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Aziza, if I were to introduce you, how should I introduce you?

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The most awesome...

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No, no, no, okay.

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Not that easy to describe what I do, because it's unreal and I love it.

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It's the most unreal thing I've ever done being an artist.

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Why feminism is so misunderstood in our culture?

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There's a lot of reasons for that.

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Lack of proper resources that explain what feminism actually is about.

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Oh, military service, or you want women to serve as well?

10
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Well, if women were in charge, they wouldn't start wars.

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You know, women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and then they'd be in the army,

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and women would be in the army,

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and women would be in the army because they are in the army.

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So, women, like I said,

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women are not girls,

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are girls,

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and women are not really

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giving a lot of opportunities,

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a lot of negativity,

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and so on,

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so women are feeling quite restrained

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and restricted in what they can say.

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Oh my god.

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just took it as, well you don't need Ospec anymore, tutu-lu!

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With every language you sort of gain a new part of your personality.

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In English I exist in a certain way, in Russian I exist in a different way,

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in Mandarin I'm a completely different person.

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And then with Ospec there's this part of my personality that sort of got lost.

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Because I was never allowed to feel like I was one of the people there.

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I could completely leave the environment I was in and find myself in a new environment with new people.

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I was able to reinvent myself.

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People, you know, they would come out to me during the opening week and they'd be like, you know,

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we're not from Central Asia, we don't know much about Central Asia, but I came out of the exhibit crying.

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Where had you raised Uzbekistan and Uzbekness?

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Oh yeah, I forgot to say, when I was in school every summer we would hang out.

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So Uzbekistan was always there?

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It was always there.

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You were feeling Uzbek or Russian or Chinese?

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We have just recorded an amazing episode with Aziza Kadri, a multi-disciplinary artist,

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co-founder of Kuzlak Collective and who has recently been commissioned to prepare the Uzbekistan Pavilion

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at Venice Biennale.

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Aziza, what was the episode about and why people should watch it till the end?

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Aziza, origin story, how I grew up in Taiwan, thought I was a Chinese girl.

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Then I was probably moved to Russia where I started struggling a little bit with my identity.

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Then we talked about how I divide my family and became an artist and all these really long-winded,

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strange ways of me straying away from being an artist and then coming back to becoming an artist.

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It's a nice and encouraging tale for anyone who wants to be creative in certain constraints that might exist in their context

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and how you can still do things that you love.

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It's a very inspirational story.

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Please do watch till the end and Aziza agreed to answer the questions that you put in the comments personally on her Instagram.

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Not all of them.

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We will pick the best questions, the most interesting questions and I will answer them on my reels on Instagram.

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That was good. You can continue.

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Can we pause?

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Aziza, if I were to introduce you, how should I introduce you?

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The most awesome!

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Let's not go there.

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How would you introduce me?

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I always tell people that I'm an artist, multi-disciplinary artist.

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Rarely do people understand what that means from get-go.

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Usually people are like, oh, so what do you paint?

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And then I have to go and say, oh, I actually don't paint.

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I don't really enjoy painting.

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I do all these other things.

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So it is really not that easy to describe what I do.

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And I have a really good friend who once said me a meme, which said,

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if you have to explain your job in more than two sentences, it's not a real job.

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Okay.

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So this is kind of...

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Explain me your job in less than two sentences.

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Yeah, this is kind of where I am at.

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I don't have a real job in a way because it's unreal and I love it.

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It's the most unreal thing I've ever done being an artist.

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It's something that I think consciously and subconsciously I've been trying to do my entire life.

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Jumping through hurdles and all kinds of things.

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And obviously lately, people especially in Uzbekistan know you because of your involvement in Venice Biennale.

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That as well.

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There has been a massive sort of thing that came along.

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We'll talk about that in much more detail.

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But before that, you said that the women in your family are the main storytellers.

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You watched my video.

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I did.

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Someone went on my website.

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Tell me your story.

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My story.

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What exactly do you want to know?

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Because there's so many different directions I could go.

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Let's start from the beginning.

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Because I believe that one person's childhood is one of the most influential bits of their life.

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That forms and shapes life.

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That is true.

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I think in my case that definitely is true.

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I come from an Uzbek family.

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My family is from Tashkent.

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And all of them grew up around school number 110.

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It sounds weird to say it in English.

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So quite central.

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So both my mom and my dad lived on either side of that school.

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That's kind of well known.

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I wasn't born in Tashkent.

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I didn't actually really live in Uzbekistan.

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I didn't grow up in Uzbekistan.

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I was born in Moscow.

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Because my father, when he was young, when he was 17, he went to Moscow to study.

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He went to the Bauman University.

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He did nuclear physics.

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As you do.

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It was the Soviet times.

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Something which actually my dad is the nuclear physicist as well.

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Really?

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Did he actually work as a nuclear physicist?

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He studied at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Tashkent.

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So maybe they know each other as well.

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I don't think so.

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Because I don't think my dad actually ended up working as a nuclear physicist in Uzbekistan.

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He studied.

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So he studied nuclear physics and nuclear reactors and stuff.

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I don't actually know the details.

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And I should probably ask him more about it.

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Around the time he was actually going into the research and actually working within the industry.

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The Soviet Union collapsed.

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So that's not the best situation to be in when you're trying to be a researcher.

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Because obviously there were no more grants or money that were directed into that direction.

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So yeah, he had to do something else.

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But he stayed in Russia and then met my mom.

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In Russia?

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No, in Tashkent.

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They were set up by my dad's cousin.

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It's a whole other story, but it's a story for them to tell.

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Right.

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And yeah, I was born in Moscow in the 90s.

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But soon after that, my dad, because he started his own business, he moved to Taiwan.

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Out of all places.

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His business was something that was electronics then.

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Exactly.

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It was literally what I was going to say next.

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So it has to do with electronics, chips and all that.

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So he moved to Taiwan and then my mom and I, we followed.

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And yeah, I spent about five and a half years, almost six years in Taipei.

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How old were you when you moved to Taiwan?

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Well, maybe, I was not even one year old.

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Oh, okay.

149
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So I was born in Moscow.

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I lived in Moscow for a couple of months and then we moved to Tashkent.

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So I spent sort of like seven months in Tashkent as a baby.

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And then before I was one, we moved to Taipei.

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And that's where I sort of got my first exposure to life in general.

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Inside the video folder places.

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How was it?

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It was, I mean, again, as a child, it's just something that you grew up in and you don't form a critical opinion about it.

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Because that's your life, everything you know.

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You grew up, for the first couple of years, I thought I was Chinese, I was Taiwanese.

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Like I had no idea that could be from some other country.

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I went to a Chinese kindergarten for a year or so.

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So Mandarin really was my second language after Uzbek.

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So my parents spoke Uzbek to me.

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They spoke Russian to each other, which turned into a secret language for parents.

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I didn't learn Russian until I was six.

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And so Mandarin was my second language.

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And I think maybe, consciously as a child, I was like, well, you have a secret language.

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I'm going to have my own secret language.

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And I started speaking Mandarin to my parents, which they did not speak.

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So my mom had to go and learn Chinese and she even did some competitions and she got some prizes for that.

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But yeah, I basically forced my parents to learn Mandarin so they can understand what I want when I was two years old.

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And then they put me into an international kindergarten, which was this equivalent of international schools.

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We have English teachers and stuff.

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So English was my third language that I learned when I was about three or four.

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And this is where languages started to get confusing because I would...

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For some reason, I didn't have any structure in the way I spoke those languages.

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So I would mix all the words together.

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I would put all three languages in the same sentence and all of that, which was, I guess, fine.

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Is it when talking to your parents or talking to...

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Well, talking to my parents mostly, yeah, family.

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Because, yeah, I wouldn't speak Uzbek to anyone else.

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And yeah, when I was six, we moved back to Moscow.

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And I didn't always speak Russian, but my parents sort of put me into a...

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A Russian school.

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Obviously a Russian school, just a normal school, nothing special.

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The only special thing about the school was that it had Chinese, Mandarin Chinese as a sort of second, third language.

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Right.

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Because they were like, oh, it'd be a pity if you forgot Mandarin.

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Which I did.

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I did forget it. And then because I was put into this environment where I could sort of pick it back up, I can still speak it.

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But then, because Russian was replacing, I guess, Uzbek in this paradigm that I found myself in when I was six years old,

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because everyone just stopped speaking Uzbek to me completely.

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Including your parents.

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Including my parents.

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Because, you know, it was out of very sort of noble intentions where they're like, oh, you have to integrate to the society.

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You have to speak Russian.

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You have to learn it as fast as possible.

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So we're going to speak Russian to you now.

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But my brain just took it as, well, you don't need Uzbek anymore.

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Toodaloo!

200
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Yeah.

201
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So that's why I don't...

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Unfortunately, I don't speak Uzbek anymore.

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I sort of lost it.

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And it's a big regret of mine.

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Why?

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Why do you regret?

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Because it's a great way to connect to my heritage and to the knowledge that I currently do not have access to.

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Because I do a lot of work.

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I'm going to talk about it properly.

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That is connected to sort of familial histories and stories that happened in the past.

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And a lot of that knowledge and a lot of these sources are very often in the spec.

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And it just feels like there's a huge chunk of knowledge that I don't have access to.

