Post-Soviet Studies

The work of laboratory consists in a serious of collective and individual researches, publications and exhibition projects which involves local and international community.

The development of post-soviet / post-communist studies was a crucial contribution in analizing the situation of geo-political change after 1989. Right now we have a whole generation from post-socialist countries who do not have a living experience of life under real socialism, they could be well informed and globally networked but locally still face the variety of specific problems which are rooted in the histories and current developments of certain territories.

In this situation we feel like it makes sense to actualize our knowledge of post-communist condition together with young generations and see what kind of politics can we derive out of it. We need to take responsibility to rescue some progressive phenomena of communist project and actualize the potentialities of missed chances to resist the reactionary politics of new cold war, growing xenophobia and nationalism.

In our research program we want to test how the demanded changes are connecting with the territory. The current situation put the issue of territory to the fore. The new practices are emerging that rely on new forms of belonging to the certain territories, its histories and condition of survival which include not only human but the life itself.

Possible areas of research of our new lab in this area will be the body politics (the practice of asceticism and the collective body), production of space, practices of comradeship (both between people and in relations with nature, animals, the dead and the ghosts), various practices related to collective memory, agitation and anti-fascism (commemoration and monumentality), specificity of decolonial struggle (problematization of Eastern-European subalternity), and the philosophical and cultural aspects of the socialist heritage that had been debated by many contemporary theorists.

So we need to find a way to relearn in order to establish some comradeship relations with ourselves and the world