Rosa's House of Culture

Emergency Project Room is an initiative of the international collective Chto Delat. It is located in Berlin Mitte. Its program is based on the model of the House of Culture with an open structure of study circles fostering different artistic practices. Emergency Project Room is a space based on internationalism, kinship, and mutual support, opened to people with different national and cultural backgrounds, genders, and experiences. Emergency Project Room activities are focused on the different decolonial struggles in post-communist spaces and the potentialities of alter (“non-western” type) modernization.

This space was founded in January 2022 in a situation where all members of the collective Chto Delat were forced to leave Russia after the opening of a criminal case related to the anti-war activism of its members and were granted asylum in Germany.

Friends of Chto Delat e.V. provided a small space in Berlin for the work, which began as a gathering place for new communities of cultural workers in exile with the goal of establishing relations with various local cultural processes. Emergency Project Room develops the practices of organizing cultural and social centers that Chto Delat collective has been doing for the past 12 years, both in an international context and locally—in St. Petersburg, where it founded the legendary Rosa Culture House in 2015.

Since its inception a number of events have been held—Mad Tea Party series of performative discussions (12 iterations), The School of Emergencies workshops, dinners, film screenings, birthdays and one memorial. (See Facebook group Chto Delat Emergency Project Room: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1644026146025744)

In the current situation of growing uncertainty, Chto Delat e.V. wants to continue to develop different cultural practices that allow their participants and the public to survive in our dramatic times and create meanings that can be demanded now and in the future.

The Emergency Project Room is open to various friendly initiatives and its program is currently based around 3 circles/workshops: an absurd study – performative discussions “Mad Tea Party”; the “MAKE SPIEL”, an emergency gaming workshop for the development of board games dedicated to various crisis situations; and a circle of body performative practices “Unplanting the seeds of Hatred.”

Participation in the circles is open to various participants on an open-call basis. Each circle interacts with the others in the process of its development and presents its work to the general public in the format of performances, public exhibitions (The signals’ window), publications, and discussions.

Sign up for the Emergency gaming workshop, run by Anton Polsky aka MAKE (the first meeting is on September 17 with approximate intensity every two weeks.

see the program and open call here and register form

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hreaM99HbM_7FQIccdiBdJ2qkO5PLtPvdtwKXkTRsGM/edit?usp=sharing

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Enrollment in the performative practices circle “Unplanting the seeds of Hatred” mediator Vera Shchelkina (first meeting is September 23 with approximate intensity every two weeks

see the program and open call here and register form

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i57UtnYBvj1NaHFPOUM3PYhd-C9X3RklxX0N4MG8giI/edit?usp=sharing

The series of Mad Tea Parties continues with special announcement for each event and date – the first autumn ceremony will happen on 1^st of October with Master of Ceremony Veronika Zaripova

and please follow us on FB group, mailing list and Instagram

need a link here with detailed explanation and how to register

need a link here with detailed explanation and how to register – like you did

It has been a year since DK ROSE was forced to cease its work. Since the escalation of the war, the ROSA HOUSE OF CULTURE and the Engaged Art Workshops suspended all their public programs – our space became a place where we could all experience together the failure of our usual reality, prepare anti-war agitation, just gather, cook food, and talk openly about what was happening. Looking back, back then, in March-April 2022, we had not yet given up hope that the situation could change, that the people would rise, that “Putin” would disappear, that the war would end, that the sanctions would be lifted, that the trauma would heal. By the end of May, the mood was different, more desperate, and we decided it was worth it to leave a city increasingly steeped in militarism. We decided to establish a country commune-as it is now clear, looking from today’s perspective, it may have been our riskiest move in the history of our work.

<h5><em> photos from recent events at the DK ROSA in May 2022 </em></h5>

We were sure that there was no point in staying in the city at that moment, and the experiment with forms of common living promised some new opportunities for psychological and physical survival, as well as opportunities to continue the practices of resistance, reflection, and education. We were lucky – the police did not catch us at the anti-war film festival, the preparations for the actions, or simply at the meetings of the dozens of activists whom the place helped to survive that desperate summer.  <a href=”http://chtodelat.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Commuzine_06.pdf”>

We publish the commune’s zine (see below) in English in a situation where all its participants are safe, but nevertheless we do not reveal the real names hidden in the publication under different nicknames.

