Asking Russia not to participate in the Venice Art Biennale “is not cancel culture, but a position to be listened to”. For Aleksandra Skochilenko, an artist from St. Petersburg sentenced in November 2023 to seven years in prison for having inserted stickers with information on the “special military operation” on the product price tags of a supermarket in her city, and released after two years in a penal colony as part of the prisoner exchange on August 1, 2024, “a request coming from the Ukrainians (like that expressed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriy Sybiha and of Culture Tetyana Berezhna, ed.) who continue to suffer the trauma of this war, must be listened to.”
In an interview with Adnkronos, Skochilenko, who is 35 years old and does not consider herself an activist, but is convinced that those who create art “must deal with contemporaneity”, explains that she, an underground artist, arrested in 2022 following a denunciation, condemned the following year for spreading false information about the armed forces, “if a Ukrainian, who perhaps lost a son in the war, felt offended by one of his exhibition, from the exhibition of any Russian artist”, in Berlin, the city where he lives now, or elsewhere. And this is what, according to him, the much more integrated Russian artists involved in the project of the Russian Pavilion of the Exhibition which will be inaugurated in May must do.
And then “those who have the possibility of exhibiting their works in contexts such as that of such an important exhibition” as the Venice International Art Exhibition “can afford to give up being there, having in any case already achieved a sufficient degree of visibility”, adds Skochilenko, at Villa Doria Pamphilj in Rome, where this morning the dedication ceremony of two olive trees took place to her and to Viktor Emil Frankl, founder of speech therapy who survived Auschwitz, “figures who in different eras testify to individual responsibility in the face of totalitarianism and authoritarian tendencies”, as explained by the Gariwo Foundation which promoted the initiative in collaboration with Roma Capitale and Memorial Italia.
‘Russian collective trauma originates in the sound of knocking on the door which in Soviet times indicated imminent arrest’
In 2022, immediately after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, recalls Sasha, who in 2014 had written a serialized graphic novel on depression and mental health, later published as a book first in Russian and then in Ukrainian, “I acted for personal reasons. Because I had many friends and acquaintances in Ukraine. But everyone has the right to do something, be it participating in a protest or helping someone, without having to consider myself an activist. The tendency to transform an act of disobedience civil activism contributes to splitting society in two”.
“It’s also a convenient position to justify one’s pusillanimity. It means being able to say, ‘I count for nothing, I’m not an activist, I can’t do anything,'” says Skochilenko, still optimistic about the possibility of recovery for Russian society and young people, despite the transformation of history into ideology, therefore the main subject of study in schools of all levels, associated with the request in questions and exams to demonstrate one’s adherence to the Putin system and creed, denounced by Boris Belenkin, among the founders of Memorial, a “political emigrant” in Europe, also in Rome today.
“Our generation has more tools to cure the trauma of society, such as psychotherapy or feminism”, specifies the young artist, whereas at his age Belenkin would have spoken of the opening of archives and speaking of the truth, “before understanding that it is not the historian’s task to cure”, indicating, she, the widespread terror in Soviet society, passed on to Russian society, the knocking on the door in the middle of the night, the sign of the imminent arrest during the years of terror and in the subsequent repressions, the origin of the original collective wound, “that of fearing arrest more than dying or killing in war”. But “trauma can be healed and can disappear”, concludes Skochilenko.