The master's thesis is engaged in the analysis of the exhibition “Taxonomy Moldova. Re-Searching” that took place from the 5th to the 28th of September 2019 in the Republican College of Plastic Arts “Al. Plămădeală”, Chisinau, Moldova. It was a photography exhibition with an integrated program of workshops, interventions and public talks that started with the Summer de(School)ing format in August 2019. The exhibition was a continuation of the photographic mapping that explored the socio-spatial relations of Post-Soviet conditions in Moldova and is based on the collaboration with the photographer Volker Kreidler. Tanja Sokolnykova appears in this project in multiple roles: as a co-author of the photography project, as a curator and as an organizer of the program. Moreover, she considers this project as a meta-dialog, through which she is dealing with her own sense of belonging. The format of the exhibition was tied to the idea of a lived social space (Henry Lefebvre) and the interest was in finding paths of collaborations in Chisinau to build a common reason for learning together and working on the transformation of certain conditions and structures, and, as a result, activating an exchange between the educational institution, the exhibition, the students, the local cultural actors and different knowledge forms. The crucial aspect of the project as well as of the master thesis is the critical elaboration of the Post-Soviet condition from the perspective of decolonial thinking (Mignolo, Tlostanova, Țichindeleanu) with the aim to complicate the politics of belonging and to disclose the tensions between the categories of space and locality.
Mentor: Dr. Sønke Gau
Ko-Referentin: Prof. Angeli Sachs