MG+MSUM

EVENING LECTURES | Arseny Zhilyaev, Branislav Dimitrijević
Monday, 26 August 2019 | 6 p.m. & 8 p.m. | auditorium MG+
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18:00 Arseny Zhilyaev, "Labor" Market: Post-Soviet Art through the Prism of the Shuttle Traders Model, lecture

20:00 Branislav Dimitrijević, "Turbo-Folk Made Me Do It!": Schizo-anthropology of the Genre, lecture

 

 

Arseny Zhilyaev

"Labor" Market: Post-Soviet Art through the Prism of the Shuttle Traders Model

 In his speech, Arseny Zhilyaev will talk about the generation of the first post-Soviet shuttle businessmen through the history of the labor biography of Soviet engineer Alexander Dolgov, who after the collapse of the USSR became a private entrepreneur in "Labor" market in Voronezh, and then would have to return to his original profession. In addition, the shuttle trader figure will be considered as one of the possible models for interpreting strategies of artistic behavior in the first post-Soviet decade.

 

Branislav Dimitrijević

"Turbo-Folk Made Me Do It!": Schizo-anthropology of the Genre

When the pop-musical genre called Turbo-folk emerged in Serbia in the 1990s, it provoked a number of controversies and affective antipathies and sympathies. Even though Cultural theoreticians and public intellectuals have mostly dismissed it as the tune that accompanies the war‑mongering Serbian politics, turbo‑folk has also been singled out as the cultural symptom of the ideology of post-socialist transition. 

 

However, the persistence and constant transformations of the genre have invited a variety of interpretations. These have raised and explored many gender-related and class issues, leading to a variety of conclusions that located certain subversive, even emancipatory potentials of this musical hybrid. There is an emerging body of academic and critical writing on the subject today, at a time when the popularity of "Balkan beat" has been boosted by the recent upsurge of "trap-folk" and other styles mixing the 1990s Turbo-folk with other globally emerging trends. So:

  • What is Turbo-folk?
  • Why and how has it emerged?
  • Is it a global or local phenomenon?
  • Did it come from grassroots or was it a highly orchestrated and sponsored national project?
  • Is it about the desire for emancipation or the desire for repression?
  • How to (schizo-)analyse this phenomenon beyond the high-modernist dismissal of popular culture and the postmodern relativism of "cultural studies"?
  • And, in general, shall we study the Serbian culture and politics of the 1990s as the vanguard of the world as we know it today?
 
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