Revision Book Festival at New Holland Island

19:00 Pavilion
Alexey Medvedev. Mockumentaries in the era of post-truth.

Cinema is a patchwork quilt made from pieces of reality and fiction. Documentary films concentrate on the first, feature films on the second, and only mockumentaries expose and explore the seams connecting one to the other. The lecture will talk about the history of the genre, from the BBC report on spaghetti growing on trees (1957) to the current “fake news” on the Internet. It will focus on the films of Ron Howard, Woody Allen, Peter Jackson, Peter Zelenka, Alexei Fedorchenko and others. It will also look at the phenomenon of “false documentary”, one of the first examples of which was the “Great Moon Hoax” — a series of reports about life on the moon from a New York newspaper in 1835.

Alexey Medvedev — was born in 1969 in Moscow. From 1989 to 1994 he studied at the directing department of VGIK (Arkady Sirenko workshop). In the 90s, he worked as a journalist, film critic and translator. In 2000-2006 he was a member of the selection committee of the Moscow Film Festival. As a program director, he worked at the 2morrow film festivals (Moscow, 2007–2009), Zerkalo (Ivanovo, 2011), and 2 in One (2009-2012). From 2012-2015 he was Program Director of the Sakhalin International Film Festival On The Edge. At present, he is the curator of the Yakutsk International Film Festival and director of the competition programs at the international festival Message to Man.

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

21:00 Vodka Room in the Bottle House
Conversations in the Vodka Room. Maria Nesterenko and Alla Mitrofanova: Can book publishing be feminist?

A feminist approach is a frame or lens that allows you to understand events from a different angle or distance. Complicating reality in this way, we improve reasoning, make emotionalism more culturally complex, shift perception filters and make semantic and logical spaces more complex.

Feminist thought has become an indispensable part of modern knowledge and this makes feminist publishing necessary, regardless of the sex and gender of the readers. The lecture will focus on recently published books: The Front by Larisa Reisner, Anichka’s Revolution by Natalya Venksteren, the compilation Authors and Poets, Hospitality of the Matrix by Irina Aristarkhova, Suffragism in the History and Culture of Great Britain by Olga Shnyrova, and Pulsating Matter by Jane Bennett.

Maria Nesterenko is a philologist, author of the Gorky website, editor of the feminist series at the publisher common place.

Alla Mitrofanova is a philosopher, curator of a philosophical cafe, a member of Cyberfeminist International.

September 6

16:30 Pavilion
Mikhail Kurtov. How would science work after the end of science?

What would happen if the so-called pseudo-scientific theories were on equal standing with theories accepted by the scientific community? Skeptics, or the so-called “enlighteners,” fear that in this case, chaos awaits us, along with the end of rationality and science itself. Some philosophers, however, believe that pluralism of scientific theories could benefit scientific research. Suppose that due to some kind of external or internal crisis, the authority of “universally recognized” science has weakened and we are in a situation similar to pluralism, a “war of all sciences against all sciences”. Would a “darkness of reasoning” really appear then? And if not, how could knowledge be organized in such an anarchistic world? The lecture will focus on mapping possible battles and alliances between (pseudo)scientific concepts in the world after the “end of science”.

Mikhail Kurtov is a philosopher and candidate of philosophical sciences. Author of the books Between Boredom and Dreaming. Analytics of film experience. (2012), Genesis of the graphical user interface. To the theology of code. (2014). Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize (in the category Humanitarian Studies, 2016)

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

September 7

15:00 Pavilion
Luc Boltanski. REALITY vs. reality (a study of the political metaphysics of the 20th century)

The lecture will cover topics of secrecy, conspiracy and investigation. We will try to understand why these topics have occupied an important place in the representation of reality since the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century. Firstly, the lecture will focus on popular literary genres in which these topics play an important role: crime and espionage novels. Then the lecture will move from the question of the representation of reality in popular literature towards new methods for the problematization of reality that accompany the development of human sciences.

