ÖPR EXCHANGE PROJECT

PROGRAM ÖPR

RESIDENCIES AND EXCHANGE

Artist's residence - a place for exchange

ARTIST'S RESIDENCE

The exchange project is implemented on the basis of three networks of sites - art residences:

PAS Fürstenwalde;
RIA Keburia;
PAS St. Petersburg;

and includes the participation of artists and cultural figures from different countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Germany.

The overall goal of the "Artist's Residence" project is to increase the number of self-organized

art spaces in different countries and strengthen the links between them.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

to design a communication environment for people of art;
create a single network of curators, artists and musicians, which will ensure regular contact within art communities and cultural exchange between the regions of Germany, Russia and Georgia;
provide an opportunity to implement projects in the concept of "up-cycling" in the common creative space of the residence.

Cooperation between cultural figures makes it possible to develop and see in practice a method for designing creative residences in abandoned and remote areas from the centers, which implies a qualitative change in the infrastructure of selected places.

Art residences are becoming drivers for the development of remote areas, attracting more citizens through the created cultural initiatives, forming the cultural stability of the regions and increasing the availability of resources for creative clusters.

PROJECT RESULTS

During the five months of development of the residences with the support of the "Expanding cooperation with civil society in the Eastern partnership countries and Russia" program, cultural and art workers, together with the local community of curators and artists, created 20 art / design projects.

It is valuable that in almost all implemented projects the concept of "up-cycling" used was reflected in serious topics affecting issues of national identity, civil liberties, territorial studies and other topical issues of civil society.

A survey of exchange program participants shows that at least 70% of them believe that their knowledge of the planning, development and operation of art residences has increased significantly and they can apply this knowledge independently in their home country.

Also, artists and curators plan to stay in touch with other project participants and seek further cooperation.

Despite the changing global situation in the world, which makes it difficult to travel between partner countries and new aspects of cultural policy, we hope that the developed concept will inspire and motivate artists to further develop art residences and international cultural projects.

The developed method in the future should become the basis for the following creative endeavors.

The project is planned to be continued and actively developed in the next two years.

The recruitment of participants was carried out in two approaches: in August and September, artists who were already in Germany participated in the implementation of the project, they actively planned and erected art residences in Fürstenwalde and created an information channel on social networks in order to effectively and easily exchange experience.

P A S

PAS IN BERLIN

Petersburg Art Space (PAS) is an art space and event venue, open to all branches of art and science. Since 2017, there has been a rich series of concerts, performances, workshops, seminars and exhibitions.
PAS also offers a residency programme for artists and researchers to live and work together in the same space.

PAS predominantly hosts works in the fields of contemporary and experimental art and music, with the goal of being a platform for new, innovative ideas and a local hub for international connections.

PAS is also welcome to holding any project which generally enriches the cultural landscape in Berlin and our local community in Alt Moabit. Aside from concerts and theatre performances, we have also hosted events such as video instillations, film evenings, or readings.

The residence of Ria Keburia is located in the village of Kachreti in Kakheti, 70 km from Tbilisi, on the territory of the 5-star Ambassadori Hotel with golf courses, a stable, a hippodrome, a helipad, its own fleet of luxury cars and retro cars.

The golf courses also serve as a place for the installation of sculptures, on which the artists of the residence work, the artists have the opportunity to present their work in a small gallery.

Ria Keburia's residency helps young artists, including collaborating with Artists in Risk.
Artists also have workshops at their disposal, where they can work in a kind of contemplative atmosphere.

PAS ST. PETERSBURG

PAS in St. Petersburg is a multidisciplinary and mobile network of art spaces for various branches of art and social practices. Since 2020, a rich range of different locations and a network of curators have been created, distributed throughout the city of St. Petersburg and its environs.

Many events are held in these places: concerts, master classes, seminars, discussions and exhibitions. The list of PAS locations in St. Petersburg includes:

conspiratorial self-organized art space F5;
gallery "Dich";
project “Art-ferma 36”

F5

F5 is a project for self-organized counter-public space questioning the border between the public and the private. From one hand, there’s a place for exhibitions, performances, lectures and quiet concerts, as well as a communication space reminding both of Soviet underground flats and decadent salons. From another hand, there are living and working spaces for residents.

