BLACKOUT COLLECTIVE
BLACKOUT COLLECTIVE
The Blackout art collective was founded in 2019 by Valeriia Lakrisenko and Alexander Belov in St. Petersburg. From 2019 to 2022, the main focus of the group's work was rethinking Ethnomethodology in the form of contemporary art. Ethnomethodology is a sociological field that studies everyday practices and the ways in which people create and maintain social order in their everyday lives. It focuses on a detailed analysis of everyday behavior, including language, gestures, facial expressions, and other forms of interaction, in order to understand how people organize their joint activities. Thus, the participants of the Blackout group made “field recordings” on the streets of St. Petersburg, in public transport, in supermarkets, noticing how extralinguistic communication between subjects occurs. Power is expressed not only in written laws and spoken conventions, but goes deeper into everyday behavior - what place does the first person to enter an empty bus take, what purchases does a migrant, a woman or a man with a child start their movement around the store with? How are people placed in space and how are their movements shaped by external factors - advertising agencies, corporations and designers, production technologies and construction materials. All Blackout field notes were collected not in the form of conventional anthropological research, but in the form of artistic expression, expanding the languages of description through graphics, video art, poetic text and installation. In 2022, the members of the collective left Russia, live and work in Austria, continuing to explore social phenomena, describing them in the language of contemporary art.
