INTRODUCTION

An artistic study of queer lives in post-soviet spaces, this project was methodologically experimental and politically ambitious, drawing inspiration from Eve Tuck and Wayne Young’s notion of ‘refusing research’ (Tuck, Young, 2014). It was designed to be artistic, activist, non-extractivist, ethically sound and beneficial not only to the western academia, but first and foremost to the local queer communities it sought to reach out to. For these purposes an experimental art-based methodology was devised that offered safer ways of collecting and creating evidence (‘cooking evidence’) of queer existence in homophobic societies. Our destinations were the cities of Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan and Novosibirsk, but eventually the list also included Vienna, St. Petersburg and Berlin. During the 2020—2023 in these cities a series of workshops has been taking place. I personally conducted workshops in Almaty (2021, five days), Tbilisi (2022, two days), Yerevan (2022, one day), Berlin (2023, one day) and Vienna (2023, one day). What is presented here is my artistic interpretation of the outcomes of these five (or ten, if counted per day) workshops.

OPACITY

The project is dedicated to the life of queer communities in a number of post-soviet cities. The field part of the project took the form of a series of original artistic workshops centred around a well-known artefact called the Dreamachine. These workshops became temporary queer utopias, providing a safe space for dreaming, reflection, creativity and exchange. The initial idea was to use Dreamachine as a source of subjective experiences/images (hereafter ‘dreams’) that are translated into written or oral form (so-called ‘dream reports’) and can subsequently be developed into an artefact using any other artistic medium. For obvious reasons such further development did not happen often, so the material I was working with was mostly dream reports – that is, ideas, thoughts and visions in the form of text. One of the key concepts in our project was the concept of opacity, as opposed to the Western paradigm of visibility and as formulated by Édouard Glissant. What it meant for us was, first of all, that we prioritised safety and did not disclose either participants or their dreams and conversations that took place inside the ‘magic circle’ of the Dreamachine. My decision to transform the dream reports into a set of images that eventually comprised a deck of associative cards was made in accordance with the opacity paradigm. 

WORKSHOP FOR DREAMING

Being post-soviet outcast ourselves, we felt that despite the specificity of each city, the queer communities everywhere within the post-soviet space share the feeling of estrangement from the local social order dominated by hetero-sexist norms, and this feeling can tap into international solidarity networks. At the same time we did not want to provoke in participants complaints or pain narratives typical for the studies of post-soviet queers. Our intention was to avoid imposing any theoretical frameworks or preconceptions regarding queer lives, whether in the form of questionnaires, interviews or agendas of Western origin. In the context of a research commissioned by the Western academia, even a neutral question like “how are you living here?” can sound like an invitation to talk about the hardships of living a queer life in a homophobic environment. We did not want to set up anything thematically — the point was to find out which topics are considered relevant by the participants themselves. This is the reason why in our research we touched on the quasi-universal topic of dreams. It allowed us to cede the prerogative of setting agenda and suggesting topics to the participants themselves – or, more precisely, not even to the participants as such but to their unconsciousness responsible for producing dreams — or daydreams – with the little help of the Dreamachine.