F5 is intended to give place for experimental music, dance, theater, performance, various cross-media and participatory art. Different curatorial, educational and community-building initiatives are also welcomed.

GALLERY "DICH"

The DICH Gallery is an exhibition project founded in 2021. DICH is a white cube for young authors, a space open for interaction, the main focus of which is the creation of personal exhibitions.

The gallery collaborates with both Russian and foreign authors. The artists, whose exhibitions were presented in the gallery, work in various media, including painting, graphics, objects, installations, video art, performance.

ART-FERMA 36

The project supposes development of an abandoned farm situated close to St. Petersburg into a place where artists and animals meet each other. There should be communication between the animals and the city dwellers. The project is also intended to provide space for various artistic initiatives, such as residencies, film and theater experiments, improvised music, and art. It is also a place for various small concerts and festivals.

People and animals are considered the most important elements of this space that is, in fact, a very special little world, a piece of nature just an hour by train from the dusty and busy metropolis.

PROJECTS

Fürstenwalde

ZOSKA LEUTINA
JULIA LEVYKINA

MAPPING COMMUNAL MEMORY

To create the object of the project, the participants collected used and obsolete textile items from the inhabitants of Fürstenwalde, which not only have the qualities of the material itself, but also bear a trace of the memory that their owners endowed them with. From these materials, they created a three-dimensional map, and also documented the process. People's stories were recorded in interview format and became the research part of the project.

Every area of a city isn’t only architecture and infrastructure, but also a combination of human lives lived in it. To gather those live stories and to create their combined image is one of the ways to make a place visible.

When we started working with the city, collecting the stories of the integration of residents was transformed into a map of our own integration. Working on collecting other people's experiences turned into practicing our own immersion in a new place.

We think that the experience we have encountered in the process of our communication with the city is to some degree universal. And it can reflect the process of "entering" into the place of any person forced to adapt to the environment and to adapt the environment to himself.

For the creation of the object we used both old clothes given to us by the residents themselves along with their stories related to life in this city, and found discarded items. All of these things, through their use, bear the imprint of the memory of the people of Fürstenwalde.

At this stage of our project, the map sewn from the old clothes of the inhabitants of Fürstenwalde is a map of our intrusions and interactions with the city, reflecting our emotional residue from this process.

We are also continuing to collect residents' personal histories to create a second map layout that will show the cumulative memory of Fürstenwalde residents about their lives in the city.

ANASTASIIA KAPUSTINA

UP-CYCLING SUMINAGASHI

Suminagashi - is a Japanese art. Abstract paintings made with paints dissolved on the surface of a liquid. In this project, momentary abstract images were fixed with nitro enamel on the lacquered surfaces of dismantled furniture thrown out into the street.

The project symbolizes that short-lived abstractions that dissolve in the past and once loved and useful things thrown away as useless can acquire new meanings and even cultural value. The exhibition was held at three events in the art residence Fürstenwalde. For the project, components of cabinets found on the street and a bank of black nitro enamel and lacquer were used.

ALEX GRIBEL
ALEXANDRA BYKOVA

INTERIOR DESIGN OF ART LIVING CONTAINERS

Within the framework of the project, a kin-dza-dza stove, a sofa with a visor (made together with Siarhei Otkydasmex), was created. The artists took part in the creation of a universal mobile space from a container that can be used as a living space, an exhibition hall, a place for watching films or a lounge area. Up-cycling furniture, practiced the method of reusing resources, which prompted the creation of new forms and construction technologies that have been described and can now be applied to any living space.

"You can make everything out of everything!" - With this motto we go through life and came to the art residence Fürstenwalde to create a multifunctional space for life and creativity from recycled materials.

For our project we used a shipping container. All over the world they are used to transport goods, they travel everywhere. And now one of them will get a second life and go on new journeys in a reborn form. The container will now enclose a cozy, unique space for life, movement and art. Equipped with tools kindly provided by the residence Fürstenwalde, we began our work.

We made holes in the container for doors and windows, insulated the floor, ceiling and walls to make the stay in the mobile room comfortable. We decided to make the walls and trim from wooden boards and cabinet sashes. For decoration we plan to use foam plastic, kraft paper and PVA glue. To create the atmosphere, introduce elements of shards of glass and mirrors, launching them into a new life full of light and sparkle.

