(Was) Is there colonialism in the post-soviet countries?
Research and online campaign, design: Studio lekko, with the support of: Relais Culture europe (ongoing)
In recent years, Instagram has become one of the main media to communicate and share ideas. Thanks to its rapidity, it has been used by numerous activists, but also by cultural workers, thinkers, and institutions to engage with online audiences, which probably would not look for such information by themselves or wouldn’t have the possibility to inform themselves via more time-consuming formats. With the recent outrage of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, scholars, artists and researchers, as well as ordinary users created series of posts, in the form of galleries on Instagram. These take into focus the terms and the history of colonial violence, as well as question language, naming, and communication tools, which often reproduce colonial and imperial thinking. In explaining, deconstructing, “re-designing” the language and its performance, such posts have a great potential to become viral.
Using Instagram, we would like to create and share meaningful content on decoloniality and war in Ukraine in order to sensibilize a broader audience on these topics using the instrument of galleries (carousels in French), which would combine impactful visuals and texts. We plan to produce 9 galleries of up to 10 slides each. Every gallery will be constructed around key concepts that the collective reflected on during its working sessions in the previous years. The content will be developed by Beyond the post-soviet in cooperation with artists and thinkers. The collective will be accompanied by a professional social media manager, whose role would be to give advice on editing and presenting the information, and to conceive a strategic plan for communication.