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  Anatoli Vlassov

  Montage of Freedom. Phonesia: The Art of Logo-Somatic Articulation through Encounter with Other Livings

  This article delves into the concept of logo-somatic freedom through an analysis of three artworks: Chairs Mots, Diaphoner, and #DanseAvecLesMots. These works exemplify how encounters with ‘other livings’—including language, dance, and digital technology—foster and enrich logo-somatic freedom, transcending conventional boundaries between language, body, artist, audience, and technology. Through practices such as phonesia, participatory performance, and online interaction, the artworks showcase the transformative potential of corporeal poetics and synesthetic communication. The exploration of logo-somatic freedom reveals a perpetual process of metamorphosis in the relationship between body and language, where the deconstruction of logo-somatic expressive habits goes hand-in-hand with the free will of their poetic recomposition. By fostering collective dialogue and individual creativity, these artworks pave the way for innovative forms of artistic expression and collective engagement in the contemporary world. This essay’s exploration of logo-somatic freedom across these artworks highlights its ongoing evolution and its role in shaping the future of artistic expression.

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  Sofia Natalia Gonzalez Ayala

  Facing Racism, Leaving Multiculturalism: Afro-Colombian, Black, Palenquero, and Raizal People’s (In)visibilities in Colombian Museums

  This imaginary guided tour gathers chronologically some of the ways Black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquero, and Raizal communities or people in Colombia have appeared represented—visible and invisible—in Colombian museums between 1994 and 2023. The author reflects on exhibitions (one of which she participated in), artworks, and books to show how a multicultural vision of the nation in museums has helped maintain a neutral memory that hides the dire consequences of the transatlantic slave trade among Afro-descendants. She also works to recompose a pathway for more radical, anti-racist, and reparative initiatives that tackle and question racism and racist stereotypes in museums and exhibitions, an endeavor that requires collective and collaborative actions between public and private institutions, involving Afro- and non-Afro-descendant scholars, artists, activists, curators, researchers, designers, and writers.

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  Karolina Nugumanova, Anonymous Author

  ‘Great, Great Sorrow and Eternal Silence’: An Experiment in Sociological Dream Interpretation after the 24th of February 2022

  The article is devoted to reflecting on silence and speaking in the dreams of people in Russia after the 24th of February 2022. Our two-stage analysis of dream narratives and dreamers’ comments on them uncovers several key topics related to speaking and silence. Interpreting them with the apparatus of sociology, we conclude that these dreams provide a space for restoring agency that had been lost in real life.

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  Sofiya Russkikh, Polina Kovalyova

  The Russian Textbook: Problems in Teaching Russian to Migrant Workers and Their Families: An Overview of Teaching Materials

  This article analyzes extant Russian-as-a-foreign-language (RAF) textbooks aimed at migrant workers. These textbooks do not fully meet the needs of migrant workers and their families: the majority of the RAF materials are written for university students, assuming that the students have the language skills needed for professional communication, while general-type textbooks aimed at mastering a practical course of Russian tend to be addressed to Westerners. The authors analyze the books in the broader context of migration in today’s Russia from anthropological, pedagogical, and linguistic perspectives.

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  Aslıhan Şenel, Ece Yetim

  Shadowing Silence: A Spatial Rewriting of Myths and Fairytales

  This paper, through theory and the authors’ own pedagogical and critical spatial practice, explores the ways in which myths and fairytales may suggest playful and collective storytelling to create a plurality of meanings and corporeal engagements that are often silenced through the hegemonic structures of society. Referencing feminist philosophers Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Hélène Cixoux, the authors take myths and fairytales as a medium to address individual urban experiences and resistance against the city’s gentrification through neoliberal administrations. Their practice, entitled Spatialized Myths, includes a collective mapping of historical and contemporary myths and rewriting of them through a shadow performance with students of architecture in a non-functioning synagogue in Gaziantep, a former Roman city in southeastern Turkey.

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  Roi Wagner

  Silence as Resistance before the Subject, or Could the Subaltern Remain Silent?

  This text considers several case studies of subaltern silence as micropolitical resistance. Around these examples the author threads a theoretical model (using ideas of such thinkers as Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard) to explain how performing silences could resist oppression without assuming an underlying well-articulated subjectivity. The paper deals with the force of silence, its conditions of possibility, and its position with respect to representation.

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  Zhanna Budenkova

  Sanctuary Earth in Ecological Science Fiction Cinema in the USSR: Per Aspera ad Astra

  This article analyzes the Soviet science-fiction film Per Aspera ad Astra [Cherez ternii k zvezdam, 1980] using the lens of sanctuary. Shot in the period of the Brezhnev Stagnation, shortly before the Chernobyl disaster, the film articulates a range of pressing ecological concerns, but displaces them from Earth and the USSR to the imaginary alien planet Dessa. In her analysis, the author focuses on the paradoxical nature of this displacement and show how the representation of Earth as an unproblematic ecological sanctuary is haunted by its own contradictions. The author also explores how this representational strategy responded to the technoscientific ethos of Soviet modernity that contributed to the destruction of natural environments in the twentieth century.

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  Miriam Leimer

  ‘Berlin Sees Bizarre Russian Art Show’: The Press Coverage of the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (1922) and the Perception of Russia’s Modernist Art

  The Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (First Russian Art Exhibition) that took place in Berlin in 1922 was an important event for the development of modernism. International artists and patrons visited the show at the Galerie van Diemen that combined paintings from late Tsardom and the pre-revolutionary avant-garde with the recent artistic production of Russia’s non-objective art movements. While the role of the Van Diemen show for the progressive international art scene in the early 1920s has long been acknowledged, little is known about the perception of this ‘Russian’ labeled modernism among the general public that encountered now-iconic art works by Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Kazimir Malevich. By analyzing the coverage of the exhibition in newspapers and art journals, mostly from the Weimar Republic, this article highlights the Western interpretation of the newly discovered suprematism and constructivism as well as their radical new aesthetics.