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Right.

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And also, you know, when I work with people, with, let's say, the artisans that I work with,

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you know, for them, often it is easier to speak Uzbek or Tajik, which, again, nobody spoke Tajik in my family,

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so it's not an option, but like even Uzbek.

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And I would love to be able to communicate in this language that is more comfortable to them.

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There's many reasons.

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And I think I just like the sound of Uzbek as well.

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It has nothing to do with you kind of losing your ties with Uzbekistan,

221
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because Uzbekistan was always present in your life.

222
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It was.

223
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I don't know if it's about losing ties.

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It is.

225
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Here's the thing.

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With every language, you sort of gain a new part of your personality.

227
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Because in English, I exist in a certain way in Russian.

228
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I exist in a different way in Mandarin.

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I'm a completely different person.

230
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And then with Uzbek, there's this part of my personality that sort of got lost.

231
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Right.

232
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And it wasn't lost, but it just never developed into something when I sort of became an adult.

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The reason why I'm focusing on this that much is obviously I am bringing up kids here.

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And we are having our own struggles with the language.

235
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And there are a lot of viewers who might be experiencing the same thing.

236
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And as the parents, what do you think we could do different?

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What could your parents do different so that you would have better links with your language, your native language?

238
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It depends so much on the context.

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Because growing up in Russia, it has a very specific attitude and a very specific history with Central Asia.

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I'm not going to go into negative things right now because we all know what they are.

241
00:15:06,100 --> 00:15:15,100
But growing up in a society where you weren't really, and this is something I realized,

242
00:15:15,100 --> 00:15:29,100
much after the fact that I never actually really felt like I belonged because I was never allowed to feel like I was one of the people there.

243
00:15:29,100 --> 00:15:37,100
In a way, like everyone would always remind me in the most subtle way that I'm still a little bit of an outsider that I'm Uzbek.

244
00:15:37,100 --> 00:15:43,100
You know, in school, this is something I tell as an example.

245
00:15:43,100 --> 00:15:46,100
I was a straight A student. I was a nerd.

246
00:15:46,100 --> 00:15:51,100
I would get all my A's and B's and go on my way.

247
00:15:51,100 --> 00:15:56,100
But still, until the day I graduated, I would do mock exams for example.

248
00:15:56,100 --> 00:15:59,100
There would be a mock exam for the Russian language.

249
00:15:59,100 --> 00:16:04,100
And then I would get a 100, or an exam out of 100.

250
00:16:04,100 --> 00:16:10,100
And there would still be a comment being like, oh wow, look, Aziza got 100 even though she's Uzbek.

251
00:16:10,100 --> 00:16:14,100
I was like, I grew up with you guys.

252
00:16:14,100 --> 00:16:18,100
You know me. You know my story.

253
00:16:18,100 --> 00:16:23,100
Why is there a need to highlight the fact that I am not the same as you?

254
00:16:23,100 --> 00:16:37,100
So again, this is the context, which is followed by specific sort of, I guess, colonial attitudes if you want to go there.

255
00:16:37,100 --> 00:16:46,100
My perspective is going to be a bit different. I don't know if I can give really good advice to parents who are bringing their kids here because it's a very different context,

256
00:16:46,100 --> 00:16:53,100
especially London where it's so multicultural and I don't know if there's the same kind of situation.

257
00:16:53,100 --> 00:17:00,100
But do you think that it is important for us to make sure our kids preserve the language?

258
00:17:00,100 --> 00:17:02,100
For you as parents.

259
00:17:02,100 --> 00:17:03,100
For us as parents, yes.

260
00:17:03,100 --> 00:17:08,100
My perspective as a kid, I'm going to speak as a kid right now.

261
00:17:08,100 --> 00:17:13,100
As a kid, yes. As a kid who went through the similar kind of, as an international kid even.

262
00:17:13,100 --> 00:17:17,100
As a kid, when I was a kid, I didn't really care.

263
00:17:17,100 --> 00:17:27,100
And I was actually happy to not really be associated with it because of those contexts that I told you about because of that.

264
00:17:27,100 --> 00:17:33,100
And stigma and everything.

265
00:17:33,100 --> 00:17:38,100
They would say things like, oh, you're Uzbek but you're not that kind of Uzbek. You're a different Uzbek.

266
00:17:38,100 --> 00:17:51,100
And unfortunately back then, that would make me feel, oh, maybe they've accepted me, maybe I am different from the other, whatever kind of Uzbek they were alluding to.

267
00:17:51,100 --> 00:17:55,100
You wouldn't mind not knowing Uzbek as a kid.

268
00:17:55,100 --> 00:17:57,100
But looking back now.

269
00:17:57,100 --> 00:18:00,100
Yeah, as a kid. The same thing. It's going to be a bad comparison.

270
00:18:00,100 --> 00:18:05,100
But I used to study piano when I was a kid. I liked the idea. But then it was so tedious. It was so long.

271
00:18:05,100 --> 00:18:09,100
And it just took a lot of my energy. And I didn't like the teacher and all of that.

272
00:18:09,100 --> 00:18:12,100
And I begged my parents to stop.

273
00:18:12,100 --> 00:18:14,100
Like, I don't want to go to music school anymore.

274
00:18:14,100 --> 00:18:17,100
And my parents were like, oh, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life.

275
00:18:17,100 --> 00:18:19,100
And I'm like, no, I'm not.

276
00:18:19,100 --> 00:18:21,100
And then guess what? I regret it.

277
00:18:21,100 --> 00:18:27,100
I regret it a lot. And I think I understand that maybe it wasn't completely under my control, you know, the knowledge of the language.

278
00:18:27,100 --> 00:18:37,100
Because growing up in Russia and maybe my parents also didn't just, didn't have the time or energy to maintain the language because everyone had to survive in a way.

279
00:18:37,100 --> 00:18:47,100
So now looking back at it and looking back at the context and understanding better what kind of situation that was, I think I've regretted.

280
00:18:47,100 --> 00:18:56,100
And as like, so for as parents, I think maybe right now your kids are not going to be very receptive to it.

281
00:18:56,100 --> 00:19:05,100
But down the line, further down the line, I think they will be grateful for the fact that they have this language, even though it's not perfect and stuff.

282
00:19:05,100 --> 00:19:15,100
Because again, even if you think about career opportunities and personal growth and all of that, the fact that I know several languages is really, really helping me,

283
00:19:15,100 --> 00:19:21,100
even if it's not helping me directly, because you have a wider sort of outlook in the world.

284
00:19:21,100 --> 00:19:30,100
You understand perspective of different people from, you know, China in my case to the UK and further.

285
00:19:30,100 --> 00:19:39,100
So they will have this extra language that was going to be this lens through which they can look at things that is different from other people's lens.

286
00:19:39,100 --> 00:19:56,100
I agree, I agree. And going back to your kind of experience growing up in Moscow, what aspect of that period of your life you think has shaped you to become who you are now?

287
00:19:56,100 --> 00:19:58,100
What aspect?

288
00:19:58,100 --> 00:20:16,100
You mentioned belonging, a number of times we were discussing the language. Do you think that it was some sort of a driving force so that you can prove that you are one of them?

289
00:20:16,100 --> 00:20:18,100
Or was that not the case?

290
00:20:18,100 --> 00:20:21,100
This is going to turn into a therapy session, I think.

291
00:20:21,100 --> 00:20:23,100
Which you don't mind?

292
00:20:23,100 --> 00:20:24,100
We should have a few.

293
00:20:24,100 --> 00:20:34,100
I think it's a very good observation that you have right now that you had about belonging, because I do feel like I always wanted to fit in a way.

294
00:20:34,100 --> 00:20:40,100
And I was never given this kind of luxury, I think, not completely.

295
00:20:40,100 --> 00:20:48,100
So I would fit in, but in a very weird way. Something would still be sticking out, kind of out of the mold, which would still differentiate me.

296
00:20:48,100 --> 00:20:59,100
And also the fact that, again, as I said, I was a nerd, I was a straight A student, didn't really help in this realm of teenage drama and all of that.

297
00:20:59,100 --> 00:21:05,100
And what really shaped me is wanting a chance to reinvent myself.

298
00:21:05,100 --> 00:21:15,100
Because, again, when you go to school and you grew up with the same people for 11 years, it's always the same people, your teachers are, everyone's the same.

299
00:21:15,100 --> 00:21:24,100
It's not like here, for example, you go to different schools every couple of years, you know, you go to primary school and then something else.

300
00:21:24,100 --> 00:21:27,100
And you change and you have these opportunities to reinvent yourself.

301
00:21:27,100 --> 00:21:33,100
But in Moscow, it was just first grade, 11th grade, same people, nothing changes.

302
00:21:33,100 --> 00:21:40,100
So it becomes hard when, for example, I was quite a shy kid before I was maybe 13.

303
00:21:40,100 --> 00:21:44,100
Actually, between the ages of maybe 7 and 13, I was very shy.

304
00:21:44,100 --> 00:21:49,100
And I was not able to really speak my mind in front of my peers.

305
00:21:49,100 --> 00:21:55,100
I was fine with teachers and answering in classes and stuff.

306
00:21:55,100 --> 00:22:03,100
But with my peers, I was quite shy and kind of not really easy to open up for me.

