The Border is the first of three performative lectures developed by Dr Margarita Kuleva as part of her project The Arrival.
The first lecture will be held while crossing the English Channel, at the France-UK border. The recording will be published on the Pushkin House YouTube channel, with the direct link available on this page.
The opening lecture is devoted to the notion of crossing borders in the context of new travel, with some historical parallels from Russian culture. Borders aren’t only anonymous non-sites to pass, but also social institutions, and crossing them is a ritual of transgression. Special attention will be given to gatekeepers and labyrinthine rules of crossing. The lecture presents an interdisciplinary patchwork woven from auto-ethnographic notes, historical examples, and recent stories of the new travellers.
The Arrival is a series of three performative lectures by Dr Margarita Kuleva exploring changing relations between space, body, and culture in the context of new travel. The project is structured around auto-ethnographic experiences and a historical investigation of 19th-20th century Russian culture in motion.
As a result of COVID (and partly Brexit), new travel not only causes anxiety and identity crises but also opens up a broader debate on how body and culture are connected at the liminal non-sites of borders. Moreover, the discussion of the dissemination of culture and the physical ability to travel is deeply rooted in the social history of Russian literature and art. The archetypal example is Alexander Pushkin: the poet who continues to embody Russian literature globally, and who never travelled abroad. How do borders transform cultural identities? What is the connection between the arrival of culture and physical arrival? Is it even possible to arrive in the context of new travel?
Each of the three public lectures is an interdisciplinary travel through time and space, and a mix of anthropological research, cultural history, and performance art. The content and choice of location for every lecture are fundamentally interconnected. All three will be performed by Margarita Kuleva (and invited speakers at the final performance at Pushkin House), aiming however at giving a voice to the many who arrived, as well as to those who couldn’t travel.
Dr Margarita Kuleva is a sociologist of culture, interested in exploring social inequalities in the art world and creative industries mainly in Russia and the UK in order to develop fairer working conditions in the sector. Primarily, she works as an ethnographer to discover the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility for the invisible workers of culture. She is currently based at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, where she is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, holding the position of chair of the Department of Design and Contemporary Art.
The supporting team: Robin Mitchell, Alexander Uttu, and Nikita Yurov.
The project has been organised in collaboration with the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity at UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES); and PPV, an events and research platforms based at UCL SSEES and supported by The Centre for German and European Studies (DAAD) and HSE University. It is presented as a part of the public programme for Desire International, an exhibition currently on view at Pushkin House.
