Edited by Shura Dogadaeva and Andrei Zavadski
Before you are the first and second issues of the new, independent scholarly journal The February Journal. The first is dedicated to silence as a form of micropolitical resistance; the second, to the phenomenon of sanctuary and its role in culture today.
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.
The 2020 Belarusian presidential elections provoked a severe political crisis that continues to this day. Over the past two years, Belarusians have faced unprecedented brutality from the authorities. A year after the elections, people could be arrested not only for attending protests, but also for merely showing solidarity with prisoners, for expressing any thought that differed from the official narrative. This performance, in which the author gazes silently into the camera, was an emotional reaction to the news about a student having been detained for expressing her gratitude to one of her teachers, who had been arrested.
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.
On the 22nd of August 2022, almost six months after ‘the special operation’ in Ukraine began, a National Flag Day concert was staged in Saint Isaac’s Square in Saint Petersburg, featuring TV-style comperes (‘This is our Russia! This is our story! Tell it to your children!’), singers, dancers, and synchronized flag wavers. The only thing missing was an audience. Because most of Saint Petersburg had, for whatever reason, chosen to absent itself from the celebrations, there was no clapping at the concert, no cheering, and no response to the comperes’ vivid injunctions to participate in their version of Russia’s national story. This project consists of a short introductory essay on the relationship between silence and resistance and a photographic account of what happened when a fictional young woman decided to conspicuously resist the comperes’ injunctions by turning her back on Saint Petersburg’s 2022 National Flag Day celebrations.
Societies and policies are based on many factors, one of which is the assigning of value to people, processes, states, and results. Said value is never nil and is never singular; its assessment bar is a projection that fluctuates between a decided interpretation and an abyss of meanings (complete plurality). Within this spectrum, various laws of men and the Universe are the easiest to evaluate and assign value to, while empty spaces, silences, and idleness are the hardest. Since they are undefined entities, they might as well turn into entireties. The latter pose maximum threat to the value of non-empty spaces—the pillar of governance and control. Consequently, the social and especially political machine invented a separate system of assigning value to voids and silences. The regulatory spectrum of this system yearns for punishment, for the prevention of the abyss—complete plurality of choice and a lack of control. Chaos. This system of punishment is especially ruthless towards the arts, activism, and independent communities. This visual essay analyzes the two nodes within the above-mentioned system of evaluating negative spaces: a void and an abyss. Thinking through the lens of different occurrences, the text proposes their definitions (values) at different points of the punishment timeline for the use of silent, idle, and resting activists and artists who found themselves under the scorching heat of looming gore.
This poetic essay considers how politics changes optics of reading poems written more than fifty years ago. The author compares her feelings about Vsevolod Nekrasov’s text 'I’m silent/stay silent’ before and after the events of February 24, 2022.
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.
This essay observes and analyzes the practices of a new generation of Russian women artists and their regionally unique politicized and feminist engagement with esoterica and the tactics of occultism and mythmaking. By exploring the work of Alisa Gorshenina (Alice Hualice) and Katerina Lukina in particular, this contribution aims to investigate the highly gender-and time-specific conception of artistic and feminist sanctuary that emerges through Gorshenina’s and Lukina’s neo-Surrealist methods, as well as their relation to the legacies of Western Surrealist and Dada traditions. Drawing on the theories and rhetorical tactics of folk-oriented precursors such as Silvia Federici, and her establishment of the direct link between the transition to (late) capitalism and the increase in misogynist violence and demonizing othering of women; the Zurich Dada scene, with its deployment of theatricality and mimetic excess to critically mine the depth of performed and performative normativity; as well as others such as Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Taussig, Georges Bataille, and Hal Foster, this text investigates and outlines the way in which the expanded neo-Surrealist practices of Gorshenina and Lukina reflect, and reflect upon, the fragile and complex historical position of the female subject within Russian society of the last decade, as well as attempt to construct a creative sanctuary for its re-affirmation.
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.
This essay looks at ways of disentangling from epistemic violence in visual production in African urban contexts. Tracing parallels between the colonial intrinsically violent gaze and contemporary attempts to disentangle from epistemic violence, the author seeks to problematize the violence of images of Africa. The essay examines works of photographers who explore urban environments in West Africa by establishing an intimate relationship with a place, opening avenues for multiple ways of seeing. This contribution shows how this personal dimension allows photographers to transcend objectivity and go beyond epistemic violence based on the opposition of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Contemplation of the city occurs both in thoughtful relation with the self and with the surrounding environment.
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.
This essay deals with the concept of sanctuary in relation to Afrodiasporic and postmigrant formations of identity. It discusses coexisting and alternating cultural identities through the work of Russian-Ghanaian artist and photographer Liz Johnson Artur, who has been accumulating her Black Balloon Archive of Black culture and diasporic identities for the past 30 years, travelling through different countries, lifestyles, and classes. The idea of the sanctuary as a place of refuge, safety, and hospitality has informed the discourse around diasporic migration in a postcolonial world for many decades. Comparatively analyzing the politics of representation and discourses on agency through Johnson Artur’s cross-cultural and intimate photographic practice, this essay explores her articulation of conditional shelters, demarcations of diasporic identities, and ultimately the archive itself as a place of sanctuary.
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.