307
00:22:03,100 --> 00:22:05,100
After that, I started to change.

308
00:22:05,100 --> 00:22:13,100
But then because there was this idea of me that already existed, it was hard to reinvent myself and actually show that I was becoming a different person.

309
00:22:13,100 --> 00:22:15,100
And so on.

310
00:22:15,100 --> 00:22:23,100
So I think not really my life in Moscow, but there was this moment where I changed.

311
00:22:23,100 --> 00:22:27,100
And I had this opportunity to change is when I moved to China, when I was 17.

312
00:22:27,100 --> 00:22:30,100
Why did you move to China when you were 17?

313
00:22:30,100 --> 00:22:37,100
To escape a little bit of reality that I created for myself.

314
00:22:37,100 --> 00:22:41,100
Sounds very dramatic. It's not. It's not dramatic.

315
00:22:41,100 --> 00:22:46,100
I think it does have to peer pressure a little bit.

316
00:22:46,100 --> 00:22:53,100
So because I was doing languages and history in school and these were the subjects that I was really interested in.

317
00:22:53,100 --> 00:22:59,100
I loved linguistics. I loved studying history, all kinds of history.

318
00:22:59,100 --> 00:23:03,100
I loved social sciences and all of that.

319
00:23:03,100 --> 00:23:10,100
I also liked art, but I wasn't well prepared to go into any art school in Russia.

320
00:23:10,100 --> 00:23:14,100
Because I was focusing more on actually decorative arts.

321
00:23:14,100 --> 00:23:22,100
So when I was doing classes, sort of extracurricular work, I did a lot of textiles.

322
00:23:22,100 --> 00:23:28,100
Everything is coming together now in my mind, all the map of my journey.

323
00:23:28,100 --> 00:23:33,100
So I did textiles and it was like batik, you know, it's painting on fabric and all of that.

324
00:23:33,100 --> 00:23:39,100
But it's not necessarily what is required to go to an art school in Russia.

325
00:23:39,100 --> 00:23:48,100
Because you have to have done academic painting, academic drawing, which I have a little bit, but it wasn't good.

326
00:23:48,100 --> 00:24:00,100
So my path was to just go and apply for the degrees, I guess, that have to do with history, languages.

327
00:24:00,100 --> 00:24:08,100
International relations made sense to me and a lot of people from my school were actually going and pursuing international relations.

328
00:24:08,100 --> 00:24:19,100
But also on the other hand, my family, I guess a little bit myself as well, expected me to go to a prestigious place.

329
00:24:19,100 --> 00:24:27,100
Because like, wow, you know, we will have bragging rights and all of that.

330
00:24:27,100 --> 00:24:33,100
So sort of because of this peer pressure, I applied to Moscow State University.

331
00:24:33,100 --> 00:24:39,100
I applied to Mgymo, which is the Moscow International Relations Institute.

332
00:24:39,100 --> 00:24:48,100
Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which is the main place where diplomats come out.

333
00:24:48,100 --> 00:24:53,100
And then another university, I forgot, which was also in the top three.

334
00:24:53,100 --> 00:24:58,100
And I got in all of them. It was all for international relations and Mandarin.

335
00:24:58,100 --> 00:25:06,100
And I got on a quota for free scholarship kind of situation. Everyone was really happy. It was great.

336
00:25:06,100 --> 00:25:15,100
I ended up giving my final decision and accepting the offer from Mgymo from the State University of International Relations.

337
00:25:15,100 --> 00:25:23,100
And everyone was like, oh, it's so hard to get in. We always thought only children of diplomats could do that.

338
00:25:23,100 --> 00:25:30,100
I got in and I went to one day of class and I went to the dean and I said, I want to take academic leave.

339
00:25:30,100 --> 00:25:32,100
First day.

340
00:25:32,100 --> 00:25:35,100
And he gave it to me. He was like, all right.

341
00:25:35,100 --> 00:25:39,100
Which is not a situation that ever happens to people.

342
00:25:39,100 --> 00:25:48,100
But I think all the stars just aligned in a way where I realized that maybe it's not necessarily what I want to do after the first day.

343
00:25:48,100 --> 00:25:54,100
And the dean was in a good mood, probably. I don't know.

344
00:25:54,100 --> 00:25:59,100
And he was like, all right, well, you know what, go for a year. Do something.

345
00:25:59,100 --> 00:26:05,100
We're going to keep your documents here. Come back in a year and start your first year.

346
00:26:05,100 --> 00:26:08,100
I said a year three times for no reason.

347
00:26:08,100 --> 00:26:10,100
Sorry.

348
00:26:10,100 --> 00:26:17,100
I went to China because I had this opportunity, again, that arose a word.

349
00:26:17,100 --> 00:26:19,100
I think so.

350
00:26:19,100 --> 00:26:23,100
It has arisen from a competition.

351
00:26:23,100 --> 00:26:31,100
So when I was in high school, I did these international competitions called Han Yixiao, which is Chinese Bridge in Mandarin.

352
00:26:31,100 --> 00:26:36,100
And those are competitions that are held in China and they're televised.

353
00:26:36,100 --> 00:26:43,100
And it's, you know, they get all these kids from all the countries to compete who knows Mandarin the best.

354
00:26:43,100 --> 00:26:49,100
So I did that twice and the second time as a team, we got second place.

355
00:26:49,100 --> 00:26:57,100
And yeah, the prize was to go to, so we had a scholarship each of us to go to China for a year, any university we want,

356
00:26:57,100 --> 00:27:02,100
or any university that would accept us to do a year long course of Mandarin Chinese.

357
00:27:02,100 --> 00:27:06,100
So what I ended up doing is like, well, I have the scholarship. I can use it.

358
00:27:06,100 --> 00:27:16,100
It could be my gap year kind of thing. I will still be studying, but I will use this year to advance my Mandarin and see what I want to do next.

359
00:27:16,100 --> 00:27:18,100
And I'm really glad I did that.

360
00:27:18,100 --> 00:27:25,100
At the age of 17, I was very wise in terms of what I was envisioning for myself.

361
00:27:25,100 --> 00:27:30,100
And yeah, I ended up going to Beijing with two of my friends.

362
00:27:30,100 --> 00:27:40,100
I did this as an advanced Mandarin course, but also I didn't tell anyone because all of my family was expecting me to come back to Mugimo and continue my studies.

363
00:27:40,100 --> 00:27:46,100
But I secretly applied to Tsinghua University to the art school that they have within the university.

364
00:27:46,100 --> 00:27:50,100
But that's how you've decided that art is something you'll be pursuing.

365
00:27:50,100 --> 00:27:57,100
I think whatever path I went on, art just dragged me back every single time.

366
00:27:57,100 --> 00:28:04,100
But I didn't apply to painting or any of the visual art disciplines. I applied to do fashion design.

367
00:28:04,100 --> 00:28:06,100
So it was fashion and textiles.

368
00:28:06,100 --> 00:28:15,100
Something that was familiar because now I realize, you know, especially my mom's side of family were all in the textile industry for many reasons.

369
00:28:15,100 --> 00:28:21,100
You know, it was Pakistan, one of the biggest industries.

370
00:28:21,100 --> 00:28:30,100
So I realized that maybe because I was always around these kind of ideas and concepts of textiles and all these sewing machines and this and that,

371
00:28:30,100 --> 00:28:34,100
I felt like something I would know.

372
00:28:34,100 --> 00:28:38,100
And because I also painted on fabric and all.

373
00:28:38,100 --> 00:28:45,100
So I applied and I got into art school at the same time.

374
00:28:45,100 --> 00:28:47,100
It was crazy.

375
00:28:47,100 --> 00:28:48,100
I did.

376
00:28:48,100 --> 00:28:50,100
We didn't want to pay for our studies.

377
00:28:50,100 --> 00:28:53,100
Nobody wants to. Everyone wants a scholarship.

378
00:28:53,100 --> 00:29:04,100
So there's this Chinese government scholarship scheme for international students where you can apply and if you get it, it pays for your tuition,

379
00:29:04,100 --> 00:29:10,100
pays for your accommodation, your health insurance, it pays your stipend every month.

380
00:29:10,100 --> 00:29:11,100
It's perfect.

381
00:29:11,100 --> 00:29:12,100
You're sorted.

382
00:29:12,100 --> 00:29:17,100
But the problem was that in Russia,

383
00:29:17,100 --> 00:29:26,100
these quotas, they're given to individual embassies in every country and then the embassies decide what to do.

384
00:29:26,100 --> 00:29:36,100
And then in Russia, the quotas are all given to the Russian Ministry of Education and the Russian Ministry doesn't want to give these quotas to people to do their bachelors or masters.

385
00:29:36,100 --> 00:29:40,100
They sort of keep them to give them to exchange students.

386
00:29:40,100 --> 00:29:41,100
Right.

387
00:29:41,100 --> 00:29:45,100
So you're not able to access those if you want to do your full education in China, which was a shame.

388
00:29:45,100 --> 00:29:55,100
And me again, at 17 or 18 years old, being a very clueless but very brave and cocky person,

389
00:29:55,100 --> 00:30:03,100
I just, I went home to my parents for the holidays in the winter and I was like, well, when does the embassy open?

