OLIA SOSNOVSKAYA
Politics of collective movements in post-socialisms.
The research addresses collective movements and their exhaustion (bodily and political) in post-socialisms, focusing on choreographies of protest actions, socialist mass celebrations and raves, and the relation between festive and the political.
After the fall of state socialism, neoliberal transformations and installment of authoritarian political regimes in the region, the notions of the collective and of political agency has been in crisis. The project departs from archival materials on the socialist mass celebrations and the candidate’s personal engagement in the 2020-21 anti-governmental uprising in Belarus, re-addressing it in the context of the current Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, which involves Belarusian territories and infrastructures, and of the anti-war resistance. It analyses specific collective choreographies (state parades, protest marches and gatherings, raves, various acts of disruptions and sabotage) and traces the transformations of “the political” and political movement in post-socialisms, while approaching the notion of post-socialism critically (in its eqauting different historical experiences and being always bound to the past on one hand, or seen as non-linear and non-unified on the other).
The project tackles those issues through the concept of a movement score (movement notation), used in dance studies to graphically record, analyse, preserve (archive) and transmit (further perform) dance and movement. In this research, a movement score is seen as any kind of graphic transcript of movement (including text) that intersects multiple temporalities of its enactment, and is used as a tool to critically approach the temporality of political action and to question the linear time of revolutionary event.
Olia Sosnovskaya (born 1988 in Minsk, Belarus) is an artist, researcher and writer. She works with text, performative and visual practices, exploring the problematics of festivity, collectivity and affect; body, dance, gender and postcolonial studies; contemporary modes of work and leisure and their intersection. Member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and co-founder of the WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! collective platform (www.workhardplay.pw).
www.oliasosnovskaya.com
