Conference “Underground and Lifeworld: Late Soviet Unofficial Culture as a Socio-Aesthetic Phenomenon”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and Uppsala University

Stockholm, 28–29 September 2019

The conference will highlight the most important aspects of underground culture – its lifeworlds.  We will focus on such formative aspects of underground culture as its infrastructures, self- conceptualization, interactions with external cultural realms through the mechanisms of samizdat, magnitizdat, and tamizdat; different forms of spirituality intertwined with artistic and cultural practices, as well as gender and performative practices of the late Soviet underground.

Organizing committee:

Per-Arne Bodin, The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities

Maria Engström, Uppsala University

Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University

Working languages: English and Russian.

Venue: Ersta diakoni, Erstagatan 1, Stockholm https://www.erstadiakoni.se/sv/konferenshotell/konferens/

Saturday, 28 September 2019

10.00-10.30 Coffee and welcome from the organizing committee

Section 1. Conceptualizing Soviet cultural underground

Chair: Maria Engström

10.30-11.00 Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University). Underground culture and historical avant-garde

11.00-11.30 Ilya Kukuj (Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich). Infrastructures of the late Soviet underground

11.30-12.00 Klaudia Smola (University of Dresden). The Life-World of Late Soviet underground

12.00-13.00 Lunch

Section 2.

Chair: Mark Lipovetsky

13.00-13.30. Ann Komaromi (University of Toronto). Samizdat, tamizdat and magnitizdat

13.30-14.00 Irina Sandomirskaya (Södertörn University). ”Maria”, the underground, and an anti-feminist feminism

14.00-14.30 Per-Arne Bodin (The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities). Maria Iudina and the cult of heroines in the underground

14.30-15.00 Coffee

Section 3. Leningrad and Moscow Artistic Underground: 1980s and early 1990s

Chair: Ilya Kukuj

15.00-15.30 Maria Engström (Uppsala University). Консервативный андеграунд: Южинский кружок

15.30-16.00 Ekaterina Andreeva (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Тимур Новиков и “Новые художники”. Ресайклинг советского быта

16.30-17.00 Andrei Khlobystin (St Petersburg). Народный концептуализм Тимура Новикова

17.00-17.30 Oleg Kotel’nikov (Pushkinskaia 10, St Petersburg). tbc

Sunday, 29 September 2019

9.00 Coffee

Section 4. Late Conceptualism

Chair: Per-Arne Bodin

9.30-10.00 Sabine Hänsgen (Humboldt University). Video poiesis. Documenting the Lifeworld of Moscow Conceptualism

10.00-10.30 Tomáš Glanc (Zurich University). West- and East-European sources and contexts of Late Soviet Underground 

10.30-11.00 Fruits

Section 5

Chair: Klaudia Smola

11.00-11.30 Ilya Kukulin (The Higher School of Economics, Moscow). Between Permitted and Unofficial Cultures: Leningrad’s “Club-81” and Its Strategies of Public Activities

11.30-12.00 Stanislav Savitsky (The Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg). Self-conceptualization of the late Soviet underground (theory and politics)

12.00-13.00 Roundtable. The Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture

Chair: Mark Lipovetsky

13.00-14.00 Lunch