390
00:30:03,100 --> 00:30:08,100
And I just went to the Chinese embassy at 9am on a random Wednesday.

391
00:30:08,100 --> 00:30:13,100
I just stood under the gate and just rang the bell for like 15 minutes until they opened the door.

392
00:30:13,100 --> 00:30:14,100
And they were like, what do you want?

393
00:30:14,100 --> 00:30:22,100
I was like, hi, I would love to discuss the possibility of getting a scholarship.

394
00:30:22,100 --> 00:30:27,100
As you do, apparently, when I was 17, I thought that was how world works.

395
00:30:27,100 --> 00:30:35,100
And, you know, it did work out because eventually they summoned a guy who was responsible for all the education stuff at the embassy.

396
00:30:35,100 --> 00:30:38,100
And he recognized me because I was doing all these competitions.

397
00:30:38,100 --> 00:30:39,100
Right.

398
00:30:39,100 --> 00:30:40,100
I was like, oh, you're that girl.

399
00:30:40,100 --> 00:30:44,100
So we had this conversation, he was like, well, I'll see what we can do.

400
00:30:44,100 --> 00:30:46,100
Maybe we have some extra quotas and stuff.

401
00:30:46,100 --> 00:30:56,100
And yeah, I ended up getting an opportunity to apply, not through the Ministry of Education in Russia, but directly through the embassy.

402
00:30:56,100 --> 00:30:58,100
It didn't mean we got a free ticket.

403
00:30:58,100 --> 00:31:00,100
We still had to apply and go through the entire process.

404
00:31:00,100 --> 00:31:04,100
But all three of us got grants in the end.

405
00:31:04,100 --> 00:31:07,100
And like I did my BA in China.

406
00:31:07,100 --> 00:31:18,100
And again, returning to the subject of me, why I was talking about this is because I could completely leave the environment I was in and find myself in a new environment with new people.

407
00:31:18,100 --> 00:31:26,100
I was able to reinvent myself and actually become the personfully that I became long before that.

408
00:31:26,100 --> 00:31:29,100
But I was finally able to show it.

409
00:31:29,100 --> 00:31:37,100
What qualities do you think one should have to be able to do what you did to move to a completely different place and to find yourself?

410
00:31:37,100 --> 00:31:42,100
The eldest daughter syndrome.

411
00:31:42,100 --> 00:31:43,100
What's that?

412
00:31:43,100 --> 00:31:46,100
It's hyperindependence.

413
00:31:46,100 --> 00:31:58,100
Hyperindependence, ability to solve any crisis in seconds, always having Plan B plan C, feeling extreme responsibility for everything, having a savior complex.

414
00:31:58,100 --> 00:32:02,100
It's all the qualities you have.

415
00:32:02,100 --> 00:32:04,100
To some extent, yes.

416
00:32:04,100 --> 00:32:07,100
And all these qualities help you to this date?

417
00:32:07,100 --> 00:32:09,100
They help me, but they also hinder me sometimes.

418
00:32:09,100 --> 00:32:10,100
Like how?

419
00:32:10,100 --> 00:32:11,100
Like the savior complex.

420
00:32:11,100 --> 00:32:12,100
Okay.

421
00:32:12,100 --> 00:32:15,100
I always wanted to help people, even if they don't need help.

422
00:32:15,100 --> 00:32:24,100
And not because I want to get some kind of benefit from it.

423
00:32:24,100 --> 00:32:26,100
I genuinely want to help.

424
00:32:26,100 --> 00:32:29,100
I genuinely want to help, but sometimes people don't need it.

425
00:32:29,100 --> 00:32:31,100
That's a backfire sometimes?

426
00:32:31,100 --> 00:32:34,100
Not that I can think of, not really.

427
00:32:34,100 --> 00:32:36,100
But I think the...

428
00:32:36,100 --> 00:32:37,100
Why is it that?

429
00:32:37,100 --> 00:32:43,100
Just a very general downside, I think, which is not very terrible.

430
00:32:43,100 --> 00:32:49,100
It affects you mentally a little bit when you have too much of it, is that you genuinely help people.

431
00:32:49,100 --> 00:33:01,100
But then sometimes you don't get the gratitude that maybe you expect in return, and that sort of makes you feel a bit disappointed.

432
00:33:01,100 --> 00:33:05,100
But again, it's not the same as expecting some kind of benefits in return.

433
00:33:05,100 --> 00:33:10,100
And I think it's a very internal thing that I just have to work through.

434
00:33:10,100 --> 00:33:12,100
That's it.

435
00:33:12,100 --> 00:33:18,100
So you are in China, you started studying textiles, right?

436
00:33:18,100 --> 00:33:19,100
Fashion design.

437
00:33:19,100 --> 00:33:21,100
Fashion design, sorry.

438
00:33:21,100 --> 00:33:23,100
How did it go?

439
00:33:23,100 --> 00:33:25,100
For the first two years, it was great.

440
00:33:25,100 --> 00:33:26,100
It was interesting.

441
00:33:26,100 --> 00:33:28,100
I was having lots of fun.

442
00:33:28,100 --> 00:33:30,100
Because the thing is, it was also...

443
00:33:30,100 --> 00:33:35,100
So it was an art academy within a big comprehensive university.

444
00:33:35,100 --> 00:33:40,100
So imagine Harvard or MIT having an art school inside.

445
00:33:40,100 --> 00:33:44,100
So it was like a similar thing, because Tsinghua University, they call it the MIT of China,

446
00:33:44,100 --> 00:33:49,100
it's just more focused on STEM-related subjects.

447
00:33:49,100 --> 00:33:52,100
Although they've got a great humanities school as well.

448
00:33:52,100 --> 00:34:02,100
So I got to do not just my art stuff, but I got to take classes from different departments and meet all kinds of different people.

449
00:34:02,100 --> 00:34:08,100
There was this class where I did sort of competitive air rifle.

450
00:34:08,100 --> 00:34:15,100
It was a thing, it was a class that you could pick within the sports.

451
00:34:15,100 --> 00:34:18,100
It's an Olympic discipline.

452
00:34:18,100 --> 00:34:24,100
And the most bizarre thing to me is that I would go to the class and then have this little air rifle,

453
00:34:24,100 --> 00:34:27,100
and then try to...it was a 10 meters air rifle.

454
00:34:27,100 --> 00:34:31,100
And then right next to me would be this literal Olympic champion.

455
00:34:31,100 --> 00:34:36,100
Because Olympic champions, when they become champions at the age of 16 and 17,

456
00:34:36,100 --> 00:34:42,100
they still then go on to universities and they go to the good universities because they have the credentials.

457
00:34:42,100 --> 00:34:44,100
They get extra points.

458
00:34:44,100 --> 00:34:50,100
So I would be doing my little wobbly, sort of not too sure how to fire this.

459
00:34:50,100 --> 00:34:55,100
And then next to me would be an Olympic champion who's like doing her thing.

460
00:34:55,100 --> 00:35:00,100
So it was quite an interesting environment to be in.

461
00:35:00,100 --> 00:35:04,100
But then the first two years you said were good.

462
00:35:04,100 --> 00:35:06,100
The other two years were also great.

463
00:35:06,100 --> 00:35:11,100
But what happened is I realized I didn't like fashion design.

464
00:35:11,100 --> 00:35:17,100
I was like, this is commercial and I want to tell stories.

465
00:35:17,100 --> 00:35:18,100
Back to storytelling.

466
00:35:18,100 --> 00:35:22,100
I want to be...I want to do weird things.

467
00:35:22,100 --> 00:35:24,100
I want to create these weird sculptures.

468
00:35:24,100 --> 00:35:31,100
I want to make wearable art that will still be costume-like,

469
00:35:31,100 --> 00:35:36,100
but maybe tell...have a narrative within it,

470
00:35:36,100 --> 00:35:40,100
or maybe will evolve or maybe will transform during whatever,

471
00:35:40,100 --> 00:35:42,100
if it's a performance and it's a performance.

472
00:35:42,100 --> 00:35:43,100
What is that coming from?

473
00:35:43,100 --> 00:35:47,100
I mean, trying to do something weird and different.

474
00:35:47,100 --> 00:35:49,100
Or wanting to do something weird and different.

475
00:35:49,100 --> 00:35:55,100
Is it not because you were feeling different growing up in Taiwan and Russia?

476
00:35:55,100 --> 00:35:58,100
Or am I going too deep with my analysis?

477
00:35:58,100 --> 00:36:02,100
I don't know if it's that connected.

478
00:36:02,100 --> 00:36:07,100
Maybe it wasn't about trying to be different for the sake of being different.

479
00:36:07,100 --> 00:36:15,100
It was just me understanding that fashion design is a bit boring to me personally.

480
00:36:15,100 --> 00:36:18,100
You mentioned it's too commercial. Why is it bad?

481
00:36:18,100 --> 00:36:20,100
It is good for some people.

482
00:36:20,100 --> 00:36:23,100
When I say it was too commercial, I'm not saying,

483
00:36:23,100 --> 00:36:27,100
oh, it brings me too much money. How horrible.

484
00:36:27,100 --> 00:36:33,100
I mean, there are certain restrictions within the spectrum of creativity

485
00:36:33,100 --> 00:36:36,100
that you can exercise when you're doing fashion design.

