A live multimedia performance based on the true life experiences of artists from ex-communist countries, working together with artists from western countries. Venues in Eastern and Central Europe and Russia host the artists during the preliminary workshops.

The project consists of two parts: a research phase and a working residency.

The research phase, carried out through workshops and investigative visits, focuses on Lenin’s statues, which were found in many cities and villages in the Eastern Bloc (and were removed after the Soviet Union fell). One of the aims of the research is to find the exact places where statues once stood, and to understand what they represented for people. The artists visit the cities and collect graphic, video and sound material, including interviews with local people.

During the second phase, a working residency in an Eastern country, artists work together on the material collected, developing the final performance to be presented in the season 2006-2007 in Barcelona. The final result is a “physical theatre multimedia show” with mobile scenography.

The artists involved belong to different fields: they are actors, dancers, singers, musicians, film makers, multimedia creators, architects and playwrights.

Aim of the project

The figure of Lenin, often misunderstood by history and widely abused by political systems, is used as an emblematic figure, embodying human contradictions, confusion and doubts.

Artists work on Lenin’s figure, making it theirs, using it to express their personal vision of today’s world, feeding their creative process with their own experiences, extracted from their own lives and artistic careers.

There is no moral or political intent in this project. The purpose is to challenge preconceived concepts and ideological language to create a living force full of human energy.

Encounters and artistic fusion

The core of the project is the collaboration between artists from the post-communist culture and others from the west: “The fusion of various experiences, extracted from life or theatrical careers, makes the explosion of creativity reflected in the dynamics of the play” (Semolina Tomic - project leader).
The encounter and collaboration between different cultures aims to develop a space for reflection, a “temporary zone” that recognises and accepts diversity as a value for artistic and creative expression.

A strong experience (by Semolina Tomic)

"All this investigation has been a very strong experience and I will in some way go on with it, it will not end in one show: I hope I can work more on it and I would also like to collect all these experiences (meetings and interviews with the people I have met) in a book.

The experience of meeting the people and of knowing what they think nowadays is very interesting and strong.

Most young people do not want to know about the past, even if it existed just 15 years ago, they just want to forget about it.

People between 30 and 50 years old are searching for some kind of identity, they do not feel comfortable with governments with a dark past.

People older than 50 sometimes miss the old time of communism – this depends on the country they live in."

Art overcoming prejudice (by Semolina Tomic)

"Due to the political and economic situation of the Balkans, where the war is still very present in the civil society’s memory, it has been shown that the exchange of experiences between Croatian actors who had never worked with Serbian actors functioned without damages and generated a very special experience, since the actors overcame their prejudices and were able to share the theatrical experience without any problem.

The mixing of contrasts, characters and nationalities fomented an intense experience, very rich in propositions, which stimulated the workshops’ development to a great creativity range that defined the principles from which the new creation would be alimented."

A historical paradox (by Semolina Tomic)

Communism is dead.

In East European countries nowadays, even to quote this ideology is politically incorrect. In Western European countries, communist parties have reformed themselves, some have changed their name, and the majority have accepted the rules of free trade and the capitalist system’s game.

Some have come to the conclusion that Communism, especially Stalin’s version, was worse than Nazism (Stalin killed millions of people, overshadowing Hitler’s atrocities).

Lenin died in 1924. Everything that has made history since ... is very far from the Marxist ideology that he held. More so, his successors used his image as a symbol for Communism, when what Lenin proposed originally was very different from what they put into practice.

With the changes in the Eastern European political systems, after being an integral part of people’s daily lives, with statues even in the smallest villages, they disappeared completely. For example, in Hungary, all the country's statues were gathered and a “Museum of Terror” was created in Andrasi Boulevard in Budapest. In other places the statues were sold to rich countries like Norway.

Therefore we find ourselves faced with a historical paradox, or a sort of collective ignorance as far as the facts about the Communist systems and the basic differences between the original ideological purposes and its applications in Stalin’s government. Lenin’s image was used as “the” Communist symbol after his death for seventy years, and after communism’s fall in the East as a negative symbol, a totem for evil and suffering of all these countries. We actually forget that Lenin’s objectives, his Communist ideology in its essential form, were positive, humanitarian and constructive, integrated and integrative by other political systems like democracy, which nowadays reigns and is considered “correct”.

The Russian Revolution in 1917, gave a jolt to Russian society, as well as a new vision of the world amidst all the humanity of the twentieth century, compared to the 1789 French Revolution.

