Studio 4.413 is a Saint Petersburg, Russia–based laboratory for alternative discourse and interspecies kinship created to rewire (trans)local art and activist communities. We program an open-ended field of mutational praxes and utopian theories without a uniform code or dominant form of discourse.

Our goal is to invent new language and strategies for interdisciplinary groupings that are adequate to today’s political situation, as well as to translate contemporary critical thought into the field of an everyday practice that changes habitual ways of thinking. We invite others to be complicit in our hybrid forms of interaction.

Our space combines the production, social reproduction, and distribution of art—that is, it includes studio space, living space for visiting residents, and performance/exhibition space. We exist as a not-for-profit, not charging for events and lending our space to friendly curators/activists with allied projects.

We are in need of your support in order to keep developing meaningful projects focused on supporting the LGBT community, queer politics, anarchist communities, and inclusivity.

Russia is currently subject to Law 6.21 of the Adminstrative Code of the Russian Federation, which forbids “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”, making conducting education and support projects among LGBT folks significantly riskier.

The range of co-organized projects and events our space can hold is potentially unlimited: we host concerts, debates, workshops, laboratories, panel discussions, seminars, propaganda parties, exhibitions, lecture performances, and plays that hone in on activist/politicized artistic devices as they carry today’s critical/theoretical field into the field of practice.

What matters here is the search for variable interfaces and new language that allow us to bring together theoretical concepts “divorced” from individual empirical and sensory experience with praxis, rewriting a micropolitics of the everyday.

In Studio 4.413’s first year of existence, we have hosted such initiatives as:

For us, seeing this space develop would mean the open-ended possibility of creating an alternative matrix of agency. Our intention: to make contact between cities, regions, and countries. We envision this space as a space of interaction for motivated people from different geographical coordinates to connect in a friendly zone of solidarity, in free conditions.

We model our format as a residency for artists, activists, researchers, and others interested in the intersection of disciplines and media. The art/activism residency format makes no claims to a final product; it is aimed at engagement with a common informational and political field for articulating the current situation and developing ways of interacting and collaborating, i. e. for process-based, cooperative strategies with the goal of rewriting the political and social field.

In addition, we are gathering data for an art/activism cartography project, starting with similar locations that we already know of and that share our conceptual agenda. We expect our ongoing work, collaborations, and contacts made through residents to allow us to more systematically plot a field of similarly-minded people/spaces/initiatives that deal with contemporary problematics and are interested in collaboration.

We are currently looking to raise 2,000 euros, which will cover 4 more months of the studio’s work (rent and utilities), simultaneously: