Activism
In the second part of her extensive article, Polina continues to share types of events and ways to organize them, as well as personal experience in organizational activities. Read the concluding part of the material “How to Organize Grassroots Events?”, find the format that suits you, and try organizing your own events—because if something is missing from the streets, it’s time to create it yourself. Enjoy the read.
ART-COMMUNICATION
Art-communication, as stated in the theme, is one of the ways to non-obviously experience so-called life. We all know about party-crash benders, group trips to museums, cafe outings, picnics, quests, board games, and bike rides. I infinitely love simple and obvious ways of spending time, but I think it’s extremely important to occasionally add elegance and absurdity to all these things.
Elegance. A bohemian lifestyle can be realized not just through a date with some artist girl (who drags you to a crazy happening you must join), or by buying a ticket to a ceramics workshop or nail-standing session, and not just through some sudden drunken artistic realization at a party. All the charms of bohemian routine (and I’m not talking about drugs) are available to anyone at any moment—the problem is that not everyone dares to realize creative leisure. Some think it’s stupid; some feel unworthy of creative practice without the identity of an “artist”; others cringe at nail-standing and DIY art therapy because of mass criticism. We, however, urge you to diversify your leisure and realize the most insane ideas that come to mind: you and your friends could hold a séance for the ghost of a famous figure in a public place; you could mold genitals out of polymer clay for a home erotic exhibition; you could host a tea ceremony while watching videos about Vedic Russia. In short, you can diversify any standard activity with some strange, non-obvious element. Go for it and let your imagination run wild! The cringier and more non-obvious, the better.
Absurdity. Absurd communication or absurd leisure is the high-level tier for those who have had enough of simple and understandable fun. Elements of the absurd can be brought into absolutely any everyday activity: hygiene routines, shopping, flirting, work, meeting people, drinking, speaking at a seminar, etc. Absurdity is created by weaving silly, inappropriate, and strange details into the routine. You can flirt by giving insane gifts or playing pranks; you can misbehave at seminars, for instance, by suddenly changing your voice during a speech; you can buy items in a store that you absolutely and definitively do not need. We recommend doing this with a trusted friend, and in the case of a solo adventure, actively share the results of your mischief with those you love.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 6: Once, I spontaneously transferred 5,000 rubles to a participant in my art lab so she could have a healer remove a curse. That same evening, my friends and I hung portraits of the writer Yuri Mamleev at a playground, thereby “consecrating” the area with his face.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 7: My friend Eva is a master of absurd flirting. Once, she gave her crush a raw fish, and later forced him to aimlessly drive a jar of “treasures” (not drugs) to another city and leave the gift on a bench in the city center.
EXHIBITIONS, CONCERTS, FLEA MARKETS
Organizing exhibitions, concerts, flea markets, and the like is perhaps one of the simplest tasks described in this manual. Why is it simple? Because as an organizer, unless you plan to exhibit or perform yourself, you will be at a significant distance from the tasks being realized. Distance almost always provides a wider margin of safety, as you aren’t immersed in deep creative processes or triggered by the things that affect the participants (who are more psychologically tied to the environment). Your job as an organizer is to be a troubleshooting machine. This is both easy and difficult. Difficult because the entire responsibility for the structure lies on you; easy because you can completely disconnect from subjective saturation and work like a robot. Naturally, organizing isn’t for those who get stuck or too emotionally involved. It’s perfect for those capable of emptying the affective part of their brain and plowing ahead, softly and consistently untying all the knots and structuring the chaos of events.
Exhibitions, concerts, and flea markets differ from lectures or reading groups because you have no direct control over the audience. When there is a single locus of attention (like a lecture), it’s much easier to control the mood. When attention is scattered (a concert), you must account for the lack of control over people’s moods and the general defocusing of the event. Working with a crowd is easier in a sense because, despite your ultimate responsibility, every participant (artist, musician, or viewer) has their own zone of responsibility—responsibility becomes a fractal. As the leader, you have the final say, but many micro-processes resolve themselves because everyone feels a sense of belonging. The most important thing here is to remain decisive and be ready to make tough calls quickly.