By creating this project we believe that in today's world overconsumption of resources can lead to a global crisis and up-cycling can provide an opportunity to reuse resources, reduce construction costs and encourage the creation of new forms and technologies of construction and creation of interior and domestic objects.

SIARHEI NAVITSKI

LASER - PROTEST

The project was intended to explore and delve into the technology of using the laser in audio-visual performances and events. A group performance using this technology was presented to a wide audience and documented. The action is based on the idea of understanding labor regimes, freedom and lack of freedom, human attitude to external global processes. It is interesting that this topic was previously developed by Sergey in photography. Working in the context of the performer's plasticity and taking into account the scenery and space features, Sergey created volumes of light with the help of a laser and a smoke machine.

ANASTASIIA KAPUSTINA
VLADIMIR IVANOV

SOUNDS OF UP-CYCLING

by Anastasiia Kapustina и Vladimir Ivanov (Perforated Cerebral Party) with participation of the local community of the residence.
In the process of working on the project, sound recordings of the work of old agricultural machines with manual control for processing grain and feed, which were found on abandoned farms, and the sounds of tools during upcycling work were used on the territory of the art residence.
During live performances, the authors combined the sampled sounds of these machines with their live sound and the sounds of homemade instruments. The idea was to create hand-operated industrial "music boxes". The general rhythm has a mechanical coloration, but the rhythm itself “floats” vividly.

MUSIC AS A UNIFYING MEDIUM

by Perforated Cerebral Party. In the format of concerts and meetings with the community, a wide audience was immersed in the context of the residence, the authors of the projects demonstrated their results to a wide audience. Three events have passed - December 3, 22 and 27, 2022. At three live performances, which took place in the Fürstenwalde residence, the goal of the project was achieved - the listeners heard live - that techno and industrial have deep roots in the era of industrialism, when manual labor was replaced by mechanisms.

This is the moment when artists reimagine the soundtrack of production in the entourage of abandoned industrial premises, turning the sounds of once-working machines and instruments into musical content.
These sounds have long accompanied a large number of people working with them.

We believe that this is why in the post-industrial era these cyclic mechanical sounds were registered at the genetic level in the minds of people and became an integral part of modern European mass dance culture.

ELENA HIZAAR

THE DESPAIR OF LOVE

The project took the form of a dance performance using recycled materials as decorations and became a collaboration with other artists in an art residence in Fürstenwalde. At the residence, Elena found a lighting specialist, musician, artist and cameraman, with whom she began to collaborate.

The performance was presented to the public on 12/22/2022 and 12/27/2022. The author created a palette of images and meanings that appealed to the memory of the viewer.

In my performances I try to avoid imposing meanings on the viewer.
I try to give images and symbols that should appeal to the viewer's memory - so the viewers decides for themselves what the work was about.
The star symbol can have several meanings.

VASIL BERELA

THE SCULPTURE ON KNIVES

The idea of the project is reflected in Greek mythology, where love-eros and death-thanatos have always been closely linked. The search for a new mythological symbolic language in the author's work is very important for him, and the themes that he chooses in his work will never lose their relevance as long as people remain humanoid creatures. The contrast between Eros and Thanatos makes the work, on the one hand, very erotic, and on the other, very dangerous, because it shows the moments when a person reaches the highest mental and physical orgasmic points, which at the same time can be deadly.

Are people willing to sacrifice their lives for this moment?
Does our passion give rise to Dionysian impulses that can end in disaster?

DARIA LOGVINOVA
MALYSHEV EVGENII

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY

The aim of the project was to get acquainted with the inhabitants of the art residence, to see the situation in the Fürstenwalde art space and the mood of the participants. In the course of the study, several points-locations were selected on the territory of the residence, which unite the team and play an important role in the life of the community.

These points turned out to be containers, which, with the help of upcycling technology, are now being transformed into residential capsules and a courtyard with a canopy, where everyone gathers to smoke, drink coffee and discuss important issues. The result was several wooden panels with landscapes depicted on them, which were subsequently mounted into the inner lining of the walls of the containers. All wall decoration is made from recycled materials, and the painted panels themselves are made from the same materials.

