Artist Anastasya Kizilova on women-run initiatives weaving social fabric as a form of participatory art in Russia

Welcome to a lecture by artist, researcher and writer Anastasya Kizilova,
Tuesday 10 May at 17.00 in Mandelgren assembly hall at Konstfack

 Women-run initiatives weaving social fabric as a form of participatory art in Russia
“All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that's more social, more collaborative and more real than art.” — artist Dan Graham
Anastasya will speak about a network uniting women-run public sewing studios based in the former Soviet countries and Russia. She shares her experience of participating and running.solidarity hubs in Russia, such as Rosas House of Culture.

Artist statement: My superpower is generating alternative economic development situations to impact our collective future. I am cultivating a weak aesthetics that knits poetic language and social reality together. In my usage, the term weak is free of negative connotations: it opens the way for non-competitive relations and inclusive practices. Weak aesthetics does not exclude the ordinary; it transforms it through studying ourselves and the Other, training skills of mutual aid, deflecting ‘the gaze’ and seeing the excluded, exuding an intangible reality, and developing improved ways to solidify it. The regular meetings and collective actions that occur in the proposed situation/space, open to editing, gradually influence participants’ perception and develop their critical gaze. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, I form participatory practices aimed at rethinking and redefining existing patterns, which help us to go beyond established neoliberal principles. This rethinking is a necessary condition if humans are ever to break out of capitalocentric isolation and become actors in the social matrix. This transformation opens the way to imagination and allows for the generating/testing-out of alternative political and social modes of development.

Researcher, artist, and science-fiction writer Anastasya Kizilovа was born in 1986. She began her artistic career in 2001 started her education at Stieglitz St. Petersburg State Academy of Art and Industry. In 2013, Anastasya presented the project The Artist's Uniform, the aim of which was to interact with the participants of the professional art system. In 2015 she co-organized the horizontal initiative, Flying Cooperation, which unites multi-skilled young artists who were born in the Former Soviet Space (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine). Since 2016 she has collected an archive of unrealized artists’ ideas entitled Found Project: authors share their ideas for free, so other people who are in need of ideas can realize them. 2018-2021 she participated in The Reshape project – a collaborative, bottom-up research process that proposes instruments for transition towards an alternative, fairer, and unified arts ecosystem across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean. She took part as a reshaper in The Solidarity Economy Trajectory. At the moment she works in the field of environmental communication, which focuses on posthumanist and nonhumanist ways of interacting, bringing together theoretical approaches such as queer-ecology, cyberfeminism and practical methods such as performative creation of an interspecific collective body. anastasyakizilova.com

Hosted by the programme CRAFT and Professor Anders Ljungberg. Konstfack, LM Ericssons väg 14, Telefonplan