Shestakova
About
Texts
Talks
Projects
Selected Projects
❇ February, 2023 - ongoing
✰ Decolonial and Post-Colonial In So-Called Peace and War
⟡ Simon Fraser University. Digital Democracies Institute
Working group with Svitlana Matviyenko and Tahmina Inoyatova
✴ We understand Russian colonialism as “multiple and overlapping subempires that … follow substantially different trajectories.” (Parsons 2014). In the context of Russian colonialism, the notion of subempires allows for seeing the overlaps between the surveillance and erasure of multiple occupations, extraction of resources and military invasions. Such an understanding of Russian colonialism reveals conflicting and differentiated positions produced by it. In the words of la paperson, settler colonialism operates through the “set of technologies, required to create and maintain these separations and alienations… Black from Indigenous, human from non-human, land from life.” (la paperson, 2017) Although la paperson writes from the North American settler colonial context, his approach applies to the intersections of colonial warfare, extraction of resources, surveillance and occupations and other technologies of alienation used by the Russian state. Technologies of alienation developed by Russia erase the possibilities to imagine and practice translocal solidarity. Thus, understanding the technologies of Russian colonialism is necessary to “bring about its multiple ends” (Engelhardt, 2022) by developing solidarity and mutual understanding across contexts. In the work of this reading group, we will move from developing an understanding of technologies of Russian colonialism towards thinking about the relationship between Russian and other colonial projects to open the space for thinking solidarity to program and initiate new practices of solidarization. The result of our work will be a collective volume to be published in 2025 on the technologies of Russian colonialism as well as methods of translocal solidarity and resistance.
Parsons Timothy. 2014. The Second British Empire : In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
la paperson. 2017. A Third University Is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Engelhardt Anna. 2022 - 2023 Hardwired Obsolescence of Russian Colonialism. Performance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZotujQUfNVA
₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊
❇ March, 2022
✰ Decolonising Russia’s War on Ukraine
Symposium, co-organised with Vlad(a) , Anna Engelhardt and Michał Murawski
Participants: Maksym Eristavi, Oleksiy Radynski , Darya Tsymbalyuk, Victoria Donovan , Ievgeniia Gubkina , Vitaly Chernetsky , Olexii Kuchanskiy (film program curator)
⟡ Reference Point, 180 The Strand
✴ Recording
✴ Press:
⋆ Radynski, Oleksiy. “Russia’s Turmoil Is behind Its War in Ukraine.” Tribune, April 22, 2022.
⋆ Vlad(a), Anna Engelhardt, Michał Murawski, and Sasha Shestakova. “‘The Front Runs through Us.’” UCL Europe Blog, May 10, 2022
⋆ Tsymbalyuk, Darya. “ERASURE: RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM, MY RESEARCH ON DONBAS, AND I.” KAJET DIGITAL, June 15, 2022
₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊
❇ January, 2022
✰ Swarm
(Plat)form of Care. Co-developed with Anna Engelhardt
⟡ Akademie Schloss Solitude, Web residency “Solidarity is a Verb”
✴ Interview