486
00:36:36,100 --> 00:36:39,100
And then the spectrum is much smaller when you do fashion design

487
00:36:39,100 --> 00:36:43,100
because it still has to be commercially viable.

488
00:36:43,100 --> 00:36:46,100
So you have to be able to sell things.

489
00:36:46,100 --> 00:36:48,100
You can do couture, but it's really hard,

490
00:36:48,100 --> 00:36:53,100
and you have to get there through all kinds of means as well.

491
00:36:53,100 --> 00:36:58,100
So I didn't like my spectrum being so limited, and I wanted to open it up.

492
00:36:58,100 --> 00:37:06,100
And I really loved theatre, and I loved history and historical pieces.

493
00:37:06,100 --> 00:37:14,100
In a way, I liked using materials to show things that are written on paper.

494
00:37:14,100 --> 00:37:19,100
So reading between the lines and finding some themes

495
00:37:19,100 --> 00:37:28,100
and maybe gestures or maybe postures to then recreate within a costume.

496
00:37:28,100 --> 00:37:37,100
So one of my first projects that I actually did that was inspired by 100 Years of Solitude by Marcus.

497
00:37:37,100 --> 00:37:40,100
Because it's one of my favourite books.

498
00:37:40,100 --> 00:37:43,100
But it's not the one that I'm going to recommend.

499
00:37:43,100 --> 00:37:46,100
Because everyone knows it anyway.

500
00:37:46,100 --> 00:37:51,100
And it was focused on this figure of Ursula, who was the matron of the family.

501
00:37:51,100 --> 00:37:54,100
And the transformation of her being this young woman

502
00:37:54,100 --> 00:37:57,100
and becoming this ancient lady who carried the weight of the entire family.

503
00:37:57,100 --> 00:37:59,100
So I tried to show that through costume.

504
00:37:59,100 --> 00:38:04,100
And this is what was my gateway into doing more theatrical things.

505
00:38:04,100 --> 00:38:11,100
And I just came up to my tutors when I was in year three or something.

506
00:38:11,100 --> 00:38:18,100
And I was like, okay, so can I do theatre? Can I do costumes?

507
00:38:18,100 --> 00:38:21,100
And they were like, whatever. Do whatever you want.

508
00:38:21,100 --> 00:38:23,100
And so I ended up doing that.

509
00:38:23,100 --> 00:38:29,100
And I was doing an internship at NCPA, which is the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

510
00:38:29,100 --> 00:38:33,100
It was quite a well-known place. It's right on the Tiananmen Square.

511
00:38:33,100 --> 00:38:40,100
It looks like a blob. We call it... we call it... the drop.

512
00:38:40,100 --> 00:38:43,100
So that was an insane first place to do my internship in.

513
00:38:43,100 --> 00:38:50,100
Because my first opera that I worked on was an opera with a placido d'amingo.

514
00:38:50,100 --> 00:38:56,100
It must be a big deal. I don't know the name. I'm not quite an opera person.

515
00:38:56,100 --> 00:38:59,100
Yeah, if you know the three tenors.

516
00:38:59,100 --> 00:39:01,100
So you had the Chana Poveroti.

517
00:39:01,100 --> 00:39:02,100
Yes.

518
00:39:02,100 --> 00:39:07,100
Big deal. Very famous guy. Very famous operatic singer.

519
00:39:07,100 --> 00:39:13,100
We became friends for the production because... I don't know why.

520
00:39:13,100 --> 00:39:16,100
He just thought I looked different from everyone else because...

521
00:39:16,100 --> 00:39:17,100
So you do?

522
00:39:17,100 --> 00:39:19,100
Maybe because of that.

523
00:39:19,100 --> 00:39:26,100
And he... just like when he was about to go on stage he'd be like, yo, how's the day going?

524
00:39:26,100 --> 00:39:28,100
Anyway.

525
00:39:28,100 --> 00:39:31,100
So that was... that left a huge impression on me.

526
00:39:31,100 --> 00:39:39,100
And it was also the opera that ended up really liking and doing a few other productions of in different capacity.

527
00:39:39,100 --> 00:39:42,100
Which is Macbeth by Verdi.

528
00:39:42,100 --> 00:39:49,100
And yeah, that's how I sort of got into this backstage world of doing costume.

529
00:39:49,100 --> 00:39:50,100
And you loved it.

530
00:39:50,100 --> 00:39:55,100
Yeah, it was... it was a world full of wonders, you know?

531
00:39:55,100 --> 00:40:05,100
It was like going into this beautiful... like you walk in and then you go through these corridors and suddenly there's a huge fish sort of coming out.

532
00:40:05,100 --> 00:40:10,100
And it's a prop. It's a prop from some... but it's huge and it's sparkly.

533
00:40:10,100 --> 00:40:14,100
And then you go further and there's all these beautiful costumes from like the Elizabethan period.

534
00:40:14,100 --> 00:40:20,100
And then you keep going and then suddenly there's actors rehearsing like fencing and stuff.

535
00:40:20,100 --> 00:40:30,100
And then... oh yeah, one of the first costumes that I helped make was... were reanimated corpses.

536
00:40:30,100 --> 00:40:34,100
Of soldiers that were dead on the battlefield.

537
00:40:34,100 --> 00:40:47,100
That was fun. That was a lot of fun because you have to actually think, oh, how do I make a costume of a reanimated corpse that will be obvious from, you know, 100 meters away?

538
00:40:47,100 --> 00:40:50,100
Because when you do an opera, everyone's on the stage really far away.

539
00:40:50,100 --> 00:40:56,100
Then you've got the orchestra pit and then, you know, then you've got all the rich people who have all the money to sit in the front.

540
00:40:56,100 --> 00:41:00,100
And then as a student, I was always, you know...

541
00:41:00,100 --> 00:41:01,100
At the back. So...

542
00:41:01,100 --> 00:41:02,100
Abinorathers.

543
00:41:02,100 --> 00:41:03,100
You need to be aiming for those sitting at the back.

544
00:41:03,100 --> 00:41:10,100
Yeah, so how do I make it clear that those weird people brazing suddenly from the stage are reanimated corpses?

545
00:41:10,100 --> 00:41:12,100
So that was fun. That was a great challenge.

546
00:41:12,100 --> 00:41:17,100
The theatre costumes must be quite different to the film...

547
00:41:17,100 --> 00:41:20,100
Very different. We can talk about it.

548
00:41:20,100 --> 00:41:23,100
We can. We can talk about anything we want.

549
00:41:23,100 --> 00:41:28,100
Because with film, what you want to really highlight is the details.

550
00:41:28,100 --> 00:41:32,100
The costumes don't really need to be durable because, you know, when you finish filming...

551
00:41:32,100 --> 00:41:33,100
It's cool.

552
00:41:33,100 --> 00:41:37,100
You can be reused for something else, but it's not the priority.

553
00:41:37,100 --> 00:41:44,100
But with theatre, because the play runs for a while, has to be durable.

554
00:41:44,100 --> 00:41:50,100
You cannot really pay attention to details because most likely nobody will see them.

555
00:41:50,100 --> 00:42:03,100
But then you have to be conscious of how do you make it look still very striking and effective from a very far distance.

556
00:42:03,100 --> 00:42:06,100
So there's different priorities when you work on those.

557
00:42:06,100 --> 00:42:18,100
So costume design for the theatre, is that what you focused on the second two years of your academic career?

558
00:42:18,100 --> 00:42:30,100
In a way. I couldn't actually do theatre within my studies, but I would work with stories and sort of create things around that.

559
00:42:30,100 --> 00:42:35,100
So the costumes, they never ended up on stage and they were not really made for the stage.

560
00:42:35,100 --> 00:42:40,100
But I guess you could say that they were more inventive fashion.

561
00:42:40,100 --> 00:42:45,100
I don't want to say couture because it was not couture, but what you imagine on a runway.

562
00:42:45,100 --> 00:42:53,100
When you see all these pieces that you can't really wear in real life. So this is the stuff that I did.

563
00:42:53,100 --> 00:42:58,100
And my graduation collection was inspired by King Lear.

564
00:42:58,100 --> 00:43:03,100
Because I was also working on a production of King Lear at the same time as an assistant.

565
00:43:03,100 --> 00:43:06,100
And I thought it would be a nice way to tie those two together.

566
00:43:06,100 --> 00:43:10,100
So you finished your studies, you are still in China, but you decided not to stay in China?

567
00:43:10,100 --> 00:43:13,100
I decided not to stay. I wanted...

568
00:43:13,100 --> 00:43:18,100
You speak the language, you are doing cool stuff there.

569
00:43:18,100 --> 00:43:27,100
I think there were several reasons. One of the reasons was it wasn't as easy to get a permission to stay if you worked in the arts.

570
00:43:27,100 --> 00:43:29,100
As it is everywhere.

571
00:43:29,100 --> 00:43:39,100
And I think I wanted to get more hands-on experience within this industry, which is theatre.

572
00:43:39,100 --> 00:43:49,100
And specifically, let's say, western theatre, or the western tradition of dramatic drama.

573
00:43:49,100 --> 00:43:51,100
Dramatic arts.

574
00:43:51,100 --> 00:43:55,100
And you know, Russian theatre is really well known.

