Interview with St. Petersburg-based Dmitry Vilensky (Santa Barbara, March 2, 2010/Sven Spieker). Vilensky is a founding member of the collective

Chto delat'

. The collective was founded in early 2003 by a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. The idea was to merge political theory, art, and activism, and to politicize Russian intellectual culture.

Chto delat'

publishes an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to activist culture.

Chto delat

' sees itself as a self-organizing platform for cultural workers who want to politicize the production of knowledge and develop critical autonomy outside of the state-dominated cultural sphere. Vilensky is currently working on the upcoming

Chto delat'

retrospective, and on another "songspiel" about recent Russian history. In this interview, the artist - who is presently in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara - discusses the problems the collective confronts in its efforts to intervene in Russia's ossifying political culture, and he analyzes the historical implications of this engagement. For more information about the group's activities, see

http://www.chtodelat.org/

.