... I am amazed by the existence in human society of structures responsible for spiritual experiences, values, the meaning of life, just as housing and communal services structures are responsible for electricity, gas, and water supply. The presence of external structures, with their own hierarchy, bureaucracy, etc. - a la the Russian Orthodox Church - which are authorized by society to deal with the internal life of a person seems to me something ... difficult to explain. In 2013-2018, this interest was also fueled by the situation in the artistic life of Novosibirsk, where the so-called “orthodox activists” were the main force opposing modern art, disrupting exhibitions, etc.

Archived version

... Two lines of argumentation can be distinguished for the unreasonableness (or weak justification) of the choice of materials for the archive and the refusal to make judgments about their value. The first line is a sociological, rather than art historical, approach to collecting material. Within the framework of this approach, we consider the entire diversity of reality as worthy of study, and our goal is to capture what is happening in the field of art as it is, without selection and judgment. We archive all the evidence we can get our hands on and trust the judgments made by the participants themselves.

Archived version

... Let's imagine some abstractly defined “artistic life” in the form of a circle, which has a core, which will include artistic practices themselves, and a periphery, where phenomena related to art and influencing it will be located. This peripheral zone includes activities that provide communication between the artist and the public, art appreciation and preservation, education, cultural exchange, etc. The confusion that we would like to avoid is that in some cases what is caused by the weak development of this peripheral zone is attributed to art itself and its artistic properties.

Archived version

... You should not imagine the social field as some kind of smooth space, movement and distribution through which directly correlates with what qualities you possess and what potentials you contain. The degree of fame of an artist is not directly related to the artistic qualities of his works or the persuasiveness of his statements and gestures, just as the authority, weight of any initiative and public opinion about it are not directly related only to the actual actions that it performs.

... I, as a person who has never worked in any cultural institutions and for the last 10 years participated only in self-organized projects, eventually realized for myself that self-organization can be quite different. There are projects that squeeze all the juice out of you and leave only a feeling of dissatisfaction, and there are those that, on the contrary, give strength and space for growth. There is a self-organization that structurally builds itself precisely as an organization and largely uncritically copies existing formats...

Discovering the homology between art and the resource economics of extraction, Irca Solza criticizes the current state of the so-called “regional art” and ways of its development: one-time PR campaigns that inflate top management, centralization of cultural resources and blind methodological self-confidence must be replaced by long-term programs to support already existing circles and initiatives.

Archived version

...What do you want to tell us? What kind of art do you produce? Where is your manifesto, after all? There is no technical/technological, thematic, or intonation commonality. Art is thought of as communication, and as soon as you address the viewer, then indicate your intentions, they tell us. The public has already learned to read irony and grin at simple jokes, but what is happening on the art scene of Novosibirsk now brings something new, completely different from what could be united under some pre-prepared sign.

Archived version

...Until that time, art must serve the emancipation of man, the creation and preservation of the human in him, which is constantly captured and destroyed by various kinds of inhuman systems created by people themselves in the process of their joint activities. These systems are superior to humans, they are inert and myopic; created by rationality, they are not able to exist in the mode of “life”, deadening everything in endless repetition.

Archived version