Dmitry Vilensky Discusses Chto delat' Collective's Political Art Practice in 2010 Interview

On March 2, 2010, Dmitry Vilensky, a co-founder of the collective Chto delat', was interviewed while he was a resident at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Founded in early 2003, Chto delat' includes artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. The collective's mission is to merge political theory, art, and activism, aiming to influence Russian intellectual culture. They produce a bilingual newspaper that tackles issues related to activist culture. Vilensky characterized the group as a self-organizing entity for cultural practitioners striving to politicize knowledge and foster critical independence from state control. He also examined the difficulties the collective encounters in Russia's stagnant political environment and the historical context of their work. The interview was conducted by Sven Spieker for ARTMargins Online, as Vilensky prepared for an upcoming retrospective and a new "songspiel" focused on contemporary Russian history.