Anastasya Kizilova

My main artistic activity is the search for hidden gaps in social, economic and environmental patterns that could open a way for a new kind of interaction and communication. My projects address the tightknitness of the artistic community, its autonomy as a separate social group, and explore and implement alternative models of interaction.

I received an academic art education, after which I was faced with vulnerability and a set of neuroses provoked by competitive relations inside the artistic community in Russia, which was politically becoming increasingly inhospitable to artists. This lack of internal support and solidarity forced me to start a social anthropology study of the creative class and artists with a hope to find like-minded people. This is how the first performances of the Artist's Uniform appeared, around which spontaneous communities were formed. The project found an institutional response also opened access to experimental educational postgraduate programs both Russian and abroad. In the course of the training, I met and collaborated with many researchers and dreamers who wanted to break bonds and enjoy teamwork. For example, I participated in several international horizontal initiatives (the links are below).

In 2015 I co-organized the horizontal initiative, Flying Cooperation. It unites multi-skilled young artists, who were born in the Post-Soviet space (Belarus, Russia, Ukraine). Faced with challenges of precarious work in the cultural industry, we decided to form a cooperative, that would elaborate the open-source economic models of survival in the neoliberal urban space in its radical Eastern European version, and test the possibilities of dispersed collectivity. Flying Cooperation | Work Hard! Play Hard! | Found Project | Blind Spot Platform