A series of Artists' Walks by Joana Monbaron
As the organizers of the Artists' Walks project within the framework of the M10 Education Program, St. Petersburg based artist Olga Jitlina and art historian Emily Newman, outlined:
“drawing from the strong tradition of the St. Petersburg derive, the MANIFESTA 10 Education department has included in its schedule of regular events, a program of Artists' Walks.”
Using local Saint Petersburg’s artists' knowledge of their hometown, the 'Artists' Walks' aim to create a relaxed platform for local artists to meet and discuss various issues with some of the international artists invited to MANIFESTA 10. The idea is to form an artistic duet (one local artist/one international) and a tailored walk in a part of the city that is relevant to the artists' common interests, with a few enthusiasts from the public to join them.
Walk 1: Lado Darakhelevidze & Evguenya Golant at Torzhovski Market
The project was launched at the Torzhovski Market on May, 14. MANIFESTA 10 Public Program artist Lado Darakhelevidze was paired with Evguenia Golant, for a sketching and painting session. Using the post-Soviet lingua franca – the Russian language – to communicate with workers and market-traders, both artists expanded on their professional interests of issues surrounding migration. After the market studio-session, we went together to the Hodja Nasredin tearoom, located above the market, to discuss a new artistic movement that Lado Darakhelidze subsequently named “Marketism”.
Above: Lado Darakhelevidze and Evguenia Golant
Walk 2: Fishing with Wolfgang Tillmans and FotoDepartment
The 'Artists' Walks' continued on June 16, when a group of young photographers associated with FotoDepartment, St. Petersburg took Wolfgang Tillmans fishing on the Smolenka river (in the city's suburbs). The very act of fishing seen by the students as somehow similar to the process of taking pictures being the inspiration behind their walk.
“just like a fisherman, a photographer is supposed to be patient and attentive to things.”
Two professional fishermen even joined us for this three-hours fishing session, interspersed with conversations and tea drinking.
Above Wolfgang Tillmans
Walk 3: Pavel Braila and PARAZIT: Borey Gallery
On July 18, a visit to the cult Borey Gallery was arranged for Moldovan artist Pavel Braila, who was asked for MANIFESTA 10's Public Program to react in some way to the local context of St. Petersburg. The local PARAZIT artists collective invited Pavel to have a guided tour of the exhibition “Black Envy”, which displays “perhaps the first attempt since the launch of Manifesta to consider the uneasy relationship between the local and the international art scenes”. After the meeting, the artists went for a walk along the Fontanka and sat in a park to discuss the history of the PARAZIT group with one of its founders, Igor Panin.
Above: Pavel Braila, Olga Jitlina and members of the PARAZIT group
Walk 4: Josef Dabernig & Pavel Stepanov at Petrovskiy stadium
The Viennese artist Josef Dabernig has been active in the genre of experimental film since the 1990s. His short film, "Wisla" was filmed in an empty football pitch in Kraków in 1996, while many of his photographic series take place in sports architectural structures. Art-historian Pavel Stepanov who's dissertation-in-progress takes on the topic "Artistic space in film in the Leningrad School" was invited on August 30 to join Dabernig for a walk at the empty and lifeless Petrovskiy stadium, which then became the theatre for an open conversation on art, film and nearly touching on football, coincidentally echoing the actual fate of the stadium, which has been partially closed to penalise supporters for racist behavior.
Above: Josef Dabernig
Walk 5: Aaron Schuster & Alla Mitrofanova, & Irina Yukina
Before his lecture on the sexual revolution of the Soviet 1920s at the Sigmund Freud Museum of Dreams for the MANIFESTA 10 Public Program on September 6, writer and philosopher, Aaron Schuster was invited for a walk starting from the Museum of the Siege of Leningrad’s Defence. Together with Alla Mitrofanova, media philosopher and founder of the cyber Feminist club (operating in GES-21 since 1994) and Irina Yukina, author of the book "Russian feminism as a challenge to the present", we walked to and talked about places associated with the events of the St. Petersburg and Russian feminist movement and the sexual revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century.
By combining a local artist with a foreign one, the “Artists' Walks” project seems to been to date successful in its will to encourage strangers to resist global politics with collaborative thinking, group learning and gestures of friendship.