House of culture as laboratory: The experience of self-organized circles of DK Rozy

Abstract

The article discusses the work of several circles and laboratories based at the House of Culture of the Rose (St. Petersburg) during 2015–2018. The idea of the DK Rozy as a place of collective cultural production is a kind of challenge to the state-corporate reality existing in Russia today, in a situation of almost complete discredit and lack of collectivity. On the one hand, the DK Rozy revises the legacy of early Soviet houses of culture, and, on the other, is based on the experience of European and American self-managed community centers. As an independent self-organized initiative, the DK Rozy represents a new type of institution, in which a “circle” is a unit of creative interaction and production. The form of the circle blurs institutional hierarchies and distances between creator and consumer, teacher and student, professional and amateur. Circles can be applied, or can work as laboratories, but they include on equal terms participants from different creative professions, as well as a wide range of activists from different sociocultural spheres. The basis of ethics of this type of creative laboratories is a long-term search for a dialogue of equals, and “non-toxic” and “attentive” communication of all participants with each other. Thus, the entire life activity of the DK Rozy becomes a social performance — a laboratory for the production of alternative forms of collectivity in conditions of the extremely individualized Russian society.