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a video project by Chto Delat
realised by Tsaplya [Olga Egorova], Nikolay Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky
Text: Bertolt Brecht

This slideshow and audio piece emerged from an inner group discussion on how it might be possible to make an artistic statement in memory of the centennial anniversary of the first Russian revolution of 1905.

In 2004, we (i.e. the workgroup Chto delat/What is to be done?) carried an extensive artistic study of the contemporary urban environment of a working class neighborhood in Petersburg.

As the center of the worker’s uprising in 1905, this neighborhood later also became the site for one of the most ambitious and comprehensive constructivist projects in building a new, socialist Leningrad.

A year later, we decided to return to this neighborhood to carry out an action and to shoot a video that might be capable of expressing our relationship to the history of this place. Below you can find a YouTube version of the results.

David Riff and Dmitry Vilenslky // The Story of “Angry Sandwich People or In Praise of Dialectics”

This piece emerged from an inner group discussion on how it might be possible to make an artistic statement in memory of the centennial anniversary of the first Russian revolution of 1905.

In 2004, we (i.e. the workgroup Chto delat/What is to be done?) carried an extensive artistic study of the contemporary urban environment of a working class neighborhood in Petersburg. As the center of the worker’s uprising in 1905, this neighborhood later also became the site for one of the most ambitious and comprehensive constructivist projects in building a new, socialist Leningrad.[1]

A year later, we decided to return to this neighborhood to carry out an action and to shoot a video that might be capable of expressing our relationship to the history of this place. But even more importantly, our goal was to examine the potential for a new anti-bourgeois subjectivity, how this subjectivity might emerge, and which problems this emergence might involve.

Actually, we had already worked with the phenomenon of sandwich people in 2003. In Soviet propaganda, these walking advertisements, sandwiched in between two placards, had always served as a symbol of the utmost exploitation of a person’s living labor. It is ironic that in post-Soviet space, working as a sandwich man has become a preferred mode of unqualified, low wage employment. Anyway, we made an action in the winter of 2003 called “Stop the Machine!” and shot a video with interviews of sandwich people in which we tried to find out about some of the most important aspects of this “profession.” What amazed us most in these interviews was how passive people today really are: thrown into a struggle for bare survival, they are completely oblivious to any form of struggle or resistance against the system of exploitation and alienation that victimizes them in such a striking manner.[2] In fact, you could say this about the majority of the population in Russia today: there is no meaningful form of mass protest whatsoever.

In this new piece, we decided to try to imagine protest in form of theatrical happening in urban space. This action was carried out in close collaboration with two local activist groups, namely “Worker’s Democracy” and “The Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement.” In fact, these activists have a great deal of experience in street politics; they participate in demonstrations of protests and picket-lines, and hand out flyers. As such, they have retained that basic form of grass-roots political culture that has an entire aesthetic of its own.

Together, we defined the goal of the piece. Here, we wanted to visualize “In Praise of Dialectics”, one of Bertold Brecht’s most striking poems, which the “Worker’s Democracy” group had published on their site www.1917.com in Russian translation.[3] The site of this visualization would be Stachek Square, from where the striking workers of 1905 marched on the Winter Palace (stachka means “strike” in Russian). We decided to bring Brecht’s poem out into this urban space line for line, carried by “engaged” sandwich people.

Bertold Brecht’s body of work was a such an important point of reference because it contains such a broad variety of aesthetic methods to answer the call of the concrete historical situation. In Brecht’s work, there is a clear understanding of how dialectical mechanisms are always at work in creativity, describing reality as a process of constant change that arises as a result of the conflicts and contradictions that makes the transformation of society possible.