Luc Boltanski is one of the leading sociologists in France, a member of the Pierre Bourdieu school of critical sociology, who later went on to a pragmatic shift in sociology (main work, The Critique and Justification of Justice, with Laurent Teveno). Boltanski’s early books, within the framework of the Bourdieu school, are devoted to the analysis of the role of kindergartens in the formation of class morality and the emergence of the social-class category of “cadres” in modern French society. During his pragmatic period he founded the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, he wrote about love, justice and criticism as practical abilities; the most difficult book from this period is about the pragmatics of abortion. The New Spirit of Capitalism (together with Ev Chiapello, Russian translation) marked a turn to social criticism again, but based on pragmatic sociology. His book De la critique is the manifesto from this last period of Boltanski’s work, and Secrets and Conspiracies is the first applied demonstration of his new method, synthesizing the approaches of both critical sociology of Bourdieu and pragmatic sociology. The last book, L’enrichissement, is an attempt to reformulate the theory of value, coming not from people’s craving for enrichment, but from the “enrichment” of things.

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

17:30 The Bottle House courtyard
It may so happen that we live in the times of mass dying. Joint publishing programme of Garage Museum of Modern Art and Ad Marginem Press

The joint publishing program of the Garage Museum of Modern Art and the Ad Marginem Press has released a book Being Ecological by British contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton. Katya Suverina, coordinator of the publishing program and member of the Garage Green team, invites you to look at what’s hidden by the ubiquitous horrible numbers, mountains of garbage and the effects of global warming, which you already know about. But did you know that, “perhaps you are already environmentally friendly, but just don’t know it?” Do you think Norton is joking? No, he offers you to think together at how you can create a sustainable future, starting here and now.

Katya Suverina is a gender historian, coordinator of the international publishing program and the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal of the Garage Museum of Modern Art, a member of the Garage Green team, editor of the book Affection Politics: a Museum as a Public History Space.

September 8

14:30 Pavilion
Round table The future belongs to ghosts: modern problems of hauntology

Hauntology (or “ghostology”), which began with Jacques Derrida, who brought the figure of the Ghost from the past to the future, is becoming an actual philosophical trend today, having new incarnations in music, photography and other genres. But what is really behind this? The round table The future belongs to ghosts is not just a retelling of Derrida, Meyasu, Morton and Fisher, but rather an attempt at “turning the tables”: addressing the ghostly future, the city and various mediums (for example, cinema), the participants call on “the ghost of surrealism”, to reconcile themselves with the current state of the world.

Participants: Joji Stolet, Yoel Regev, Andrey Kartashov, Danil Lehovitser (Great Britain — by video call)

Moderator: Elena Kostyleva

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

15:30 The Bottle House courtyard

Yuri Saprykin. New sensitivity: what lies behind talk of empathy and devaluation, and how to survive in a world of hurt feelings.

Everyone around us is talking about feelings, and new concepts are always appearing: empathy, depreciation, bullying and shaming. It seems that the diversity of feelings and especially the degree of vulnerability to them has increased dramatically in recent years, these changes affect the way we communicate with each other, and how we understand ourselves.

What lies behind the conversation about feelings, how does all this affect the media and ethics of behavior on social networks, why are our partners in conversation increasingly traumatized by other people’s opinions, where is the border between value judgments and bullying, how are hurt feelings becoming a factor in big politics, and are all emotions equally useful? Yuri Saprykin, journalist, culturologist and author of the Shelf project will discuss these questions.

Yuri Saprykin is a journalist and culturologist. He was head editor of the Afisha magazine, the online project Slon.ru, and had a column in GQ. In 2018, he launched the online educational project Shelf, dedicated to the most important books in the history of Russian literature.

17:00 The Bottle House courtyard

Alexander Vileikis, Polina Khanova. How to undo the spell on the world in order to conjure it back: Dark ecology and romanticism.

We were born too late to explore the Earth and too early for space. The world has become understandable, or at least accessible for understanding. Ecological crisis, global climate change, melting glaciers: it seems that humanity can predict changes in the environment. Magic has disappeared, nature has ceased to be something magical, becoming an understandable, scientific phenomenon. The Dark Ecology project suggests looking at the world differently, to make it strange, unstable, and people, powerless, but having the courage to research and experiment. How can we live in the new ecological era, returning to the spirit of explorers?

