Michal Muravski — The Age of Culture T(h)ree, or Global Sobyaninism: Aesthetics, Ecology, Bezobrazie and Blagoustroistvo

May 16, 7:30 PM

Moscow’s Zaryadye Park is designed by hip Manhattan architects, well-schooled in critical theory and self-perceiving as “mavericks” and “dissidents”. Its aesthetic and rhetoric is global, cutting-edge, cosmopolitan, eco-futurist. It is the opposite of the vertical bling of the Luzhkov era. It is Vladimir Paperny’s Culture One, rather than Culture Two. It is a Culture One, however, which manages to acccommodate a stunning array of national (and imperial, and Soviet) iconographies, ideologies and symbologies. It is Culture Two masquerading as Culture One. Or rather, it is not only Culture One, but also Culture Two. Zaryadye Park is Culture T(h)ree (or Culture Tree — Культура Tree — for short). With reference to Zaryadye (but also to the Sobyanin-era blagoustroistvo of Moscow and to other realized or failed grand projects like Manhattan’s High Line and London’s Garden Bridge), this lecture names Culture Tree (or global Sobyaninism) as the emergent hegemonic form of speculative urban capitalism.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and art based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where he is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Critical Area Studies. His work focuses on the complex social lives of monumental buildings and on the architecture and planning of East European communism. He is especially interested in the powerful — and subversive — impacts that communist-era architectures, infrastructures and aesthetics continue to exert on the capitalist cities of the twenty-first century.

Admission is free of charge, lecture is delivered in Russian. Attendees must register in advance (link in Russian).

Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg lectures

Curator: Margarita Kuleva, Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Director, Design and Contemporary Art Unit, Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg

This lecture series will examine modern society through the optics and tools of sociology, anthropology, political science, cultural and media theory.

How is “human science” possible without people? Which is more important to the global cultural economy — London or Siberia? Is sixty the new thirty? Can talent replace oil? What is work in the age of robots and craft breweries? Do classical museums and Instagram compete with one another? Do new technology and opportunities in education help to rid us of social inequalities based on class, gender and race?

These and other questions will be addressed by renowned overseas and Russian social scientists in dialogue with artists, industry professionals and the lecture audience.