picture taken by Nadezhfida Davydova
The picture shows Arcady Tyurin of St. Petersburg’s Street Paper ‘Journey Home’ in a public performance piece. For Russians, access to social services is dependent on registration at an address. St. Petersburg has at least 54,000 unregistered individuals living in the city. To be registered you have to have proof of past residency, and without this you cannot get access to jobs, healthcare and other necessities to live. If you cannot get a job you cannot get an address. This means you cannot get registered. This is the vicious circle of homelessness in Russia.
In this short podcast interview, Arkady Tyurin of ‘New Social Solutions’ talks about new ’surviving technologies’, solutions to tackling social exclusion within St. Petersburg’s unregistered population.
Click Here to listen
New Social Solutions also publishes Putdomoi (Journey Home), St. Petersburg’s Street Paper.
Design by Alexander Menus
Our flight stops off at somewhere called Riga, and I’m sitting here thinking’ Riga, where the hell is Riga? When we did arrive at Riga we got lost looking for our Russian transfer, and the staff were shouting our names over the PA to get our arses there and we finally found where we were supposed to go. The plane to Russia was a 40 seater with two propellars. At the Airport, Arkady was there to meet us.
He took us for coffee at 2 am and then to a hostel that reminded me of a commune I was in when I was younger.
Ade introduced his language tool to people at the hostel, something I have named the Welsh Computer (Ade is Welsh). This is a piece of Welsh slate and a stick of chalk.
Wake up first day in Russia, Ade is photographing everything in the room. The place we stayed in has a bordello above it and you can watch cctv footage of whose going up and coming back down. St. Petersburg is a very beautiful city. It is very big and everything looks very old. We used the metro for the first time, the escalator goes down for ages and all the architecture in the station and the design of the trains is very classical. The concentration is on design rather than what is practical. Travelling round is very difficult as the Russian alphabet has 36 letters and half of them are completely alien to me (no English translation here) Walking around the centre we saw someone selling kittens in the street…
…and a couple of young lads doing acrobatics in front of cars in the road
Our first meal was in a traditional pancake shop.Ade ordered a couple of salads. He was telling me how nice they were and that I should try them myself. When I told him they had chicken in he seemed a bit surprised, and he suddenly got ill. He says meat makes him ill, I wonder if he would have been ill if I had never told him there was meat in it.
Hi everyone, hope you doing well… I was meant to create something about the circus performance but it’s not going to happen, no yet… In the mean time here is George, we always chat at his flat while having a coffee and taking pictures of his work. We are very good mates and respect each other. I really like his work and things fro him are getting very excited, not only in terms of making a living selling his work but the work itself is evolving in amazing ways… but let’s not get in the way, PLEASE DO CLICK HERE TO LISTEN GEORGE AND HIS JOURNEY THROUGH ARTS… comments as always are very welcome…
Billy
OSW brought three groups - from Madrid, Paris and Budapest - to visi TFA’s art workshop at Union Chapel in North London- we had a discussion of the festival - audio here. The conversation is between Csilla Horváth and Sebo from Fedel Nelkul and Jo and Ade from ten feet away.
