Lecture-performance by Olia Sosnovskaya (Minsk)

29/03/2017

“burn, on fire, alight, inflamed, glow, ablaze, fervent, go up in smoke”
The work is part of the on-going research regarding official soviet and post-soviet celebrations, festivals and rituals, focusing on the relation between the sublime, the affect and ideology and discipline, incorporated into the spectacle and celebration.

At the same time it is part of the research on techno and rave culture and its political dimension. It brings the problematic of subversive, revolutionary moment and the issue of post-colonialism, exoticism and commercialisation, looking into recent turbulent histories of former socialist countries, particularly into the phenomena of rave cultures in the context of war and crises.

It also explores the problematic of the visual pleasure and relations between material experience and its production through knowledge (technology) and language by looking into the soviet literature on mass holidays and pyrotechnics along with the videos of fireworks and flares in various contexts (protests, mass celebrations, commercials), as well as using the visual language of Power Point presentations to articulate the rupture between the representation, discourse and the embodied experience and affect.

A lecture-performance explores various spaces, dimensions and layers of the festivity and their intersections. It operates through constellations and tensions of leisure and work, entertainment and boredom, pleasure and violence, embodiment, estrangement, representation, integration, potentiality and enforcement.

Videodocumentation (in Russian):