In our piece, we tried to imagine how this dialectic might work today. Silently coagulating and reconfiguring their body-signs to the soundtrack of passing cars, these sandwich people demonstrate the potential of new representational constellations between protesting singularities from a broad variety of backgrounds and age groups – pensioners, activists, children – thrown into a dialectic of constant change. But at the end of our piece, we asked our participants to read Brecht’s poem out loud. The effect is very strange, and might be described with what Brecht called the alienation effect: the silent motility of political potential erupts into decisive poetic speech, distancing the spectator from the action’s reconfigurative flow. Recited in a “Soviet” mode, the poem now resounds with the depleted pathos of the revolutionary past, a re-collection (Er-innerung) of the very language that new forms of protest aspire to negate. We hope that this will allow the spectator to step back and to consider the range of problems that we were trying to address: the historical problem of failed revolution and the political potential that arises on its ruins, at the site of its origin, 100 years after its first defeat.

[1] You can read more about this project on our site https://chtodelat.org/index.php?option=content&task=section&id=12&Itemid=81.

Soundtrack and poem

The work is based on the poem by Bertold Brecht “In Praise of Dialectics” (1930). You can find this poem also published in newspaper.

The lines of that poem are placed in front on 21 Sandwich-people (of different age from children up to elderly people, the core of the group are the local political activists from the group “Workers Democracy”). The back side of sandwich-people is blank.

At the beginning of the action they are all staying with their back towards the direction of the camera and one after one (line by line) are turning around and moving forwards, thus making a changing text composition.

Bertold Brecht /// In Praise of Dialectics

Today, injustice goes with a certain stride,
The oppressors move in for ten thousand years.
Force sounds certain: it will stay the way it is.
No voice resounds except the voice of the rulers

And on the markets, exploitation says it out loud:
I am only just beginning.

But of the oppressed, many now say:
What we want will never happen

Whoever is still alive must never say ‘never’!
Certainty is never certain.
It will not stay the way it is.

When the rulers have already spoken
Then the ruled will start to speak.
Who dares say ‘never’?

Who’s to blame if oppression remains? We are.
Who can break its thrall? We can.

Whoever has been beaten down must rise to his feet!
Whoever is lost must fight back!
Whoever has recognized his condition – how can anyone stop him?
Because the vanquished of today will be tomorrow’s victors
And never will become: already today!

Translation: David Riff

Special issue “Why Brecht?”

In parallel to “Angry Sandwichpeople,” Chto delat published a special issue of the newspaper dedicated to Bertolt Brecht. It can be found here.

Publication on the project

From: “Ex Argentina: mapping the visual and political in Argentina”, by Zanny Begg

For the Russian collective Chto delat?/What is to be done? the transition of their work Sandwhiched from a two screen video projection to a collection of photographic stills was a smooth one.The original work drew on the visual imagery of a protest by showing a group of people wearing placards with their back to the viewer who turn around one by one and reveal the lines from a Bertolt Brecht poem In Praise of Dialectics. This work explores the tensions between subjectivity and collectivity in political protest – each participant both makes an authentic claim “it will not stay the way it is” or “whoever is lost must fight back!” but also fills their preordained place in the stanza of the poem. Sandwiched thus encourages the viewer to identify with the emotional appeal against injustice contained within the poem but also observe, with Brechtian distance, the collective subject presented as capable of changing it.

In the context of this exhibition the transition to photographic stills created a visual dialogue between this work and the Tucuman Arde archive, in both cases the photographs explore communities in conflict and communicate an uncompromising humanism. Tucuman Arde are an avant-garde art collective who sought radical ways of communicating and displaying their works in the 1960s. This tradition is continued, albeit a contemporary context, by groups such as Chto delat?/What is to be done? whose artwork, newspaper project and investigations of urban space such as “Drift ” seek to radically redefine relationships between art, activism, theory and audience.

Published in Moscow Art Magazine #61, 2006

The work was shown in the exhibitions

– “Capital (It Fails Us Now)”, Kunstihoone, Tallinn, Estonia

– “La Normalidad/ Ex-Argentina”, Palacio Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires

– “Interrupted Histories”, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana