Vienna Workshop 2020

Vienna, August 2020, flinte Queer-feminist Bar/Club, Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Ruthia Jenrbekova, Iain Zabolotny

Being unable to travel in the wake of the pandemic, we have organized the very first Dream Machine workshop for the Russian-speaking community in Vienna. About ten people participated in a full-day workshop that included the project presentation, building the dream machine together, dreammachinery and free writing sessions. Many ideas were born during of this first workshop, some of which later found their embodiment in short films “Gender Dotulation” and “a text floating on a river” (both 2023).

https://vimeo.com/765057332/15bfdbd64d

_{(click on the images to se the slideshow in full colour)}

The artwork The Magic Closet: Art Spaces As Safety Zones For Post-Soviet Queers by Masha Godovannaya, 11 min., video, sound, 2020, Austria sprouted from this workshop.

The Magic Closet: Art Spaces As Safety Zones For Post-Soviet Queers (2020) is a short film developed by the working group of “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine,” shot and edited by Masha Godovannaya in May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. It summarizes theoretical and practical aspects of the artistic research “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance.”
The film is a long shot of the four participants (Masha, Iain, Katharina, and Ruthia) standing and reciting a text in what looks like one frame. Both “one” and “frame” are an illusion, a construction of unity built during editing and post-production. It was a formal decision that we made jokingly thinking: “No one was risking a coronavirus infection while shooting this video. Social distancing was performed according to the rules.” We shot each other separately in the frame, lip-syncing our own dialogue while one of us was reading it off-frame.
We met at the beginning of May when the security protocols were slightly eased in Vienna. It was our first meeting after the lockdown. With the “safety and health” concerns still on everyone’s mind, we had no other choice but to critically reflect on the imaginary “post-covid19”, or, as many started calling it – “the new normal”. The split screen united by one frame was an aesthetic move towards such a reflection.