575
00:43:55,100 --> 00:44:01,100
And at the time it was booming. It was really interesting, it was happening at the time, 2017.

576
00:44:01,100 --> 00:44:05,100
So I was like, oh, I can go back and get more experience just doing that.

577
00:44:05,100 --> 00:44:11,100
And I did. So I went back to Moscow again, to my parents.

578
00:44:11,100 --> 00:44:16,100
And I got this job at a theatre costume studio, I guess.

579
00:44:16,100 --> 00:44:20,100
It wasn't connected to any theatre, but it would work.

580
00:44:20,100 --> 00:44:33,100
It would be like a contractor, I guess, for a bunch of theatres. So I got to lead costume production for Bolshoi theatre, for Stanislavskiy Nimerovich with Aynchenko musical theatre.

581
00:44:33,100 --> 00:44:38,100
All kinds of different... Because Moscow's got like 200 theatres.

582
00:44:38,100 --> 00:44:43,100
So I did a lot of that. It was really difficult. It was probably the...

583
00:44:43,100 --> 00:44:49,100
I would want to say the worst, because it wasn't the worst in the year of my life.

584
00:44:49,100 --> 00:44:57,100
It was very demanding. And it was a very violent restructuring of my life.

585
00:44:57,100 --> 00:45:03,100
Because you come back from China where you were used to one thing and then you're back into Russia.

586
00:45:03,100 --> 00:45:07,100
And you're not studying at a school, but you're actually doing a real adult job.

587
00:45:07,100 --> 00:45:13,100
And then you realise that, oh, in this industry there are hierarchies.

588
00:45:13,100 --> 00:45:20,100
There's ageism. People's attitudes are different to you if you're young.

589
00:45:20,100 --> 00:45:25,100
Because they think you have no knowledge or experience, which is true to some extent, but I have different experience.

590
00:45:25,100 --> 00:45:30,100
Is it industry specific thing, or is it just in Russia, this kind of...

591
00:45:30,100 --> 00:45:34,100
I don't know. I think it's not just Russia as well. It's like a lot of different countries.

592
00:45:34,100 --> 00:45:38,100
I'm not saying that it's just exclusive to Russia.

593
00:45:38,100 --> 00:45:46,100
But this is something that I faced, even within the studio. I came in as this technical specialist, technical artist.

594
00:45:46,100 --> 00:45:51,100
And those are people who have been doing this for years.

595
00:45:51,100 --> 00:45:54,100
It took me a long time to earn their trust.

596
00:45:54,100 --> 00:45:58,100
Because they're like, who's this 23-year-old who's just bossing us around?

597
00:45:58,100 --> 00:46:00,100
So you had to prove yourself.

598
00:46:00,100 --> 00:46:05,100
Yeah. That was the most demanding part. And I was paid peanuts.

599
00:46:05,100 --> 00:46:09,100
Not paid very well.

600
00:46:09,100 --> 00:46:12,100
But I guess I was paid with experience.

601
00:46:12,100 --> 00:46:19,100
Because that really gave me a lot of knowledge in how this whole backstage and production thing works.

602
00:46:19,100 --> 00:46:28,100
And how long have you been doing that in Moscow before you've decided to come to the UK?

603
00:46:28,100 --> 00:46:33,100
So a bit more than a year. But I felt like seven years.

604
00:46:33,100 --> 00:46:36,100
That felt like an eternity.

605
00:46:36,100 --> 00:46:43,100
And I think at some point, the reason I came to the UK is because at some point I realized that this kind of profession that I'm doing doesn't really lead anywhere.

606
00:46:43,100 --> 00:46:45,100
So you're just kind of like doing the same thing.

607
00:46:45,100 --> 00:46:51,100
Because I was seeing women who were doing the same thing as I did for years.

608
00:46:51,100 --> 00:46:54,100
And they were still in the same kind of position.

609
00:46:54,100 --> 00:46:59,100
And I didn't want it to be like that. And I wanted to do my own art as well.

610
00:46:59,100 --> 00:47:01,100
And I didn't have the confidence to do it.

611
00:47:01,100 --> 00:47:06,100
I didn't know where to get the confidence to do it.

612
00:47:06,100 --> 00:47:14,100
And I didn't have the people around me who would give me this confidence or in a community where I could share my ideas.

613
00:47:14,100 --> 00:47:16,100
I did not have that.

614
00:47:16,100 --> 00:47:21,100
So I just felt like I needed to have a goal in my life.

615
00:47:21,100 --> 00:47:24,100
And just for funsies.

616
00:47:24,100 --> 00:47:32,100
I don't think it would sound ridiculous, but just wanting to have a goal and wanting to have something to look forward to.

617
00:47:32,100 --> 00:47:36,100
I decided to just try and apply for universities in the UK.

618
00:47:36,100 --> 00:47:37,100
Why UK?

619
00:47:37,100 --> 00:47:39,100
Because I spoke the language.

620
00:47:39,100 --> 00:47:40,100
And I...

621
00:47:40,100 --> 00:47:41,100
US?

622
00:47:41,100 --> 00:47:42,100
Huh?

623
00:47:42,100 --> 00:47:43,100
US is an option.

624
00:47:43,100 --> 00:47:44,100
US is too expensive.

625
00:47:44,100 --> 00:47:47,100
Okay. So it's a financial decision.

626
00:47:47,100 --> 00:47:53,100
Well, I just knew that if I go into the US, then definitely no way I could go.

627
00:47:53,100 --> 00:47:57,100
The programs that I applied to in the UK, they were still very expensive.

628
00:47:57,100 --> 00:48:01,100
But compared to the US, they were cheap.

629
00:48:01,100 --> 00:48:02,100
Right.

630
00:48:02,100 --> 00:48:05,100
Which is already a ridiculous thing to say.

631
00:48:05,100 --> 00:48:11,100
So you didn't have any other links in the UK? I don't know, family, friends?

632
00:48:11,100 --> 00:48:15,100
Well, yes. I have extended family here.

633
00:48:15,100 --> 00:48:17,100
But that wasn't another reason.

634
00:48:17,100 --> 00:48:22,100
No, it wasn't really a reason because I have extended family in the US and way more people.

635
00:48:22,100 --> 00:48:25,100
And also not extended like quite close family.

636
00:48:25,100 --> 00:48:27,100
I think there were several reasons.

637
00:48:27,100 --> 00:48:28,100
So financial is one.

638
00:48:28,100 --> 00:48:34,100
Two, I really wanted to go to Central St. Martins because coming...

639
00:48:34,100 --> 00:48:40,100
Especially coming from a fashion background, you know, you always hear about how amazing that school is and how amazing...

640
00:48:40,100 --> 00:48:45,100
Like I would follow a lot of current students at the time on Instagram and see what they're doing.

641
00:48:45,100 --> 00:48:47,100
And they all seemed really appealing.

642
00:48:47,100 --> 00:48:51,100
Even though I didn't want to do fashion, I knew that there were other disciplines I could apply to.

643
00:48:51,100 --> 00:49:00,100
Also, I think I like UK more because it's closer to the places that are important to me.

644
00:49:00,100 --> 00:49:01,100
Geographically.

645
00:49:01,100 --> 00:49:02,100
Geographically.

646
00:49:02,100 --> 00:49:08,100
Closer to Europe, which I find personally more enticing.

647
00:49:08,100 --> 00:49:14,100
And also, health care is a big thing.

648
00:49:14,100 --> 00:49:17,100
So there's a lot of reasons.

649
00:49:17,100 --> 00:49:24,100
And I've never been to London before that and no idea and just the idea of London was also very alluring.

650
00:49:24,100 --> 00:49:26,100
But I didn't think I would get in.

651
00:49:26,100 --> 00:49:34,100
I was just doing it because I was like, you know, I got to have something to look forward to, even if it's a rejection.

652
00:49:34,100 --> 00:49:35,100
At least I tried.

653
00:49:35,100 --> 00:49:42,100
And I applied and then two months passed by and nobody's inviting me for an interview.

654
00:49:42,100 --> 00:49:47,100
Well, that's it. Well, you know, try to do something else, I guess.

655
00:49:47,100 --> 00:49:53,100
And then suddenly in April, so I applied in February in April, I get a letter saying congratulations, you've been accepted.

656
00:49:53,100 --> 00:49:54,100
Sality interviews.

657
00:49:54,100 --> 00:49:55,100
Without interview.

658
00:49:55,100 --> 00:50:00,100
So I guess they liked my stuff and they liked my proposal.

659
00:50:00,100 --> 00:50:04,100
It was a masters and the masters was in performance design practice.

660
00:50:04,100 --> 00:50:10,100
So it was adjacent to what I was doing, but going into more experimental areas.

661
00:50:10,100 --> 00:50:23,100
So what I was doing is more like technical costume and production, maybe not really going outside of those boundaries.

662
00:50:23,100 --> 00:50:33,100
But this course allowed me to actually experiment with my ideas and work with different people because the great part of the course was that they brought in people from different backgrounds.

663
00:50:33,100 --> 00:50:42,100
So, you know, I was coming from this fashion costume background, there were people who did sound design, there was a theatre director, there was a choreographer.

664
00:50:42,100 --> 00:50:44,100
There's all kinds of people.

