Issue 3/2006 - Working Poor
The action »Angry Sandwich People« centred around the 100th anniversary of the first Russian Revolution of 1905. As this (alas, completely neglected) day of commemoration drew closer, the group Chto delat (What is to be done?) intensively debated whether an adequate artistic form could be found for exploring this date and its consequences. As we know, the revolution of 1905 began with a workers’ march on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg that was later put down with much bloodshed; the march started off from the Narva Gate, which is situated in the middle of a proletarian residential and industrial area. A year ago, we had already engaged with this district in the project »Drift. Narvskaya Zastava«. In the late twenties, Narvskaya Zastava was replanned and developed, but it still remained a workers’ district. These days, a typical post-Soviet tragedy is taking place against the background of the constructivist architectural ensembles of that time. Many of the local companies have closed down their factories. Poverty, cheap consumerism and socio-ethnic conflicts now characterise the area, along with the visual flood of advertisements.
At any rate, it seemed only logical to return to this place. The aim was not so much to celebrate the revolution of 1905 as to project the potential of a new political subjectivity that could oppose the new Russian bourgeoisie. In this respect, »sandwich people« seemed particularly interesting. In Soviet propagandistic art, they symbolised the epitome of exploitation as »walking advertisements«. However, these days, this profession is very widespread as a low-wage job, particularly in the post-Soviet region. In 2003, Chto delat took a close look at this job, carrying out an action and a series of interviews. Despite the frustration that goes along with the job, sandwich men and women seem unbelievably passive. In their fight for the bare essentials of life, they have little time to consider the possibility of resistance, for example. In Russia, where mass protests are now apparently impossible, this passive attitude seemed very typical. When carrying out our examination of Narvskaya Zastava, we came across it again and again. Would it ever be possible for this passiveness to turn into rebellion?
In this new work, we wanted to imagine »the revenge of the sandwich people« and stage it as a theatrical happening. The action was conceived and carried out in cooperation with Petersburg activists from the groups »The Pyotr Alexeyev Resistance Movement« and »Workers’ Democracy«. Because the latter group had published a Russian translation of the Brecht poem »In Praise of Dialectics« on its Internet page, we decided to carry out our own Brechtian revenge fantasy and bring this classic poem, verse for verse, onto the square at Narva Gate, carried by sandwich men and women who had at last become aware of their contradictory situation. The result of this action is a slide series in which the sandwich people, with their bodies as text-bearers, silently come together and drift apart again to the soundtrack of the traffic – and in the process manifest the possibility of new representative configurations between protesting singularities from different age groups and social classes (pensioners, activists, children). At the end, each of the participants reads the verse that s/he is carrying. The effect so produced could be called an alienation effect. The mute motive potential of a political potential becomes a decidedly poetic discourse, now marked by the emptied rhetoric of Soviet pathos, although it is precisely this that more recent protest culture want to deny. It is here that the scope of the problems addressed in this work becomes clear: the historical phenomenon of a failed revolution and the political potential that could grow on its ruins, at the place where it originated, one hundred years after the first defeat.
Chto delat (What is to be done?), made up of Dmitri Vilensky, Olga Egorova and Nikolai Oleinikov, is an artist-philosopher-writer group from St. Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod. In addition to publishing a Russian-English newspaper, they also carry out art projects. For further information: http://www.chtodelat.org