Alexander Vileikis is a philosopher, an employee of the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Tyumen State University (Tyumen), and curator at the Center for New Philosophy (Moscow).

Polina Khanova MA (Warwick University), assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, specialist in speculative realism and dark ecology. Member of the editorial board of Logos magazine, translator, editor.

19:00 Pavilion
Against Progress: Watching New Horrors with Eugene Tucker. A discussion in collaboration with the RussoRosso portal.

Horror has always stood apart from all other cinematic genres. Being in a marginal position, it allowed itself to boldly represent human fears, both applicable to the spirit of the times, and timeless. Now, the horror film has once again got the attention of intellectuals: well-known philosophers turn to it, film critics try to comprehend it. We are talking about so-called “new horror”, the work of Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Jordan Peel. The discussion will look at modern examples of the genre, which can be comprehended through the category of progress and horror. Eugene Tucker, Howard Lovecraft and philosophy of the non-human will be our assistants along the way.

Nastasya Gorbachevskaya is an art critic, actress and director. A specialist in Dostoevsky in theater and Russian scenography at the turn of the century. She has worked as an actress in the MOST Theater since 2012. Author of RussoRosso since 2019.

Marat Shabaev is a horror researcher and film critic (Kinopoisk, Kinoafisha, Session). Graduate of the Master’s program “Art Criticism” at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University. Permanent author of RussoRosso since 2018.

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

19:30 The Bottle House courtyard
Maxim Krongauz. In the beginning was the word

We are used to the fact that language reflects reality and helps us to understand it. However, sometimes the object and the mirror switch places, more precisely, the reflection appears first and it forms the object. We can recall the slogan of the magazine Afisha: “What we say, that’s what will happen.” It was invented by Yuri Saprykin, who then brought the word “hipster” into the Russian language, even before they had appeared. The Afisha slogan would be perfect for a totalitarian government, which always want to manage society through language. This is what 1984, the dystopian novel by George Orwell, is about. One of the main forces in 1984 is newspeak, the ideal language of totalitarian power. Today, the art of creating words that form reality is one of the most relevant and prestigious. This is done by politicians, journalists, PR managers, political strategists and scientists. Language has become a battlefield of ideologies that no longer enforce individual words, but whole ways of speaking. How should we relate to this, is it worth resisting, and is there a difference between natural and “artificial” changes in the language?

Mikhail Krongauz is a linguist, an expert in Russian language, humanities and education. He is the author of popular articles on Russian language, linguistics and education in paper and electronic media, an active participant in public discussions on radio, television and the Internet. Professor, Doctor of Philology, Head of the Laboratory of Linguistic Conflictology and Modern Communicative Practices of the Higher School of Economics, Head of the Laboratory of Sociolinguistics, Russian State University for the Humanities.

September 6, 19:30, Main stage
Thirty

Dir. Simona Kostova, Germany, 2019, 115 min. 18+

A Friday in October. In hip Berlin neighbourhood Neukölln, we experience 24 hours in the lives of a group in their late twenties. While writer Övünç struggles with a feeling of emptiness, former lovers Pascal and Raha try to let go of their relationship. Kara, Henner and Anja are also facing problems within their group of friends. In the evening, they celebrate Övünç’s birthday, then wander the streets, into the night.

In impressionistic scenes, the friends leave the confines of their constrictingly filmed minimalist apartments for Berlin’s bustling nightlife, presented as full of movement. This series of colourful vignettes simultaneously exudes loneliness and attachment, and in so doing Thirty captures the mood of young urbanites on the verge of a quarter-life crisis. The friends are in the midst of life, but feel their sell-by dates fast approaching. “It’ll all be alright”, Anja says when Kara, following a tantrum, collapses weeping into her arms. Maybe it will — but when?

