A learning mural curated by ELENA SOROKINA

choreographed by ULA SICKLE

With the support of the Vlaamse Overheid, the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and Gemeente Vorst

IN COLLABORATION WITH YOUNG ARTISTS, DANCERS AND STUDENTS OF ACADÉMIE ROYALE DES BEAUX ARTS DE BRUXELLES, LA CAMBRE, ECOLE DE RECHERCHE GRAPHIQUE, HISK, SINT-LUKAS BRUSSEL, SINT-LUCAS GENT, PHL LIMBURG (M.A.D. FACULTY). and with programme of talks, cooking, nightwatch film screenings performed by ROSSELLA BISCOTTI (Amsterdam), ADELA JUShICh and LANA ChMAJChANIN (Sarajevo) and others (TBA)

In early Soviet science fiction, revolutions happened all over the Solar system - on Mars, on the moon, and of course on Earth. Full of vivid social imagination, its authors described cosmic class struggles and social upheavals booming in space - forceful and impetuous. The labor of revolution was, however, supposed to as the building blocks to create the new future conditions of labor. And here the revolutionary dynamics often got stuck on a single question: How will future humanity work? Should it work at all? The visionary writer Andrey Platonov proposed several contradictory options. In his novel Foundation Pit, the protagonists work to point of total exhaustion. In Chevengur, on the contrary, they stop working altogether as a programmatic and radical gesture. Finally, in Juvenile Sea, they become ceaselessly inventive, displaying an exuberant working creativity. Many writers of the 1920-30s hesitated between the abolition of labor, its extreme technologization, and its hyper-acceleration or a total creativisation. The text "In one thousand years," written in 1927, opts for a creative non-labor and describes the inhabitants of the future as dancing, singing, painting creatures, who also regularly engage in unassisted flight. Like art, levitation and flight are considered a creative pastime that keeps the new humanity busy. All these activities - more or less virtuosic but decidedly unalienated - can be read as pure self-expression or cultural dissemination. What they don't accommodate - and the author is absolutely certain about it - is labor. Neither painting, nor dance, nor levitation contain any "work". This opinion was disputed by some: levitation as labor was most prominently theorized by Tsiolkovsky, a great scientist but also a sci-fi writer. In his novels, people can very well enjoy the low gravity on the moon while working on their research assignments. For Tsiolkovsky, occupation of space by means of levitation is result of engineering labor and scientific work. All these observations bring us to the central question of our project: How can we see the relation between work and levitation today, in the times of our precarious present and the prevailing conditions of groundlessness? Analyzing different types of labor as they were depicted in early Soviet sci-fi, we will investigate possible links between the levitating proletariat and today's groundless precariat, which is trying to gain some leverage in occupying space and spaces. Keeping in mind Google Earth and surveillance technologies, we will try to imagine ourselves levitating while working. Finally, we will take this as opportunity to look back to at the role-models of the "working artist", "managing artist" and the "artist trying not to work" and ultimately, we will ask how artistic labour today resonates with these ideas.

METHOD

About three years ago Oleynikov initiated a series of projects grounded in collective creative living. Since then, bringing together practitioners from different fields and organizing temporary communities in constant dialogue has become one of the essential elements of his artistic practice. This initiative was immediately taken up by several collectives, and was adopted as experimental non-stop seminars, congresses-communes or learning plays which have been recently presented at the ICA in London, Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, at SMART and SCOR in Amsterdam, among others. For "Zero Gravity Revolt" the artist and curator will conceive a specific temporality for the upcoming learning mural. The process will take 15 days, from the first brainstorming sessions to its actual "visible" result. This period of time will be filled with testing the ground, enacting the characters to be featured (flying proletariat as much as levitating bankers), training in levitation, screenings, talks, and informal exchanges. All this will result in collective writing of a program for the mural, which might take a fictional form, and its ultimate completion.