Now, with the existential preamble understood, we can move to the technique. Organizing mass events with fractal responsibility can be summarized in a simple instruction:
- Come up with a project
- Set a date and time
- Find a venue and negotiate
- Reach agreements with participants (artists, musicians, or sellers)
- Launch an “advertising campaign”
- Execute the event
- Collect feedback
When creating a project, lean on your personal passions and goals. Usually, DIY events are organized simply because someone personally wanted to hear certain performers, needed to sell some things, or had a vision they wanted to show everyone. Personal preference is what distinguishes a grassroots event from a mass, pop-culture one. In the latter, the goal is usually profit; in the former, it’s about massive, interesting tasks of an intimate nature. A large-scale event requires more “anesthesia” to friction and difficulties, because surviving a major problem while being emotionally attached is nearly impossible. So lean on the personal—what you love and want specifically. In a grassroots setting, your passion will help you overcome difficulties and project maximum love onto the crowd through your personal love for the project.
Regarding date and time, aim for the end of the week and weekends. I wouldn’t recommend organizing anything on a Friday, as Friday is a litmus test for organizers. If you’re ready to invest in ads and compete with other Friday projects, go ahead. If you want something quiet and gentle, aim for Thursday evening, Saturday, or Sunday afternoon (NOT night!). Remember, if the crowd needs “doping” (alcohol; for exhibitions, they ALWAYS need it!), don’t aim for Sunday, as fewer people will party right before Monday.
Venues will welcome you if there is a bonus for them. Clarify what the place wants: PR? Clout by supporting artists? Profit? (Most likely profit). Organize logistics so the venue gets what it wants. If you have symbolic capital, share it; if you have a unique vision, work to realize it perfectly. Regarding profit, predict roughly how much you can earn from viewers and how payment will work: will it be donations, a percentage to the venue from the bar, or a fixed fee from you? Remember, finding a place that doesn’t demand millions up front is MORE THAN POSSIBLE. You can even find places that won’t charge a cent and will be happy to help organize something socially significant—this is usually how it goes with exhibitions.
When negotiating with participants, focus on “serving” them, not just gathering perks for yourself. You must provide a comfortable environment; be ready to solve their problems and sometimes play the “rescuer” (while maintaining boundaries). Keep a mask of a benevolent and friendly organizer to maintain relationships for future cooperation and to ensure participants don’t start sabotaging the event out of a bad mood. Remember, people are different: someone will get drunk, someone might not show up, someone will forget something. Your task is to maintain calm, not panic, solve problems as they arise, and judge no one until the event is over. Any difficulty not caused by you (assuming you are responsible and on time) can be played off with humor.
We discussed advertising earlier: tell as many people as possible through any means. Your acquaintances have their own acquaintances, and they all have channels to spread info. Almost everyone has enough social resource to promote a project; the difficulty is switching to “rage-mode” to actually use it. Don’t be afraid to be annoying; focus not on “what’s best for you as a social unit,” but “what’s best for your project as a living organism.” Write, call, pester; lose face, embarrass yourself, be pushy. The more people come, the better, because hype and social involvement can ennoble any venture. People come to look at others and show themselves—this fact is your key to their hearts.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 8: A friend of mine, Misha, traveled a lot by hitchhiking and organized communes in different cities while blogging about his adventures. His main tool for finding people for anything was mass DM spamming on VKontakte. If he needed a place to stay, he’d message everyone whose avatar he liked. If he had a project, he’d send mass invitations. Mass spamming helps remove the tension around potential rejection because out of 10 people, someone will say yes.
During the event itself, remember that you are the “lawmaker” of the party and you have the final word. This might seem obvious, but if you don’t have experience grouping responsibility around yourself, you might panic in a critical moment. Don’t. From now on, improvisation is your forte and humor is your weapon. If lost, consult friends WITHOUT shifting responsibility onto them. Panic internally, but your external actions must be clear. I have never seen an event turn into a total catastrophe and eternal shame. Usually, the worst thing is that the party is boring. Unless there’s an earthquake or a police raid, things go smoothly. In case of raids or disasters, you simply pass the scepter of responsibility to third-party entities—no one will judge you.
Collect feedback not as a self-conscious person afraid of failing, but from a distance, where the goal is to prevent similar mistakes in the future.
Finally, a lifehack for any failure: people don’t want precision and accuracy; they want emotions and fun. If a disaster unfolds that can’t be fixed, aim for maximum “luls.” When an actor forgets their lines, the audience usually reacts kindly because the error leads to emotional intensity. If handled correctly, mistakes can generate more pleasure and interest than if everything had gone perfectly.
