FABRIKA Center for Creative Industries
Supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

February 1 – March 8 2014

“Where do you live? Not in Russia? Why are you asking me these questions?”

Yakov Krotov

Any government and any state is primarily an apparatus of violence (of one class over another), so at least says a famous definition. And society itself? It too  is saturated with violence: moral condemnation and exclusion, affirmation of norms, control over corporeality, religious taboo etc. The role of violence varies from society to society, and here, Russia takes a place of its own, a space steeped in various forms of aggression and checkered with spaces of exclusion, where the violence of repressive, punitive shocks is cultivated by both power and the population at large and has a nearly ritual character. Russia sports a highly profitable market of “violent actions,” which acts as an important if not key factor in the local economy: the courts and the police, the prisons and the corporations, migrant labor and cultural production, all of these spheres are based on the consequences of violent raids, each of which comes with a price tag of its own.