Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup

Perestroika Songspiel. Victory over the Coup is a video structured in the form of a song that conveys and analyses a key episode in the final period of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. In August of 1991 an unprecedented popular uprising against the established order took place. This uprising represented the end of the Soviet period and was deemed by the West to be the final triumph of democracy in Russia. This film is part of the trilogy Songspiels that the collective Chto Delat? made between 2008 and 2010, in which it uses the term created by Bertolt Brecht (“songspiel”) as a perversion of “singspiel” (German popular opera). The video speaks ironically about the epic genre that tinges certain historical processes, such as the one that meant the end of the Cold War, and plays with a distanced re-writing of history.

The work is along the lines of action of a series of artists from Eastern Europe who work with the processes of transformation of the West. With its work, Chto Delat? proposes alternative visions to the dominant narration, but from the vantage point of generational distance with regard to the period addressed, and it seeks to recover the social signifier and the changes in the political and the subject, in dialogue with post-communist and post-colonial thought.



Cristina Cámara Bello