September 7, 17:00, The Pavilion
Immortality for All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism

Dir. Anton Vidokle, USA, Russia, 2014–2017, 96 min. 16+

Combining essay, documentary and performance, Vidokle quotes from the writings of Cosmism’s founder Nikolai Fedorov and other philosophers and poets. His wandering camera searches for traces of Cosmist influence in the remains of Soviet-era art, architecture and engineering, moving from the steppes of Kazakhstan to the museums of Moscow. Music by John Cale and Éliane Radigue accompanies these haunting images, conjuring up the yearning for connectedness, social equality, material transformation and immortality at the heart of Cosmist thought.

After the screening there will be a discussion with the director Anton Vidokle, moderated by Oksana Timofeeva (Russian philosopher, associate professor at the department of sociology and philosophy of the European University at St. Petersburg).

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

September 7, 19:30, Main stage
Sorokin trip

Dir. Ilya Belov, Russia, 2019, 92 min. 16+

At the end of the Soviet era Vladimir Sorokin blew up the traditions of Russian literature turning it into the cruel and subversive phantasmagorias. During Putin’s first term he was the target of attacks by right-wing organizations. Now Sorokin is often perceived as a prophet who predicted the weird and whimsical features of modern Russia. In the documentary the writer reflects on his life and works, tracing their origins to the Russian literary canon, the Soviet artistic underground, and the aesthetics of totalitarian regimes.

September 8, 20:30, Main stage
Luz

Dir. Tillman Singer, Germany, 2018, 70 min. 18+

The Russian premiere of, according to the RussoRosso portal, one of the most interesting horror films of 2018, which premiered at the 68th Berlin Film Festival as part of the Promising German Cinema section. Filmed on 16 mm film, this mystical thriller evokes the art horror of the 1970s (in particular, the work of Andrzej Julawski and Lucio Fulchi) and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Fleeing from an unknown force, Luz runs into the police station at night. A demonic entity has been hunting her for a long time, and now, after having possessed a psychologist who was brought in to help with Luz, it has got as close to her as possible.

September 6

19:30 The Bottle House courtyard
Government House as the designer of memories. What do we remember about the 30s? Meeting with Yuri Slezkin and Boris Kupriyanov

The book Government House by Yuri Slezkin, which was published this year, gained well-deserved interest, but most of the reviewers and interviewers of the author, firstly, paid attention to the concept of “Bolsheviks as a millenarian sect.” In discussions of the book, the most important motives of the work faded into the background. Boris Kupriyanov and the author himself will draw the attention of the readers to these themes.

Boris Kupriyanov is one of the founders of Phalanster, the director of the site Gorky.media, about books and reading and a member of the expert council of the Non\fiction fair.

Yuri Slezkin is a professor of history at the University of California in Berkeley, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of Arctic Mirrors and Era of Mercury, which have been translated into Russian.

September 8

14:00 The Bottle House courtyard
What is visual anthropology. A Guide to the Classics of Ethnographic Cinema

The new book from Ilya Utekhin is focuses on the ethnographic cinema of the twentieth century as an important component of visual anthropology. The author uses classical ethnographic films as a pretext for a popular introduction to anthropological subjects: non-verbal communication, ritualized aggression in tribal societies, trance sessions in different cultural contexts, the boundaries of normality and psychopathology in modern Western civilization.

Ilya Utekhin is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the European University in St. Petersburg, author of the study Essays on Communal Life, the project Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life (kommunalka.colgate.edu) and the documentaries PUGOVKA and Volunteers.

19:00 The Pavilion
New Stagnation / Fast Communications Presentation # 22 from the almanac [Translit]

The editorial board of the [Translit] almanac, which has always looked for the least obvious reactions in modern times, has, over the past six months, focused on stagnation and fast communications. The topic of [Translit]#22 unexpectedly intersected with the agenda of the Revision festival. Stagnation most likely refers to the history of the long Soviet 70s, fast communications refer to the cutting edge of modernity and the transformations that we are technologically experiencing now or are expecting in the near future. From this strange combination of a deficit of political and institutional mobility (generating an allusion to the Brezhnev era of stagnation) and an unprecedented acceleration of communication, the formula for the modern world is born.