Ria Keburia

The group of residents included 10 people - artists and sound artists from Georgia, Russia, Germany and France. They were at the residence of Ria Keburia from December 4 to 20 and developed the concepts of art projects, some of which were realized at an exhibition in the self-organized gallery "Hermitage", as well as in a series of individual and collective performances.

SIMULTANEOUS LABORATORY

A collective performance in the gallery, "Simultaneous Laboratory" was held by the curator and philosopher German Preobrazhensky, who was present at the residence as a volunteer. According to the scheme developed by Herman several years ago, a laboratory session is an interaction of several parallel and relatively independent aesthetic flows: sound, movement, image, semantic flow (voice / speech).

The laboratory, being a kind of happening, captures the moment of the present in its ephemerality, eludes the finished form of the work, but at the same time relies on a strict formal "canon" of simultaneous flows. Georgy Elaev and Stepan Kachalin (sound) took part in the laboratory from our group.

Video by Gosha Elaev

GOSHA ELAEV

POSTHUMAN FACULTY

Main goal of the project is to develop an effective platform for an upcycling community. It might be an online space with an opportunity for an offline workshops, hosted by the artists interested in amaintained collaborative work on a long-term basis. The platform would be focused on the practices of sustainable production, participation and care through the prism of posthumanism and queer theory.

HERMITAGE GALLERY

The empty, dump gallery turned out to be the most free format of artistic expression, where everything appears not in accordance with someone's expectations, but rather contrary to the situation.
The Hermitage has become a spontaneous gesture of institutional criticism. It should be noted that the abandoned and dump sites surrounding the territory of the hotel served as a resource of materials not only for our group, but also for the participants of the Connecting the Dots exhibition that was held in parallel in the gallery.
One of the main such loci was an abandoned boarding school, where you can still find curious artifacts of the Soviet era (visual natural science aids, portraits of great Russian writers, etc.).

The proposed gallery initially had several variants of the name (“Fake off Gallery”, etc.), but in the end they settled on “hermitage”.
We have used the literal meaning of the French word hermitage: “a wretched hermitage”, “a place of solitude” (one of these is just a wasteland or dump, embodied “the roadside of the world”).

The building of the Hermitage was left practically unchanged - only a couple of non-working lanterns from the landfill were brought to the entrance to give it a more stately look.

ANASTASIA
KRYAZHEVSKAYA

ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP
WITH THE MOTHERLAND

Nastya Kryazhevskaya, as part of her project "Abusive Relations with the Homeland", created an object - crying guts. The intestines themselves (an anatomical manual) were found in an abandoned boarding school, a piece of red velvet was placed in the gap (such material was used to make flags in the USSR), and a ceramic eye was inserted into this piece of kumach, from which tears flow - plastic parts of some chandeliers in which the light is beautifully refracted.

Nastya's other object is a self-made gramophone made on the basis of a manual from a physics classroom with rotating disks. If you wish, putting your ear to the paper socket, you can distinguish someone's unintelligible muttering from a flexible blue plate - the very presence of speech, but not its meaning.

SIMON CHAOUAT

LIQUID DISTRICT

Simon Chaouat presented a brutal work done by welding on sheets of iron.
In the center of the iron sheet - a jar with some kind of vital fluid - either oil or blood.

LERA GROZA

UPCYCLING REALITY

Presentation of the video work by Lera Groza, created as part of her Upcycling Reality project based on many images obtained at the residence, capturing the life of the artist and processed using artificial intelligence.
The plot of the film is that AI is introduced into our consciousness and modifies perception in order to finally rid us of anxiety. Reality begins to boil down to a set of everyday rituals, streamlined and improved by AI. However, despite this, the feeling of loneliness and disturbing strangeness only grows.

This is a story of the relationship between humanity and capitalism with globalization.

We all have the same habits, the same rituals for calming down while we’re living our speed up lifes. We just try to save something stable and unchangeable, when we need to change living place, or work, or city.
And corporations want to improve and monetize everything, even if we don't ask.

Reflection on what attempts to preserve reality look like when the information field is crumpled, reassembled from the same elements. We feel anxious clinging to the form, while the content slips through our fingers, changes, overwhelms.
What happens when objects now only mimic themselves?