Is it possible to continue DK ROSA in a new situation, when its participants find themselves in very different places and when they have very different tasks in life? We were lucky enough to get a space in Berlin, which we called Chto Delat Emergency Project Room thanks to the support of our friends – it is still very new and we are trying to make it a new community space – a gathering place, a discussion place, a residence, a place where we hold our Mad Tea Parties, dedicated to different emergency situations and the absurdity of the reality that we are facing. It can’t become a full-fledged social center-but that seems to be another challenge. If the School of Engaged Art, transformed into the School of Emergencies can continue to exist trans-locally, the House of Culture requires another concrete spatial assembly of bodies and interactions. In the meantime, it is important for us to keep our community alive and hope that at some not-so-distant point in time we can come together in that very city, and it will make new sense.

(text by Dmitry Vilensky)

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ROSA’S HOUSE OF CULTURE (RHC)

WHAT: an initiative of the collective Chto Delat based on commoning and solidarity economy aimed at creating a community of comrades engaging into cultural activity and self-education. Rosa’s House of Culture was founded on 1^st of May 2015 in Saint Petersburg.

WHY ROSA: A rose is a beautiful and very thorny flower. And, that’s the name of Rosa Luxemburg, a great figure in the history of the revolutionary movement, who is one of the few consolidating names for different fractions of leftists today who share feminist demands. ROSA’s name is the name of solidarity.

WHY A HOUSE OF CULTURE: This project draws on the history of Houses of Culture in socialist countries, the experience of social centers in Europe and Latin America, and the new politics of progressive art institutions that aim to overcome the alienation of the pure display and the passivity of the public. In contemporary Russia, we envision the House of Culture as a model that reestablishes a counter-public sphere (Nancy Fraser), serving as a “training grounds for agitation activities” with the ultimate goal of nourishing new sensibilities that are not always welcome around here, embracing the difference of many different species that may not want to become too visible, and protecting endangered and yet-unborn ideas. The House of Culture is a space for militant cultural environmentalism.

HOW IT WORKS: RHC is a space for running various workshops, reading groups, seminars, circles as well as a space for hosting different kinds of public events (lectures, film screenings, discussions, exhibitions and parties). RHC is home to the School of Engaged Art, as well as to a unique publicly accessible library dedicated to contemporary art and activist literature. The activities in RHC are coordinated by a self-management group and general assembly. The work of RHC is supported by the Chto Delat Mutual Aid Fund and by donations of its participants.

Why are we looking to the experience of the establishment and development of houses of culture? Why is it important for us today?

For us, the Chto Delat collective, this is not an abstract question for scholarly research, but rather speaks to the urgent need to form a fundamentally new context for the development of art. We believe that houses of culture can become places for the formation of a new public beyond the limits of the neoliberal creative class and focal points for the development of political communities of people, ready to produce and defend socialist foundations for culture and art.

For that reason, our historical interest has taken practical forms: instead of studying the houses of culture of the past, we decided to open up a small house of culture and see what we, together with other participants, could learn in practice. That is how the Roza House of Culture appeared in Petersburg, and it has since hosted many initiatives and events which otherwise would probably not have seen the light of day.

It needs to be pointed out that the idea of houses of culture appeared in Italy in the middle of the 19^th century, when workers began to gather together to learn how to read in order to pass a literacy test and be allowed to take part in elections. Later, this idea was energetically developed in Soviet houses of culture, and even after the collapse of the USSR it did not disappear, but was transformed and emerged in new incarnations. We can find traces of it in the new centers of the creative industry: Loft Projects, co-working spaces, leisure and recreation centers, and so on.  Today, every shopping mall hopes to house a cinema, a theatre, and children’s play areas. Many art institutions are increasingly integrating the functions of houses of culture within themselves, with their educational programs, libraries, accent on access to marginalized members of the public, etc. All of these contemporary tendencies, obviously, take place in the absence of a political program with any degree of articulation, while in the past, houses of culture were run either by mass socialist movements or by state education policy, as in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Clearly, if we wish today to reclaim the emancipatory and educational function of the houses of culture, it must be a well-articulated project directed against the hegemony of the commercial-consumer relationship to culture and eager to assert its values and show the possibilities for their actualization.  The political purpose of the new houses of culture is to raise, first and foremost, the issue of re-examining and reformulating the new class structure of society, in which we see the potential for the formation of singularities, i.e., new people, ready at a given historical moment to defend the values of an emancipatory politics and rethink the role of culture and aesthetics in processes of emancipation. This is happening in the Zapatista caracoles in Chiapas, and it is happening in social centers around the world experimenting with principles of autonomy and protocols of openness. Autonomy is always naïve, as any micro-project is naïve in the big world of corporate capital, but only autonomy can launch a challenge and present new forms of production communities that disobey the logic of profit.
Who are these new people? What are they prepared to fight for? What culture forms are they capable of drawing together and organizing? These are precisely the questions we posed when we opened Roza House of Culture, and they are the questions being discussed inside this publication.