[Translit] is a literary and theoretical magazine and a publishing project that makes up a community of poets, philosophers and humanitarian researchers.

Participants: Dmitry Zhukov, Alexey Konakov, Dmitry Bresler, Tim Timofeev, Igor Gulin, Marina Simakova, Dmitry Golynko, Roman Osminkin, Anna Rodionova, Mikhail Kurtov.

Moderators: Pavel Arsenyev, Nikita Sungatov

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

September 7

12:30 Pavilion
Panel discussion Decolonizing language. Russian-language poetry in global and post-Soviet contexts

Russian-language poetry practices nowadays exist in the zone of tension between the “mother tongue” and the nomadic movement of the Russian language in other global and post-Soviet cultures. But what if, even in the 21st century, Russian language still bears a “colonial footprint”, can it (if we critically interpret the areas and logic of its distribution, influence and existence) be a language of the new, escaping the overbearing identifications of poetry intensively integrated into other poetic and national cultures?

Is it possible to “decolonize” poetic language? How do poetic practices themselves influence decolonial attitudes to language? Can we build a “utopian autonomous city of poets” outside national and state borders, while reflecting on and criticizing the foundations of our “common ground” and the very borders that somehow maintain our lives and languages ​​today? Why don’t those who write poetry in Russian, but do not live in Russia, refuse to call themselves “Russian poets”, and prefer to talk about themselves as Russian-speaking poets? These and other issues will be discussed by the participants, who write in Russian in other cultures and countries, as well as in different regions of Russia.

Participants: Anna Glazova, Sergey Mushtatov, Egan Dzhabbarova, Janis Sinaiko, Vitaly Lekhtsier, Daniil Zadorozhny.

Moderator: Galina Rymbu

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

19:30 The Bottle House courtyard
Presentation of books from Elena Kostyleva and Nastya Denisova

The first two books from the caesura poetry series, released by the Word Order shop, will be presented as part of the poetry program at the Revision festival. They are They touched and Loved Each Other by Nastya Denisova and Day by Elena Kostyleva. It was decided on principle to open this series of female (St. Petersburg) texts, with books from two authors with completely different poetic strategies.

Nastya Denisova is a poet and video artist. Born in Leningrad in 1984. The author of two books of poems: There is nothing and Incl, as well as publications in literary and poetry magazines and anthologies. Her texts have been translated into English, Italian, Latvian and Romanian. She lives in St. Petersburg.

Elena Kostyleva is a poet and journalist. The author of two books of poems published by Colonna Publications: Legko dostalos (1999; a selection of poems from the book was included in the short list for the Debut Prize in 2000) and Lidia (2009, short list for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2009), as well as many publications in Russian and foreign publications.

20:30 The Bottle House courtyard
Presentation of the book From the depths of the defeat of the species by Janis Sinaiko

In From the depths of the defeat of the species, the reader is faced with an attempt to explore material whose existence preceded the emergence of life, at least life associated with language, and hence material which is inaccessible to cultural designation. This poetry asserts that the very phenomenon of “designation” is not an exceptional property of human language or human consciousness; in a special form it is present everywhere in organic and inorganic nature. However, this is not a historical return to the archeological, at a time when thinking did not exist in any part of ​​the universe. Rather, it is noise “from the depths of defeat”, in which paradoxical feelings of closeness and alienation alternate, in it we can read the decaying leftovers of the above “meaning”, which has nothing to do with identity, be it individual, collective, or linguistic.

Janis Sinaiko is a poet and translator. Born and lives in Lviv. He graduated from the I. Franco. Faculty of Philosophy at Lviv National University. Author of the books Angel Constructor (Kiev: Locia, 2017), From the depths of the defeat of the species (Kharkov: kntxt, 2019). His poetic texts and translations have been published in Ukrainian and in foreign physical and online publications. Long list for the Arkady Dragomoshchenko award (2015, 2017).

