Post 89 Lecture: Svetlana Boym: Performing History in an Off-Modern Key

POST 89 LECTURE:
Svetlana Boym: Performing History in an Off-Modern Key

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Svetlana Boym discusses the strategies of performing history and various forms of nostalgia for the future that could have been after 1989. Hannah Arendt referred to the experience of public freedom as the "miracle of infinite improbability," and compared it to a performance on the public stage which can easily become a "forgotten heritage" written out of the official historiography. She examines different forms of performing history that engage with or censor such experiences of public freedom in cinema, architecture and popular theater. After beginning with the mass spectacles of the October revolution (commemorated in including Eisenstein's "October"), she will move to their post-Soviet recreations in the St. Petersburg carnival. This was a short-lived "phantasmagoria" of unconventional urban archeology which, in addition to mobilizing alternative cultures of late socialism and art of dissent, restaged the October revolution in the off-modern key. Svetlana Boym will then address two architectural and cinematic performances in the space of the museum: Alexander Sokurov's film "The Russian Arch" and Rem Koolhaas' project "Hermitage 2014," before, at the end, offering her own phantasmagoric conclusion.

Svetlana Boym is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She is exhibition curator and author of books such as: The Future of Nostalgia, New York 2001; Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Cambridge 1994.

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