Lera Groza posted a poster related to her film outside the Hermitage
(another poster was hung on the wall of Ria Keburia's gallery).

NINO CHECHELASHVILI

THE FOREST

Nino Chechelashvili made a sculpture out of plastic waste - a human figure without a head, dynamically frozen in some kind of torn jump, an element of the Forest project, referring to the forest of suicides from Dante's hell (humanity seems to be diligently cultivating such a forest from itself). In addition to this sculpture, Nino also prepared a completely functional sound object - a xylophone welded from scraps of metal pipes.

ADA ABDRUSHEVICH

BETWEEN

Ada Abdrushevich's project was presented on two large panes. Arranged in the corners of the gallery, they seem to immediately give it some kind of ritual dimension. There are post-apocalyptic black flowers on the glasses, patiently woven by a post-human spider.

The idea behind the project is to explore and rethink fragments of our past. The rags of memory make up the patchwork curtain of the picture of our world, on the basis of which we reinvent ourselves and in a new quality.

Finding ourselves in the transcendent between the «before» curtain and the abstract «after», we reassemble our consciousness, shattered by war and torn by politicization.

STEPAN KACHALIN

IS IT NATURAL?

The works of Stepan Kachalin are objects found in an abandoned boarding school placed in the “Hermitage” context. One is a faded map of Europe, a fading trace of the (violent) division of land.
At another object, immersion in languagelessness is growing: a visual aid with the consequences of some kind of man-made disaster (poisoning, wounds, mutations), but only all the words are cut out, as if this is the main consequence of the cataclysm.

“Is it natural?” is a multimedia installation. This is a conceptual work, an attempt to comprehend the art of up-cycling and the context in which it exists.
The work includes two parts:

The first part can be reproduced in Fürstenwalde. This is a spatial installation, which is an empty room with a window, or a hole of arbitrary shape, carved into a wall.

Above the hole is the inscription "Is it natural?".

The second part exists in a digital form, as part of a virtual exhibition made jointly by artists during the Artist Residence in Ria Keburia. It is a photobook and the text documenting the process of working in the residence. The virtual exhibition is in progress.

Large amounts of waste concentrated in one place is the significant indicator that we are not coping with the issue of waste. Large accumulation of a garbage is always something enormous, frighteningly immortal, something that will not go anywhere in the next hundreds of years, the hyper-object.

Hence the pictures of a world turning into a wasteland. Hence a fear of the catastrophe that just about could knock on our doors.
This catastrophe has already happened.

What can art do?

Art can rethink a monstrous, chaotic garbage object, turning it into a functional object, “humanizing” it.

During the residence, we walked around in the vicinity of the Ambassadori hotel. This is the hotel where we lived and on the territory of which the Ria Keburia gallery is situated. Right behind the fence that surrounds the hotel, we have found many places where waste is dumped.

The wastelands that opened before us became our inspiration and the area where we looked for materials for our works. Our journeys were documented by me on an expired photofilm "Svema". These pictures formed the digital part of the project.

What is natural?
Is what we see on the landfills is natural?
Where, in all this slow decay, human and nature end and something else begins - something that threatens to stay here for a long time?

PETR KUPRIIANOV

SAMODUR

In my up-cycling art-project SAMODUR I present the variations in the application of kitchen, household, industrial, waste and defective materials to create sound substances that can be widely used both in experimental music performances and in writing and recording of samples and arrangements.

The elements of the project are plastic, silicone, metal and rubber tubes, a steel case of an old malfunctioning samovar, kitchen metal household appliances and broken children's holiday toys-whistles, blowpipes and horns.

The main purpose of the project is to prove the fact firmly pointing at the unconditional possibility and benefit (both for humanity and for the world around) of reuse of waste products and materials of domestic and industrial production in the realisation of something radically new in the context of contemporary art and noise music.

During my stay at the Ria Keburia Foundation art residence

I developed and realized art projects in up-cycling technology:

SAMODUR
Is a brass percussion device for extracting a wide range of low-, medium- and high-frequency sound vibrations.

SPIRALIST
A version of the classic spring guitar for the production of rustling and tinkling sounds.

BUG
An acoustic wind instrument for reproducing loud, noisy, nervous and roaring sounds.

