluded from all the majorities. And even though what we do in this situation is for us a metaphor as well as the reality, we feel the importance, the necessity even, of making art, and at the same time of really participating in several activities, as Dmitry would say, of supporting all the campaigns, even physically and mentally, and being present in several communities which are struggling at a fundamental level.

 

DV

You know, I’m speaking a bit differently because actually it’s not about that. Right now, I would say the complete opposite, it makes me laugh when we speak about cultural hegemony. Right now we are really in a shrinking cultural environment.

 

NO

I’m not saying it without critique: I’m speaking about impossibilities . . .

 

DV

For me it’s a matter of survival . Right now, in a very mad way, I’m always comparing certain leftists and that kind of position in academic art to—it’s kind of a medieval time. You know, there’s heaps of barbarity outside. Most people are illiterate, they can’t read, can’t write. And some monks sit in a very special castle or somewhere in their cloisters and copy Latin manuscripts—for what? To have a renaissance two centuries afterwards. Because without this book there can be no renaissance . . .

 

GR

Again, this is about hope for the future . . .

 

DV

Exactly. Yes, exactly. No, no, no, you know, something that Boris Groys has really brilliantly theorized is the way that there’s a certain pressure imposed on art, firstly by its own form, which is understandable but also from the outside, a pressure to be efficient, to be useful, to be útil, as Tania Bruguera would say. And there’s always here a certain criticism of that particular instrumentalization of art by different forms of real politics, and activism too. Because we always think that the problem is not just that art circulates through different media channels—that’s fine, you can’t escape that, it’s the 21st century. The real problem is that a lot of art is already customized for the media gaze. And—this might sound extremely conservative but I am not afraid of saying it—art expresses a certain radicality and brings us to the issues of the future, to insist on another temporality. Sometimes, you know, Artur Żmijewski comes and sits with me and asks, “Where is your result, Dmitry? You made this film. Where are your results?” And I think, “Artur, you’ve just been to a private flat for the premiere of the film, what results are you asking for? Please come back in 20 years and then we’ll talk.” You know. Because that’s another temporality entirely, which really creates some sense which could make real impact, I would say.

 

OE

For us it’s such a new situation. I really want to believe what Nicolay says. All of my life I believed that art has its own power and art has changed things and that’s it. But now, it’s hard, it is changing.

 

DV

Maybe not today but tomorrow.

 

OE

Maybe in the future.

 

NO

Maybe yesterday. Maybe in the tiger’s leap . . .

 

OE

Yeah, I really want to believe it but I don’t know.

 

GR

But not to get too much into the depression . . . (laughter)

 

NO

I’ll start crying . . .

 

GR

It’s maybe this kind of essentialized thing: the artist’s position or art’s position is part of the problem. If you separate it from every other social practice, then it becomes a part of this indefinite postponement of the revolution. So I think, again, there is much more of a red thread linking your earlier works and this work here, where I do see some desires, some hopes. I see some revolutionary aspects in a now-time, in an expanded present, as I would say, maybe. But to stay with the question of the criticism of this linear idea of temporality: when you spoke of the task of the artists as something like a revolutionary or overturning of temporality—this I find a very interesting point. But here I would also see, as a part of the plot of the film, that there are two situations. Firstly, you have this one, I think this is the kind of piling up of—catastrophes, in a way.

 

DV

—point of no return.

 

GR

Yeah, well, I mean it’s not very linear because the dramaturgy of the people speaking about their own positions is quite interesting. But when you look at this still, it’s piling up the catastrophes, or points of no return, which is in a way also linearizing. And the second point in the film is even a bit worse for me. By the way, I really like the end of the film, so this is kind of nit-picking—but the other one is the piling up of the heroes. I don’t think that leads anywhere either because, of course, you could say in a kind of pseudo-Gramscian way that you have to counter the hegemony of the victors with a counterhegemony of our heroes. I think that’s wrong.

 

DV

But actually the film said that it’s wrong. The final voice says “stop it.”

 

GR

Well, this is why I like it. But maybe we can come to this next point. How you view this? Maybe you’ve already given the answer. For me, much that is being said in the film is wrong but it ends with a wonderful situation. Also, the question that we discussed.

 

DV

Wonderful?

