May 24, 2003, a group of Saint-Petersburg artists, architects, ciritics, and scholars organized and realized an action entitled “The Foundation of Saint-Petersburg”. In the days of the pompous celebration of the 300th anniversary of Saint-Petersburg, the participants decided to leave the center of the city by train, and then to symbolically found a new center of the city on the far edge of the city.

At 12.30 PM, the participants entered the platform of the Baltic railway station with the large signs of the following content: “I am leaving Petersburg”, “Petersburg from scratch!”, “Petersburg roofless”, and “Petersburg 003”. They marched in front of a large crowd that followed them, running. In front of the door of the suburban train, the manifesters stood, exposing the signs and distributing the leaflets that invited the citizens to think of the city cultural policy.

In his “Theses toward the Politicization of Art” Alexander Skidan applies the Brechtian concept of estrangement as a model of political art.

Estrangement, by destroying the aesthetic illusion, draws the recipient into the process of self-reflection and self-consciousness.

At the same time the very nature of art as such is questioned, suspended.

Estrangement, caesura, self-reflection, fragmentation, destabilization of the subject and dispersion of the narrative – these are the instruments, which work to provide us with the a-semantic gaps, folds of meaning, not yet appropriated by ideology.

In the streets of Saint-Petersburg, one has always to watch one’s step, so as not to fall into this or that pit. But sometimes we raise our eyes and look up one’s leaky roof onto the large Petersburg sky. The sky gets closer.

Today, just before the pompous festivities of the 300th anniversary of Saint-Petersburg, it is about time to think about the future of our city. Its official cultural politics is the suffocating conservatism. Its main focus is all sorts of restauration work; the opening of memorial desks, and speculation on the”great history and cultural traditions”. Since 1991, that is since the city got its old name back, no single new building was build that could compete with the masterpieces of the modern architecture, and what is built is nothing but the cowardly imitation. No single influential journal or newspaper in these 10 years. The situation in the visual arts is somewhat better, thanks to some private initiatives and to the Western funding.