In 2022, the NOGR collective underwent a radical transformation. Today it is an open structure that still resists personal authorship, while manifesting personal responsibility for utterance and action. Our sustained work with political imagination and cross-border interaction no longer holds practical value within its original frame, as the return of "the right of the strong," imperialist war, and the maximization of information slop erases such statements and strips them of any practical dimension. Today we must build the preconditions for resistance, for pushing back against aggression and inequality — at the very least within the culture we can reach. We believe it is now necessary to focus on practices of "radical care," on images of resource redistribution through the loss and transformation of one's own identities (rather than their defense). Images of commonality within migration, exile, struggle, and horizontal support — this is our cultural goal. We understand that artistic research is a weak foundation for such a manifesto. Still, our attempts and our work will be directed at exactly this. We still believe that difficult questions and artistic images can contribute to positive change. An emerging decolonial optics within culture drives the disintegration of imperialist narratives, alongside support for the total necessity of the dissolution and destruction of empires as such. The colonizer's language cannot be decolonized from within its own grammar — which is why we believe it is now essential to change (to live through disintegration) ourselves as well.

Archival statement --->
Nogr is an artistic and research collective. As an entity, which was created within the post-Soviet space, initially Nogr addressed the issues of collective memory, its formation mechanisms and effects on the present-day political and social situation, history and its image in the contemporary official historical narrative in Russia and abroad, as well as international near-border communication and its historical development. Currently Nogr has expanded its interests, artistically considering topics of alternative scenarios of the past, and speculative modelling and design for the multiple future(s), both based on the aim of the development of the political imagination. The collective employs multidisciplinary approach and is not limited by any particular medium.

nik degtyarev


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NOGR.COLLECTIVE