Open Lecture: Anastasya Kizilova. Women-run initiatives weaving social fabric as a form of participatory art in Russia

Anastasya Kizilova will speak about a network uniting women-run public sewing studios based in the former Soviet countries and Russia. The seminar task is to analyze these communities as a form of socially engaged art and to find points of intersection and ways that they diverge in their approach to forming communities. The main challenge is to articulate the risks associated with social engagement in the Russian context and consider the forms of feminist solidarity support are possible in our unstable times. Anastasya will share 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.