This instruments can be used for musical and visual performances as well as for the creation of sound sequences and compositions for use as soundtracks and samples for videos or, for example, independent cinema.

A video example of the use of the samodur in the performance of the improvisational-performative musical act «Concerto for Seven Mantises and One Turtle».

As a development project, the "Hermitage" exhibition was scanned in 3d, which will become the basis of a virtual gallery with reference to the corresponding mark on the map. The topic of upcycling in the work of the group at the residence of Ria Keburia turned towards environmental art and institutional criticism.

The group has shown its creativity and readiness for cooperation and joint projects. What the artists and sound artists have created during their stay in the residence is a positive evidence of the possibility of their further development of the theme of upcycling in other contexts (for example, in Fürstenwalde).

PAS in Saint-Petersburg

According to the concept of the project and due to the inability to leave,
the following projects were implemented in this residence:

MARIA FROLANDINA

FIRE RENDERING

Art Group Marathon of horror esthetic forms (Maria Frolandina) presents a performance with burning sculpture and a video recording process. A place for this event was chosen in a suburb of Saint Petersburg and named Art-Ferma 36.

The shooting was made in the gallery of the farm - a house without windows and doors. An iron barrel for a fire was mounted in the floor of the gallery, and above the barrel we placed a sculpture for burning.

Performance must show irreversibility of nature and human catastrophe in the apocalyptic interior of Art Ferma gallery house without windows and doors.

The sculpture was made by the artist Paper Pate (Maria Frolandina) from recycled materials using the author's technology, the process took a year. The second plan of the stage consisted of noisetextil canvases created on the theme of fire.

Performance “Fire rendering” is a first part of catastrophe catalog by Art group M.o.h.

A point of each part of it is a tragic event in the world since the year 2020.

“Fire rendering” is a dedication to a fire that happened in the Big Utrish, Krasnodar region.

The essence of the process was to concentrate on the destruction of an art-object, equal in value to a perennial tree, which can disappear within a short time in a catastrophic fire.

Fire and bonfire are beautiful in themselves, despite the tragic fact of irretrievable loss. Therefore, in the video you can read the insoluble contradiction between aesthetics and the tragedy of what is happening.

ILIA LOBOVIKOV

SHARED THOUGHTS

The project created a community of enthusiasts who are interested in the topic of tape recycling and cassette culture in general. This resulted in a launch event representing the local cassette community, the designers who use the cassettes for recycling projects, and the labels that produce and distribute the cassettes. The main goal and physical result of the event was an audio collage made by all the participants of the event.

To fully convey the experience of creating such a work of art we provided almost unlimited materials and all the necessary tools to take the tape out of the cassettes and use it for the collage.

At the same time in the other part of the F5 space we organized an area where people could see catalogs of local labels and private collectors, exchange cassettes and discuss music.

Our team together with mmmesss studio sound engineers tested the technology of transferring ferromagnetic material from the spent cassette tape several times before the event to avoid unforeseen results. As a result, the creation of the audio collage went according to plan and attracted many more participants and spectators than we had originally expected.

The table on which the information was transferred from the tape was set up in such a way that it was easy for several people to approach it at once. Some of the guests spent more than half an hour at the table creating a collage, while others came back to the table several times during the evening.

PABLO RASCOBAR

ART FARM 36

The purpose of the project: to unite people and animals, their free and friendly existence in one creative and natural space. The project continues the traditions of the Educational and Practical Center for Natural Agriculture and Farming, which used to be located here. The community uses the Sepp Holzer permaculture method, which is based on the rule "to save and increase greatly what is given to us by nature."

In addition to people, goats, sheep, chickens, a cow and a horse live on the farm. The animals live on the ground floor, but they kindly gave people the 2nd and 3rd floor for cultural rest and music making.
Animals are happy to join in common activities with people.

Before the members of, there was an abandoned farm here, the buildings were in bad and uninhabitable condition. For 2.5 years, we have established infrastructure, created comfortable conditions for residents, as well as for animals that live on the territory all year round.

During the implementation of the program, instead of the planned 20 projects, 26 took place, some personal projects were combined into group ones.

An impressive textual and visual archive of the project is of practical value for any art figure who is going to create art residences as a place

for the exchange of experience.