Landscapes of Reality

The speaker

Katya Abdulova — curator of cultural projects, researcher, producer, psychologist by training (Higher School of Psychology). Co-founder of AELITA PRODUCTION, curator and producer of the “Tochka Cuire” festival. She is currently studying at the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema in the course of master Yuri Muravitsky — the only one of 800 applicants to be awarded a tuition grant.

Starting point

The starting point of the talk is anthropologist Gregory Bateson's idea of “third-order learning”: not solving a problem within already given rules, but changing the rules themselves. Katya shows how this works not in theory but in practice — in directing, in business, in working with a team — drawing on a lecture cycle she has already given at the “Tsiolkovsky” festival in Kaluga.

Business is used to defending itself against uncertainty with strategies and plans. The artist doesn't fight uncertainty, but works through it — and that is exactly why they create the image of the future that everyone else later claims as their own.

What the talk is about

On how systems thinking and creative practice turn a point that isn't on the map into a point of attraction — and how not only an artist but an entrepreneur too can use this.