The Lunch Lecture on Tuesday, August 14th (the Documenta workshop week “The Position of the Speaker”) is a presentation by Irina Sandormirskaja (contributing author to Glänta, Stockholm). This is the story of Olga Skorokhodova - a blind-deaf scholar, educationalist and author, a star of Stalin's cultural revolution. Skorokhodova lost hearing, vision, and speech in her childhood and gradually regained language through persistent effort and with the help of advanced special education technologies in the 1930s. In her presentation Sandormirskaja will follow Skorokhodova's re-invention of her own self in the process of her re-acquistion of language.
The day is continuing with a lecture in the afternoon (16.00-18.00) by John Roberts (London), followed by a discussion with David Riff and Dimitry Vilensky (Saint Petersburg/Moscow). In both contemporary art and contemporary grass roots politics, the idea of avant-gardism sounds rather discredited by the Soviet experience of party politics. Most if not all new cultural workers refuse such claims of totality, at the same time, the developing political situation urgently poses the questions of the forms of the organization which can arise on a place of party politics. Which new forms of cultural production are capable of continuing avant-garde practices? Which political subjectivity lies at their base? What are the possibilities for “avant-gardes after avant-gardism”?