St. Petersburg, March 2022, Masha Godovannaya with collaborators Anna Altukhova, Polina Zaslavskaya and Dina Murzaeva.

It was a four-day workshop that was held in St. Petersburg, Russia, during two weekends, March 12-13, and March 19-20, 2022. Due to the full-scale Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Masha couldn’t travel to St. Petersburg. However, the workshop for the queer community was conducted via Zoom with St. Petersburg collaborators and co-organized together with the Side by Side LGBT International Film Festival. As the workshop’s organizers and collaborators, Anna, Polina, Dina, and I had to readjust the original idea that had been developed during the year 2021 in order to respond to the unfolding catastrophic events around us.

The first weekend was dedicated to different activities for community-building in order to create a breathing space for the queer people. 

The second weekend, March 19-20, was dedicated to the Dream Machine workshop: building the machines, experiencing them with closed eyes, free-writing after it, doing some additional body exercises, and experimenting with spontaneous tactics of queer bonding which were needed for the participants. 

We decided to have a theme for our workshop in order to attune ourselves and participants to certain common grounds. We asked ourselves and others: what could be ways of coping with reality and ourselves in concrete socio-political circumstances when there was no language to describe all the unfolding horror? How can we keep in touch and organize support for one another when social ties and bonding are collapsing?

Our idea for the workshop was to transform a specific room of the rented space into a magical but at the same time completely material space, which will take us, the participants, to another PLACE: a space that is FAR AWAY, a temporary imaginary refuge. This far-close space, jointly created, was imagined by us as pulsating, alive, and fully ours. We wanted to create a space as an antidote to the reality that was being imposed on us by others-in-militaristic-power who were trying to destroy what we had built for so long, collectively and solitarily. These others-in-militaristic-power were trying to impose on us violence that we had resisted all our lives, to normalize the heteropatriarchal macho power to which we had opposed our collective queer initiatives, projects, friendship affinities, and activist communities. They tried to discipline us with cruelty and force, prohibitions and destruction. In response, we had confronted them with our bodies, queer tenacity and imagination.

Our subjectivity and human dignity lie in this—in our tenacious resistance to the repression of our inner powers, queer intensities, and mutuality of being. And one of the strategies for resistance is to evoke the imaginary. Not escapism and oblivion, but a critical imaginary, where we do not forget about reality but try to transform it in order to continue living.

In the workshop, we created and appropriated a space that we didn’t have, but which was reassembled and made real through our collective actions, and queer presences. It was a temporary space where the queer community could take a deep breath, be with others, share dreams, nightmares, and hope, and go on with living, imagining, and doing alternative worlds.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:

Masha Godovannaya

Anna Altukhova

Polina Zaslavskaya

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANCE:

Dina Murzaeva

PARTICIPANTS:

Andrei

Ari

Iolia

Fedor

Dimon

Rita

Zhenia

Mairna

Elia

Dina

Margarita

Semen

Ulia

During the workshop we had different activities and practices. The following are images of documentation and ephemera which was left from these activities.

Workshop Documentation

Ephemera of Dreams

Ephemera of Taped Traces

 contains remains of messages on scotch tapes which the participants taped on the walls, steps, furniture, etc. – throughout the space where the workshop was taking place.

How were these messages produced?

On the second day of the workshop, we asked the participants to re-read their free-writing texts and choose the most important phrases and words from them, or to write down what they remembered from the body exercises from the previous day. After we asked them to put down these key phrases and words on a wide masking tape and stick these notes in places of the room where they felt it was necessary.

You can see these notes in the workshop’s photo documentation. Through these gestures, the participants and we tried to own the space and make it temporarily ours – to transform the material place into the space that carries our hopes, thoughts, and dreams.

After the workshop was over, Anna and Dina collected these taped messages and sent them to Masha who scanned them and made them available for the archive.

Dream Machine Traces

The process of rephotographing and documenting the real Dream Machines which were transported from St. Petersburg to Vienna led to another art project and practice. Working with the large-scale scanner Masha created photographs of the Dream Machines that express her tangible relation to these artifacts. These performatively produced photographs reflect care, affective labor, and attentiveness to queer ephemera – to traces left by queer others in the time of the catastrophe – while archiving their dreams, nightmares, hopes, and images of the future.

The artwork Зачем?/ What for? by Masha Godovannaya, 4:55, HD video, color, sound, Austria/Russia, 2022 sprouted from the workshop

The film contains traces of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. 

“An articulation of what is unexplainable but felt. Touching what touches us and leaves us in a state of confusion, feeling empty, alone and questioning. Touch is an act of orientation.” 

Keith Sanborn