FILM SCREENINGS
Cinema is excellent at uniting people. A collective screening is the fixation of people around a shared life. Many underestimate film events, reducing them to basic leisure or rare screenings. We believe a film screening can become a non-trivial event provoking a non-obvious experience through its conceptual component.
We won’t delve into organizing a basic screening—that follows the BASIC INSTRUCTIONS: prepare material, find a place, invite people. We want to inspire you to rethink the format itself—the conceptual side—to open new horizons of co-experiencing cinema.
A screening is essentially watching video material together. Unlike a lecture, it requires a different focus. It can be conceptual if you play with *what* you watch and *why*; *how* you watch and in what conditions; *how long* and *how much*; what accompanies the viewing; what limitations exist; *where* you watch. You can play with all these points, making them grotesque, funny, or radical. For example, selecting films based on the stages of grief or the stages of falling in love. Regarding location, you could project a movie onto the body of a cow or a car during a “dirt-poor” punk road trip. You could play with quantity: watch movies non-stop for several days, and whoever watches them all gets a prize.
We urge you to treat cinema more directly. Not every film in every situation requires ascetic observation. Cinema can become material for an adventure where the excessive responsibility of “watching correctly” is replaced by play and a non-standard experience of art.
ART-BUSINESS
The goal of this fragment is to reveal the beauty of art-business and business adventures. I radically urge you not to view this as an instruction for something “sensible” or something that must bring a stable income. I am convinced that business can be a fun enterprise and an act of creativity. I want to inspire everyone to have the courage to dream and the bravery to bring those dreams to life. The lens I recommend using here is the *love of failure*.
“Here is the idol of my East German friends—Franz Jung. A Dadaist, expressionist, famous in the 1910s, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, even became a pirate—stole a fishing trawler! He hid in a chest, captured a trawler, sailed it to Soviet Russia and gave it to the Soviet government! He met Lenin, then went back to Germany, started an uprising, was exiled, led a match factory in the Soviet Union… and all his projects—the factory and others—were absolute failures. He wrote that this is correct! That we should always be in the ‘shit’! ‘All my projects failed, and that is right!’ We must try again and again… they will brand us as losers, but we have a motor instead of a heart! Being a failure is not shameful, it is honorable. A failure who never loses faith. A failure who starts over and over. That is honorable!”
(Quote from *Lifestyle / образ жизни: [collected articles]*. — Moscow: Common place, 2014, pp. 36-37)
Starting a business is actually not that hard. It’s harder to maintain it and break even. However, if you have an idea burning inside you, it’s better to risk and lose a lot than not to risk and lose even more (the pleasure of the experiment).
There is a universal business instruction:
- Decide what you will sell
- Create the product
- Find buyers
- Sell
- Reinvest part of the money into the business, keep part for living expenses
- Repeat as needed
The first thing that stops people is the fear of the project being “unbearable.” You might feel small and weak. You’ll fear finding a venue, limited resources, losing energy, and public indifference. I urge you to destroy that fear by stepping toward it.
Start with your head. If you maintain a discipline of rest and don’t sail away into workaholism, you can solve problems as they come. When your head is clear, risk going into total creativity and imagine your dream project. Then, trim it with compromise where the scale exceeds your capabilities.
Finding a venue is surprisingly easy. Renting a space can cost less than renting an apartment. Since we aren’t looking at “sensible business,” calculate a budget for 2+ months of rent. Check Avito for spaces near the metro.
Regarding taxes: when I organized my “free price” flea market, I knew donations weren’t taxable. After I handed the project to others, they ran it for two years without issue. But to be safe, register as self-employed (in Russia, it’s 4% for individuals). If you want something massive like a bookstore, don’t read this manual. Stick to things that don’t require constant financial circulation, like a gallery or a lecture hall. Donations are your salvation.
If you’re doing a small virtual project (courses or selling crafts), the main hurdle is management. Slow and steady wins the race. Don’t try to conquer the world at once. Take a few clients, hone your communication, and be honest about your vulnerability. It makes you human and wins people over. Since you’re a punk, learn to enjoy the act of selling.
The hardest part is the *entry point*—the portal where you create something from zero while facing problems from rude clients to plumbing disasters. Two months is enough to catch the “flow” of the enterprise. These first two months are the hardest. There will be stress and unplanned tasks. Hold on, don’t despair, and solve problems as they arise. Eventually, the chaos will subside, and processes will automate. Funnily enough, after the storm passes, you might even start to miss the jitters of the beginning. And that might be the start of a new, larger adventure.