 

GR

Wonderful in the sense of open and multiplying positions. I’m talking about more or less the last scene. First, we get the scene where the body of a revolutionary multitude forms and then we see one person, maybe like the one that left Maidan because of homophobes or nationalists. In any case, there’s a person leaving the crowd and then when she comes back, it’s about her failure, she gets beaten up. And then there’s this wonderful speculation: who did it? And it’s this multiplicity of possibilities and it’s not explained or answered, it’s an open question. But I think this makes it clear because I was always asking myself who is the ear of society? And who is society? And I said to you that I was going to pose the question, who is the tentacle? Who is the red thread? And I think the last scene gives maybe a bit of an answer to that. But maybe you want to answer it.

 

OE
Answer what?

 

GR

This question. I said before to the other guys that this is a trap, the question. You were not there, so I have to warn you! But the question, more or less—and I think there is an answer in the film—is: who is society? And considering the first scene of the individuals in their separation, to say which is maybe also to simplify a bit but nevertheless: the separated situation. Who is society and who is the ear of society?

 

DV

That’s a very interesting question. Thanks also for a very interesting reading of the film; that’s not exactly what we intended but you might be right. (laughs) What is really important is that the girl leaves to engage in so-called solo picketing, the only activity for which you don’t need a special permit. And she does it alone because the group is completely solipsistically engaged in some sort of body recognition  and she becomes completely fed up. So she needs something real. She goes out and she gets beaten. It’s a very typical story of recent solo pickets. She’s not beaten by police but by passers-by. I actually picked up that story around one of the first peace demonstrations in Petersburg. I was really shocked by how a quite elderly guy was singing “give peace a chance,” or something like that. And then he was beaten by some people, not by police but because it was seen as pacifism, which is wrong, against your country, and so on. And then what brought us into making the film was that really completely new composition of society. Because Putin previously had a majority but at the same time, it included a lot of different voices. It was a lot of political people. And what really made a change, speaking in real political terms, was a kind of conservative mobilization. At the same time, I wouldn’t say that Russia is pioneering this conservative mobilization on its own because conservative mobilization has also happened in Egypt and it’s happening all over; just look at the European election in Brussels. It’s quite interesting how very conservative ideas become more and more appealing to people. In Russia, it has reached a certain point when you really become what they speak about in the film, a really tiny minority that is completely vulnerable, and they don’t even need a state apparatus to repress it. It’s just a general feeling in society: beat them, hunt them, you know, “they’re traitors turning against the nation,” and so on. And this is a different thing. Because before, if you got in some trouble, you could go to court and so on. But it was starting, it was already quite visible; even Pussy Riot was very interesting in how they encountered antagonistic views like that. With Ukraine we saw the emergence of a completely consolidated, mobilized society. I wouldn’t compare it to examples from the thirties, like Nazism but similar affects are at work. And even now it’s really very strange because at the same time you see all kinds of rational thinking. People say things like, “We have sanctions, people are leaving, filling their pockets, they can’t buy things.” “No, we don’t care. We’re staying strong against American imperialism, and we don’t care. We can die.” It’s very rational but also very romantic in many ways. What came to my mind when we started to talk about that hope, is that since quite an early period of our work—maybe since 2008 with Perestroika—we started to ask what contemporary tragedy is. And that the concept of tragedy, of course, sounds very depressing but in reality it’s not. Speaking very generally, I would say it’s a very archaic idea: experiencing catastrophe and tragedy, like in an ancient theater when, as a community of people, we deal with irreconcilable antagonism. Where we don’t know how things can be resolved, where there is no solution. It’s like in Greece, it’s fate. You know, the fight is fate, you have to die. But a community that is watching it can face that irreconcilable conflict, can get into that leap and experience catharsis, metanoia, whatever you want to call it. But at the same time as the community is watching tragedy, facing it, it’s also at a distance from it. For Chto Delat it’s also a big issue. You know, activist art can often insist on immediacy, direction. But we insist that art always needs estrangement and distance. Sometimes distance can be close . . .

 

 

GR

I don’t agree with this kind of opposition that activism is immediate and then art is the form of distanciation. This is not my point of view. I think that activism as art acts in an expanded present time, which has nothing to do with these immediate, presentist ideas. Both art and activism are acting in the present time. Even if you follow the ideology of the time capsule, you’re acting in the now-time with this exhibition. Nevertheless, I wanted to come back to this question, maybe Olga . . .