The sense of freedom and creativity that took place in the following 15 years (until the arrival of Stalin’s regime), gave birth to the most fruitful vanguard in theatre arts, architecture, cinema and poetry: the constructivism in the architecture of Melnikov, Vesnin, Lessitsky or in Malevich’s supremacist studios, Meyerhold’s theatrical experiments, the scenes from Popova, Maiakovski’s poetry, Dziga Vertov’s and Rotchenko’s cinema, to mention only a few examples. Artistic disciplines fused, creating new forms of expression and interacting with the whole of Europe’s scene of the time, the Bauhaus School, Stijl School in Holland, Italian’s futurism or the painting experimentation in France.

For this reason, Lenin, or rather his iconography or “iconoclast”, is proposed again in the frame of a critical project about a prospective vision with different points of view. An image that is reflected over and over again in the time and space of Eastern European culture as well as in the collective imagery of Western culture.

Lenin, just like any other historical figure, embodies humanity’s contradictions, confusions and doubts. Lenin is an interface of past, present and future times. He is a “medium” where we can analyse and reinterpret the world through a poetical and romantic vision, playing all the multiple sides of life.

In “Lenin is Mine”, I want to use all these contradictions. Work with Lenin’s emblematic figure making it mine in my own way.

I will try to synthesise, around this icon all the questions, all the answers of my vision of today’s world.

I would like to talk about subtle things, things that are nearly invisible and at the same time strongly noticeable, daily situations, like waking up and making breakfast (but what breakfast?), or the way to buy bread or go to work.

I would also like to talk about culture and education, the ways and methods to realise them in a Communist system and compare them to today’s system.

I am not interested in morality, the good and the bad - I don’t want to look for justifications in the systems to make facts worthless.

I am aware that it is a delicate and risky subject, even 15 years after this massive change has happened and I want to treat it with all my sensibility, intelligence and respect."

Concept (by Semolina Tomic)

The work is inspired by the roots of my most anxious questions about life, about people and how the world is going. The world with all its contradictions never ceases to inspire me.

The first time I stopped to think and I seriously asked myself “what is really happening?” I was 13 years old and I had just met two Hungarian boys at my friend’s house.

I was born in Osijek, North Croatia, only 100 kilometres from the Hungarian border. These two kids were in a state of shock because they had just escaped their country, running while the Eastern bloc soldiers were shooting at them. They ran and ran without looking back. One of their friends had been killed so they just ran forwards. The just wanted to get to Paris.

I started to understand how things worked. I realised that Eastern bloc Communism controlled lives down to the smallest detail and that options for the people with a free spirit didn’t exist.

This really scared me, even though in the socialist system where I was born and educated, former Yugoslavia, life was very different.

In 1989, the Eastern bloc wall fell and in 1990 we started noticing the beginning of conflicts in the Balkans and the entrance of wild and fast capitalism.

What has happened in the last 15 years, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the death of Communism and the Balkan’s ethnic war?

Most parts of Russia and Eastern Europe has been privatised. What now reigns is wealth plunderers and speculation, the Mafia, prostitution, corruption and nationalism… The first millions are earned, ex KGB agents turn into state presidents, the Mafia’s godfathers use their business influence to buy positions in parliament, in the police force and in the army. Their children get sent to Oxford.

Most people’s lives don’t make any SENSE any more, because everything has changed. Generations of parents and grandparents who knew the Communist system educate their children with their old rules. Children born in the 1990s grow up only knowing the wild capitalist system.

A year and two months ago, I met Ludomir Wegrzecki. He is Polish and comes from Warsaw.

He speaks Spanish, English and Italian. In the 1980s he lived in Spain for a few years. He also escaped. He is nearly 40 years old.

His face is full of scars and he owns two pitbull dogs

Both of us come from the punk movement and everything that that means.

Ludomir is a noble Polish; as you enter Warsaw’s cemetery, the first grave with a sculpted head on a nice stone is Ludomir’s great, great, great grandfather, who was Warsaw’s mayor.

In February 2004 I went to visit Ludomir. He showed me Warsaw, Radom and Llodz.

I already knew Poznan, I was performing there in 1996 and 1998 in the Malta Theatre Festival.

Ludomir would talk to me, talk to me about so many different things…

Surviving is very difficult. He knows Warsaw well. His small details, his history, his past and present.

He transmits it with intensity, and all this made me realise that I felt the drive to create, basing my self on my own reflections on the subject that always moves me: a show in Poland with Polish people.

And that was the beginning of my research on Lenin is mine.