Maria Rakhmaninova
I am Maria Rakhmaninova, born in Moscow, lived and worked in St. Petersburg. Initially trained as a graphic artist and photographer, I later studied at the Faculty of Philosophy and have held a PhD in Philosophy since 2019. Since 2010 I am a political activist. Since the beginning of the war, I am political refugee. I currently live in Georgia. Although I have been cast out of all familiar worlds for the past 3.5 years, I continue to create art. At the moment, I am working on two major projects – one dedicated to the war in Ukraine, titled “Gnosis of War”, and the other focused on political reflections on the loss of biodiversity, titled “Encyclopedia”. For me, participating in this project is an attempt to stop being a ghost for a moment and to be present in a shared space with like-minded people and professional colleagues.
Militärische Auswanderung
An autobiographical reflection on the experience of exile by a disparate group of former political activists who resisted the authoritarian Russian regime for many years and are now vulnerable and powerless, frozen in the Nowhere—suspended above the catastrophic abyss of territorial reconfigurations and fatally reinterpreted imperial discourses. This state of floating offers a unique point from which to understand historical processes, geopolitical conflicts, and the catastrophes of our era. It is from this hovering perspective, frozen in limbo, that the world has presented itself to us over the past years of war.