 

 

OE

The question of the society which we show in our film. Well, maybe, you know that eighty or ninety percent of our society supports Putin. Our society is deaf. And that is why we show this big ear and we show that we have to cry. Somehow this ear, it’s obvious. But at the same time, we’re saying that we are part of the society and this ear is our own ear, because sometimes it’s so difficult to keep your ear open, you know. It’s so difficult to always think about what is going on. It’s so easy just to close everything, to close your eyes, to close your ear and just follow.

 

GR

I think this is an answer. It doesn’t fall into the trap of the question, what you did right now. Because there is no answer to the question, “Who is society?” But to talk about the ears and saying that it’s all of our ears, is also quite connected to what Dmitry said before, that it’s maybe something which is no longer the Foucauldian idea of self-government. But even the problem that a majority of the society takes violence into its own hands, as you just said. And of course, self-government doesn’t disappear because at the same time, when I’m in danger, moving in the streets, my self-government will really work with that and frighten me even more. So I think this is this complicated thing, where I would interpret the red tentacles, something like the in-between of individualities. It’s not that there is a certain superstructure of society that suppresses us and these are the tentacles. And on the other hand, it’s also wrong to see just the first image of the separated individuals because, of course, they’re also producing when they are doing social media and they’re connecting. It’s not only this separate image. Again, I like the piece because in the end, you really have the answer to it, in the sense that it’s an open . . .

 

DV

I found the end really depressing. Here I have a completely different reading . . .

 

NO

Wonderful not in terms that it’s, you know, something beautiful.

 

DV

That’s exactly what we did in that learning play in Berlin, Who Burned the Soldier?   We were also artificially constructing that kind of totality of different interests who really might attack that kind of sculpture because it was unbearable for them, they hated it. But I don’t know how far you can actually feel that because the provocation of that film might be much more vivid in the Russian context. Of course, you can say “America kills,” “Israel kills,” you know, Austria probably also kills, as we saw recently with Oliver’s poster. At the same time, we worked in Russia and in Russia there was quite an interesting debate, including inside of our group because many people asked whether we were afraid to make that sign: “Russia kills.” And, yeah, that’s something you can really be punished for, perhaps not in a legal way but in many ways, even publicly. It’s something you can’t say. Yet we do make this criticism. Okay, sure, if you’re definitely not supporting Ukrainian politics, you can do your own. But we as Russians must say that. I’m not sure if I would really fully appreciate it if Americans came and did work saying “Russia kills,” or “Austria kills” for that matter. It would be a bit too much, you know. But we as locals can say that. And it’s not just in relation to the war between Russia and Ukraine. It’s how we’ve treated children, people with disabilities, people with HIV/AIDS, gay people. Russia does more metaphorical killing, you know, by how otherness is considered. That was the main message.

 

NO

The drug trafficking problem is massive in Ukraine right now. In Crimea, it became a severe problem because there are certain painkillers that are not allowed by Russian law. And many people were treated with these drugs in hospitals in Crimea. Right now, they are really dying, dozens of them.

 

DV

There are a lot of examples like that.

 

NO

Yeah, it kills.

 

DV

Yeah. At the same time, when you come here and more or less have the majority of Western media saying, “Russia kills,” as if nobody else were killing, then I feel a little bit uncomfortable because how is that supposed to be read? Okay, it’s kind of a mainstream truism. But, you know, we really have to learn from different perspectives.

 

GR

For me, that’s not a problem. It’s a general problem, you can universalize neither artworks nor political positions. “Russia kills” is something different, depending on whether it’s uttered in Russia or here. So, yeah, you can only react to it and only say “Russia kills” in Russia and here maybe say something else. Europe kills, of course. Well, I have a last question, which is connected to the ear. This time it’s quite an idiosyncratic question because even though this is not the main aspect of the film, I wanted to ask you about the sound. Because again, this is something I really like. I see a break in this from the former pieces with quite a modernist approach to music. And there it’s really developed into something else which I wouldn’t call creative but inventive. It’s inventive regarding this sociality between people, but also in particular voices. And I wanted to hear a bit more about how it came about and how you developed this form of sound.

 

DV

Why didn’t we make a singspiel?

 

OE

Yeah, why didn’t we? I like to do singspiels and I really like to do good, simple constructions because I think that our mission is to make hidden things visible. Usually, we take a real situation from our political or social situation and make a simple model of the situation and show people how it functions and how that means that we can change it. But for a model like that, you first have to understand what is going on. But now we don’t understand, to be honest. Of course, we have a lot of ideas but what is true? And this is why we decided to invite our young friends to work with us and we decided that maybe in this communicative constellation we would be able to create something.

 

DV

Some songs.

 

OE

Some songs or what-have-you. As I said yesterday, from the very beginning of when we started to do this film, we didn’t know what we would have in the end. And, you know, for me, that’s very stressful because I really love to know.

 

GR

I envy you, Olga. I never know. So at least you had some occasions when you knew when you did the singspiels.

 

DV

Yeah, we had to sing.

 

OE

Of course.

 

GR

So you’ve come to my point of not knowing now, in a way.

 

OE

Yes.

 

DV

You know, I’m doing it again but I have to insist on a certain position. (laughs) For us, what really constitutes the line of continuity in our development is that a lot of the films we’ve made are reenactments, in a way. They’re not literal reenactments but reenactments in a certain spirit. And this film is also a reenactment. Olga might not agree but for me it was quite clear. It’s La Chinoise by Godard.

 

OE

Hmmm . . .

 

DV

I mean, it’s a general scene where an activist returns to a flat, and then in the end the owners come back and everything is cleaned, and they disagree and are mad and they don’t know how to relate to society. They go into terrorism. But it’s not an issue in Russia. And then the chapters, that loss of narration; it’s a chapter-based film. So two people sit in and do exercises. When we were making it, I had it in mind all the time.

 

OE

Yes. (laughs) He was inspired.

 

DV

I was inspired. Actually, when I happened to re-watch La Chinoise, it’s exactly what we were thinking about. Of course it’s not a literal reenactment. There are certain moments . . .

 

GR

Vibration is there.

 

DV

To come back to what you said about it being a completely new type of music. We work with a high tradition of Soviet realist music, very much opposed to minimalism, and our group is very much into that very agonistic relation to Western ideas of modernism and political minimalism. So for us, it’s really something. It’s not an enemy, we really love it and appreciate it but at the same time we feel a certain political closure and saturation of it. And that’s why we’re openly and sometimes aggressively anti-minimalist. So it’s in the Russian tradition but also in the realist tradition. It’s important to us that they’re visible in this film. The music is more concrete, so people can make it with their bodies and with their voices. No scripted music.

 

OE

For me, it’s always a question of what kind of music we ought to create in the face of the war. What kind of song? Maybe something patriotic, I don’t know . . .

 

DV

We could do that.

 

OE

We could, maybe.

 

DV

I mean, subversively, absolutely patriotic.

 

OE

Maybe next time.

 

DV

A song about a national traitor . . .

 

NO

There’s already a song like that by Boris Vian, Le déserteur.

 

OE

This time, we decided to try to create a new language. Usually, we start with the brain but this time we decided to start with the body. And this is not a song, not music but just noise which emanates from the body of the group of our students.

 

DV

We were practicing.

 

OE

We decided to create some kind of collective body and to feel each other. We used to think that we need collectivity because we really want to be stronger. Now we feel that we need this collective body because we really want to survive this stage and really need to touch each other, and when we touch each other, we create noise. I think it helps somehow. It’s the music of our bodies, our collective body.

 

NO

If Nina was here, that’s what she would do with you. She would give you these bodily practices.

 

OE

I think it used to be that the strongest part of our collective were our philosophers.

 

DV

You think so?

 

OE

Yes, I do. But now the most important part of our collective is our choreographer, Nina Gasteva, because we always need her.

 

NO

Yeah, yeah. There was one episode here in which we actually tried to create a song using the model of a samba band. The episode is called Revolt-Here-We-Now . They’re shouting out and it was exactly modeled on how samba bands do it. So people are grouped by particular roles, the particular rhythm and role of a single word, and they’re shouting. But then we understood it doesn’t work. The film shows that as well. It was beautiful to unify ourselves within the kind of practices of a samba band. Maybe this muteness doesn’t allow us even just to . . .

 

DV

Yes, but it worked.

 

NO

It works in the film, to show like different ways of producing sound in a time of muteness, I would say.

 

GR

I would love to have a three-hour conversation, but I must leave. My proposal would be for you to continue discussing informally.