665
00:50:44,100 --> 00:50:50,100
And what they did is just smash us all together and said, do work.

666
00:50:50,100 --> 00:51:01,100
And that really made me leave this cocoon and I guess stop being self-conscious about the things I have to say.

667
00:51:01,100 --> 00:51:05,100
Because I never thought the things I have to say would be interesting to anyone.

668
00:51:05,100 --> 00:51:09,100
But this course gave me the opportunity to voice those things and get feedback.

669
00:51:09,100 --> 00:51:12,100
And when the feedback was good, it would encourage me.

670
00:51:12,100 --> 00:51:15,100
If the feedback was bad, it would encourage me even more.

671
00:51:15,100 --> 00:51:25,100
Because I would be like, oh, okay, this is something I need to work on and I can improve and see what other directions I can work in.

672
00:51:25,100 --> 00:51:30,100
So the feedback is important in, especially developing in your area.

673
00:51:30,100 --> 00:51:40,100
Because many people would be scared to put out their story, their character, their work out to the public scrutiny.

674
00:51:40,100 --> 00:51:44,100
But you are saying that you need to do it because of that.

675
00:51:44,100 --> 00:51:47,100
Because that helps you to develop, grow.

676
00:51:47,100 --> 00:51:49,100
Well, it really depends on what kind of feedback.

677
00:51:49,100 --> 00:51:54,100
Because it's one thing to post a video on YouTube and get a bunch of negative comments that don't really have any substance.

678
00:51:54,100 --> 00:51:56,100
That's not the kind of feedback I mean.

679
00:51:56,100 --> 00:51:59,100
How do you filter out the good feedback from the bad feedback?

680
00:51:59,100 --> 00:52:07,100
Well, you mean good and bad in terms of quality?

681
00:52:07,100 --> 00:52:10,100
The feedback that contributes to your growth, yes.

682
00:52:10,100 --> 00:52:14,100
Okay, so there's positive and negative feedback.

683
00:52:14,100 --> 00:52:16,100
I guess this is how I should have framed it.

684
00:52:16,100 --> 00:52:19,100
So what I meant was positive and negative feedback.

685
00:52:19,100 --> 00:52:23,100
And then in terms of quality of feedback, there's good and bad feedback.

686
00:52:23,100 --> 00:52:25,100
Useful and useless.

687
00:52:25,100 --> 00:52:28,100
It has to be constructive.

688
00:52:28,100 --> 00:52:37,100
So what I learned as well, because every time we would have this opportunity to present a piece of work,

689
00:52:37,100 --> 00:52:42,100
a little sketch of something that we want to do in terms of performance or video.

690
00:52:42,100 --> 00:52:47,100
And then the entire course and maybe someone else would be there in the audience.

691
00:52:47,100 --> 00:52:50,100
And yeah, it would be like a crit.

692
00:52:50,100 --> 00:52:57,100
Where after you finish, everyone voices their opinions, maybe say things that worked for them that didn't work.

693
00:52:57,100 --> 00:53:03,100
Maybe some proposals as to how do you want to develop that.

694
00:53:03,100 --> 00:53:15,100
And you can always see if feedback is constructive because it analyzes and gives you a possible solution.

695
00:53:15,100 --> 00:53:20,100
Non-constructive feedback is like, oh, I just didn't like it.

696
00:53:20,100 --> 00:53:22,100
Yes, criticizing for the sake of criticizing.

697
00:53:22,100 --> 00:53:27,100
I just thought it wasn't accessible.

698
00:53:27,100 --> 00:53:30,100
But then if you don't explain why it wasn't accessible, then it's bad feedback.

699
00:53:30,100 --> 00:53:40,100
If you explain, oh, because I thought that it wasn't accessible because you were using these words that maybe only 1% of people would know

700
00:53:40,100 --> 00:53:42,100
because they read this very specific book.

701
00:53:42,100 --> 00:53:44,100
This is completely made up right now.

702
00:53:44,100 --> 00:53:46,100
This is not something that happened to me.

703
00:53:46,100 --> 00:53:53,100
Or like, oh, you made the space too dark so people couldn't actually see so maybe next time consider lighting a bit more.

704
00:53:53,100 --> 00:53:55,100
Like these kind of things.

705
00:53:55,100 --> 00:53:59,100
And also narrative wise, and there's different kinds.

706
00:53:59,100 --> 00:54:14,100
For me, I think I really wanted to get feedback on narrative and also on how much the subject actually resonates and how the things work together.

707
00:54:14,100 --> 00:54:26,100
Yeah, so this is when I actually started developing my very first thing, where I started looking at my background and the stories and the video that you mentioned earlier.

708
00:54:26,100 --> 00:54:28,100
That's what I was actually going to ask.

709
00:54:28,100 --> 00:54:34,100
A lot of things happen, like Moscow, Taiwan, China, back to Moscow, now London.

710
00:54:34,100 --> 00:54:38,100
Where is Uzbekistan and Uzbekness within that story?

711
00:54:38,100 --> 00:54:39,100
Oh yeah, I forgot to say.

712
00:54:39,100 --> 00:54:43,100
When I was in school, every summer, I would go to school.

713
00:54:43,100 --> 00:54:47,100
So you would go to Uzbekistan to your grandparents, I'm assuming.

714
00:54:47,100 --> 00:54:48,100
Yeah, hang out with them.

715
00:54:48,100 --> 00:54:49,100
Uzbekistan was always there.

716
00:54:49,100 --> 00:54:50,100
It was always there.

717
00:54:50,100 --> 00:54:55,100
You were feeling Uzbek or Russian or Chinese?

718
00:55:00,100 --> 00:55:05,100
I think for, okay, so for a long time I would tell people that I'm Russian just because it was easier.

719
00:55:05,100 --> 00:55:06,100
Right.

720
00:55:06,100 --> 00:55:14,100
And I technically grew up in Moscow and Russian is my first language now.

721
00:55:14,100 --> 00:55:16,100
It's like the main language I speak.

722
00:55:16,100 --> 00:55:19,100
Not my first language, but like my mother tongue.

723
00:55:22,100 --> 00:55:28,100
So for the sake of just simplifying things, people would be like, oh, where are you from?

724
00:55:28,100 --> 00:55:30,100
I went from Russia because my family's in Russia.

725
00:55:30,100 --> 00:55:36,100
And people know Moscow, like Tashkent or Uzbekistan is not something that many people would know.

726
00:55:36,100 --> 00:55:39,100
So, but then I stopped doing that.

727
00:55:39,100 --> 00:55:51,100
You know, because, and I stopped doing that actually a while ago, maybe in 2018, 2019.

728
00:55:51,100 --> 00:55:58,100
Because now I was going into this research and actually trying to find ways where I can explore this identity.

729
00:55:58,100 --> 00:56:06,100
Because what I was interested in is that it was identities and it wasn't necessarily just, you know, my Uzbek identity or whatever identity.

730
00:56:06,100 --> 00:56:08,100
We were doing a lot of work around sort of this.

731
00:56:08,100 --> 00:56:15,100
So I was working with the friend who was from Bulgaria and we were looking at sort of identities within that region.

732
00:56:15,100 --> 00:56:23,100
And we were doing lots of work with like local communities in London when I was a student.

733
00:56:23,100 --> 00:56:38,100
So there was a lot of these things that were overlapping and I think the tools that I gained from that, I would apply onto researching my own background and identity and trying to understand again, what is the sense of home?

734
00:56:38,100 --> 00:56:44,100
How do I have, you know, like, what is home for me?

735
00:56:44,100 --> 00:56:49,100
Because spoiler, I don't think I know where home is yet.

736
00:56:49,100 --> 00:56:52,100
It's a process of exploring.

737
00:56:52,100 --> 00:56:57,100
Yeah, maybe I'll just never feel like home anywhere and it's also fine.

738
00:56:57,100 --> 00:56:59,100
That is actually another question I was going to ask.

739
00:56:59,100 --> 00:57:08,100
Why identities are important? Why do someone need to know their identity where they belong to?

740
00:57:08,100 --> 00:57:17,100
Is it not from one hand the reason of being divisive where people are kind of clinging onto their identities?

741
00:57:17,100 --> 00:57:35,100
And as you have experienced in Russia, kind of lifting out those who don't match their identity, can we not just be the people of Earth and not identify with certain regions for certain cultures?

742
00:57:35,100 --> 00:57:40,100
How do you shed all the context that you were brought up in?

743
00:57:40,100 --> 00:57:51,100
Like, I don't know. Again, as a person who lives literally in so many places, and I could say that I'm a person of Earth,

744
00:57:51,100 --> 00:58:04,100
but I still don't feel like I can say that because I don't know the struggles of people in, you know, in Central Africa.

745
00:58:04,100 --> 00:58:16,100
I don't know the struggles of people in different areas. And I cannot represent them, but they're also on Earth in a way.

746
00:58:16,100 --> 00:58:25,100
I have to go far. In Uzbekistan, people identify themselves as being from Tashkent versus being from other regions or here.

747
00:58:25,100 --> 00:58:31,100
People being like English versus Scottish versus Irish. And it's not always...

748
00:58:31,100 --> 00:58:35,100
So you're talking more about national identity.

