Red Petrograd Revisited/drifted

Not sure how I've managed to avoid properly coming across these people, seeing as their obsessions seem to tally so precisely with mine. Chto Delat/What is to be Done are a St Petersburg-based collective producing various magazines and interventions, such as an issue on what is a still a necessary question, and work seemingly mainly on the intersections between Situationist psychogeography, Constructivism, and a hauntology of post-Stalinist space. Among all sorts of intriguing things here, one worth isolating is an issue devoted to a derive round Narvskaya Zastava (photos of which above and below), the Petrograd district from which the columns of the Military Revolutionary Committee marched to the Winter Palace in October 1917, and which was replanned as a Constructivist district in the 1920s: communal housing, collective kitchens, workers' clubs and so forth, interventions in the byt of the proletarian (supposed) rulers of the new state, now an 'invisible zone' at the periphery of the city's tourist regeneration.



But what is especially interesting here is a forswearing of the usual jaded response (failed utopias/beauty of decay/ostalgie, etc: not that this blog isn't sometimes guilty of such things) in favour of some sort of active practice and production, even if it's only the walk round the city - here for instance. The group-dйrive differs drastically from flaneurism on one obvious count. While the flaneur pits the personal, solitary pleasure of ascetic aestheticism against alienation, the group-dйrive offers the possibility for exploring meeting places such as parks, playgrounds, benches, bleachers and squares together . Narvsakaya Zastava is full of such Commons , ranging from secret meeting places in abandoned factories or collapsed buildings to representative squares, Constructivist backyards, and amusement parks. Thus, the most obvious goal of the dйrive was to flow into these social spaces together , to upturn and reanimate their hidden potential.