September 8

16:00 The Pavilion

Dinner with friendly gods. Poetic and musical performance by Alexander Skidan and Dmitry Shubin

A performance dedicated to the release of Cheese letters chalk. About Arkady Dragomoshchenko, a collection of essays by Alexander Skidan. There will be a reading performed by the St. Petersburg improvisation choir led by Dmitry Shubin of Arkady Dragomoshchenko’s poem Dinner with Friendly Gods (1984), a turnaround text for this author, which is dedicated to one of the key essays from the book.

From the late 1960s, Arkady Dragomoshchenko (1946–2012) almost single-handedly developed the cosmopolitan modernist line of Russian verse, going back to late Hölderlin hymns, Rilke’s Duin Elegy, Pound’s Cantos. This line is complicated by linguistic and philosophical experience from the 20th century (Wittgenstein, Bataille, Derrida), as well as Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist thought. Essays from the poet and critic Alexander Skidan, written in different years, explore the logic of verse of Arkady Dragomoshchenko, which changed the logic of the socio-political function of poetic text at the beginning of the 21st century.

Alexander Skidan was born in Leningrad in 1965. He is a poet, critic, essayist and translator. The author of more than a dozen books, including the novel Guide to N. He has translated contemporary American poetry and prose and theoretical works in literature and art. Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize (2006, for the book of poems Red Shift). Editor of the Practice department for the magazine New Literary Review. He lives in St. Petersburg.

Dmitry Shubin is a musician, artist, founder and conductor of the St. Petersburg Improvisers Orchestra and pianist. His main areas of musical interest are improvisational music, graphical notation, electroacoustics, piano and electronica, conducted and structured improvisation.

Places are limited. Advance registration is required.

Sergey Dobrotvorsky
Cinema by touch

Sergey Dobrotvorsky (1959-1997) was a cult St. Petersburg film critic of the nineties, theorist and practitioner of parallel cinema, underground director of Russian cinema of the 1980-1990s. Cinema by touch was an editorial by Dobrotvorsky, and the adverbial phrase “by touch” is an important characteristic of his method.

Tatyana Nikolskaya
Stilyagi and stileviki: On the history of a Leningrad subculture

Tatyana Nikolskaya (born 1945) is a researcher of Russian and Georgian avant-garde and behavioral practices in the Leningrad subcultures of the 1950s and 1960s. Stilyagi and stileviki is the first lecture in the series Theatricalization of Life and Avant-Garde Behavior, which was read at Word Order. Mudists is one of the few memoirs from the legendary informal Leningrad movement that pre-empted the The New Idiots and Mitki.

Leonid Dobychin
Stories

Leonid Dobychin (1894-1936) is a forgotten prose writer whose life was surprisingly similar to his books, underlined by brevity, restraint, minimalism and invisibility, just short of anonymity, and ended with a surreal disappearance (he is presumed to have drowned in the Neva). This silent disappearance of Dobychin from life and from literature in itself has become part of Petersburg Text.

Nikolay Oleinikov
Tchaikovsky Street, Dombrowski’s Cabinet ...

Nikolai Oleinikov (1898-1937) was a Leningrad poet close to the union of OBERIU, a like-minded friend to Harms, Vvedensky, Schwartz, Druskin and Lipavsky. An author of ironic poems and the first Soviet comic. Shot in 1937 in Leningrad in the wake of repression against Soviet children’s writers.

September 8

21:00 Kuznyahouse
Mishamish Concert (Tribute to 2H Company)

St. Petersburg rappers Mikhail Fenichev and Mikhail Ilyin, in collaboration with the group Yolochnie Igrushki, announced the emergence of Russian independent hip-hop in 2004. 2H Company, the first group to successfully combine high-speed rap with experimental electronica, recorded two amazing albums of intellectually-absurd rap, provided the ballet soundtrack at the Mariinsky Theater and then broke up in 2009.

At the Revision festival, ten years later, under the banner of Mishamish and with the support of DJ Scotch, the rap half of 2H Company is going to present a tribute to the legendary band. Mishamish have promised to play the entire first album, Psycho-Surgeons, but this time without Yolochnie Igrushki.

Tickets are priced at 500 roubles, and are on sale at the New Holland Infocenter or online (service fee applies). Places are limited.