749
00:58:35,100 --> 00:58:51,100
What I'm looking at is not really national identities. It's more, I guess, social and cultural and gender, those kind of things, which sort of blur the idea of nation, per se,

750
00:58:51,100 --> 00:59:06,100
because like, I'm not looking at me being from a specific area. I look at myself, how I engage with the cultural heritage that was given,

751
00:59:06,100 --> 00:59:17,100
and how that cultural heritage is linked to the other things that I experience in all these different countries, and how this hybrid identity emerges.

752
00:59:17,100 --> 00:59:22,100
But nationality and religion is part of the social identity, isn't it?

753
00:59:22,100 --> 00:59:27,100
I guess, well, yeah.

754
00:59:27,100 --> 00:59:38,100
I think what I'm really interested in is looking at these identities that have emerged post-independence right now in Uzbekistan, let's say.

755
00:59:38,100 --> 00:59:45,100
And it's a whole tangle of things. Again, you know, people identify that they're from here, but they do this and that.

756
00:59:45,100 --> 00:59:54,100
And a lot of people try to, for example, reject the Soviet past, or they're trying to reject certain things.

757
00:59:54,100 --> 01:00:04,100
And I think what's interesting for me is to actually not reject any of that and accept the fact that these identities that we have right now,

758
01:00:04,100 --> 01:00:19,100
they're not broken or they're not incorrect, like the fact that you grew up in Tashkent, where you don't speak Uzbek, is not necessarily a mistake.

759
01:00:19,100 --> 01:00:24,100
It is a fact that happened, and it is a product of things that happened in history.

760
01:00:24,100 --> 01:00:33,100
And it is just a new identity that you need to accept in order to move forward, and you need to celebrate that.

761
01:00:33,100 --> 01:00:40,100
It's not something you have to fix. You can. You can learn Uzbek, but it's not going to be fixing your identity.

762
01:00:40,100 --> 01:00:46,100
You can learn Uzbek because you want to. And I don't know if this is clear enough.

763
01:00:46,100 --> 01:00:58,100
It is, yeah. It makes sense. So you're doing masters in London, and you're starting, not starting, you're more focused on exploring your identity and your roots.

764
01:00:58,100 --> 01:01:03,100
Yeah, I think this is where this whole thing started.

765
01:01:03,100 --> 01:01:04,100
Yes.

766
01:01:04,100 --> 01:01:15,100
Yeah, I just got the confidence to really explore that, maybe also slightly outside of the context of Russia again.

767
01:01:15,100 --> 01:01:32,100
Because I think maybe I was slightly scared to do that in Russia initially. Maybe I was scared of people not understanding or thinking, oh, this is not important because it's about Central Asia.

768
01:01:32,100 --> 01:01:36,100
So London being multicultural, as you said earlier, has triggered it.

769
01:01:36,100 --> 01:01:48,100
And also not very, like not a lot of people know about Central Asia here. So there is this freedom to really talk about it and share.

770
01:01:48,100 --> 01:01:53,100
There's interest as well. People do genuinely express their interest when you talk about it.

771
01:01:53,100 --> 01:02:05,100
There was interest, yeah. And also, even if there wasn't interest, the things I was doing, because I was doing a one-woman show, I was developing a one-woman show about migration and moving between the cities

772
01:02:05,100 --> 01:02:13,100
and sort of looking at the cities and sort of maybe creating the characters out of those cities.

773
01:02:13,100 --> 01:02:18,100
So I was going through exactly the way we're going through right now in the podcast, through all these cities that I've lived in.

774
01:02:18,100 --> 01:02:26,100
And there was this transforming set that came out of a suitcase that I built and built up and then put pieces together and turned into Tetris.

775
01:02:26,100 --> 01:02:38,100
And it's like a whole, whole very inventive thing. And I would show it and even the people who didn't know about Uzbekistan and didn't care about Uzbekistan,

776
01:02:38,100 --> 01:02:50,100
they could still feel a connection because in its specificity, the experience is still quite universal because, again, we live in a globalized world.

777
01:02:50,100 --> 01:02:59,100
Everyone's been a migrant at some point. So I've gotten this feedback. We're like, oh, we still can connect to a lot of the things that you say,

778
01:02:59,100 --> 01:03:04,100
even though you talk about these things that we don't have no idea about. So that gave me this encouragement.

779
01:03:04,100 --> 01:03:15,100
And I was working on it for about a year and a half. And then a month before the premiere, so the premiere was on 22nd of April 2020.

780
01:03:15,100 --> 01:03:20,100
A month before that, everything gets canceled, obviously, because of the premiere.

781
01:03:20,100 --> 01:03:22,100
So you didn't have a chance to...

782
01:03:22,100 --> 01:03:23,100
Never showed it.

783
01:03:23,100 --> 01:03:24,100
Okay.

784
01:03:24,100 --> 01:03:33,100
Never showed it. It was an hour-long show. The set still exists somewhere. I don't know where it is because I left it, I think, with my friend or something.

785
01:03:33,100 --> 01:03:34,100
How do you feel about it?

786
01:03:34,100 --> 01:03:38,100
The fact that I never showed it. I'm glad.

787
01:03:38,100 --> 01:03:40,100
Why?

788
01:03:40,100 --> 01:03:53,100
Because now looking at the script and the things that I did, it was all still quite naive, which is understandable because it was the first thing I ever did about this subject.

789
01:03:53,100 --> 01:04:02,100
And maybe at the time it would have been fine, but it was one of those things when I look back and I think, oh, it's not a bad thing that I didn't do it.

790
01:04:02,100 --> 01:04:12,100
Not because it was so offensive or intolerant. There was none of that. It was just still, I think, very...

791
01:04:12,100 --> 01:04:14,100
Immature? Not immature.

792
01:04:14,100 --> 01:04:17,100
Not immature, but...

793
01:04:17,100 --> 01:04:20,100
He's barely.

794
01:04:20,100 --> 01:04:21,100
Raw.

795
01:04:21,100 --> 01:04:22,100
Raw.

796
01:04:22,100 --> 01:04:23,100
No, right.

797
01:04:23,100 --> 01:04:29,100
Not right, yeah. It wasn't ripe enough, the subject. It was getting there.

798
01:04:29,100 --> 01:04:34,100
And the video that you saw was actually me just filming in my friend's kitchen.

799
01:04:34,100 --> 01:04:36,100
Kadir Iwasrit.

800
01:04:36,100 --> 01:04:45,100
And it's a five minute video, which is kind of... It's not an excerpt from the show, but it's kind of inspired by the show.

801
01:04:45,100 --> 01:05:03,100
I've seen the VR version of that as well, which is on your website, and a lot of the stories are initially told in that version. Was it kind of done during the COVID period as well?

802
01:05:03,100 --> 01:05:14,100
So your story that you wanted to play as a real production as a world as this kind of video eventually that you did?

803
01:05:14,100 --> 01:05:21,100
So the videos weren't meant to exist.

804
01:05:21,100 --> 01:05:28,100
So the pandemic hit and we couldn't do the shows, but we still had to be great at somehow, because it was a master's degree.

805
01:05:28,100 --> 01:05:36,100
So I ended up recording the whole show, just like an audio play, into a microphone just like this.

806
01:05:36,100 --> 01:05:44,100
So I had this hour long recording, and then I submitted all of that and the script and the drawings on the website as well. You see the 3D...

807
01:05:44,100 --> 01:05:54,100
So on the... Yeah, you see on my website the 3D renders of the set and how it would have been if it happened.

808
01:05:54,100 --> 01:06:03,100
And I think in a way it was an exercise for me to see what I can do digitally, because at that time I wasn't working a lot digitally.

809
01:06:03,100 --> 01:06:12,100
But we were all locked in and I was like, I've got to do something. Better see if I can. I could challenge myself.

810
01:06:12,100 --> 01:06:19,100
So I turned to these media that I was interested in but didn't have enough time to explore and now I have all the time in the world.

811
01:06:19,100 --> 01:06:22,100
Because they're all stuck in doors.

812
01:06:22,100 --> 01:06:32,100
Yeah, so because I made the 3D models I was able to create these VR videos and use some of the excerpts of the recording that I had to put it in.

813
01:06:32,100 --> 01:06:39,100
And I also submitted for grading and stuff and I was like, oh well, I'll put it on my website as well.

814
01:06:39,100 --> 01:06:48,100
And this is where I started also experimenting with AR filters, which is also on the website.

815
01:06:48,100 --> 01:06:58,100
That page has not changed for four years. So it's still the same as it was four years ago. Maybe I should maybe edit it.

816
01:06:58,100 --> 01:07:06,100
But yeah, I was locked in and this is where I really started thinking, well, I can't do actual costume anymore.

817
01:07:06,100 --> 01:07:11,100
And it was a period, it was a very strange period where everyone was doing zoom performances.

818
01:07:11,100 --> 01:07:17,100
And I also, I'm guilty of that, I did a zoom performance about the RLC.

819
01:07:17,100 --> 01:07:21,100
Not really about the RLC, but about cotton picking.

820
01:07:21,100 --> 01:07:22,100
Okay.

821
01:07:22,100 --> 01:07:28,100
And the RLC and it was a zoom performance where I was in zoom and there were two cameras, sort of from two different angles.

822
01:07:28,100 --> 01:07:33,100
And I was ridiculous. I'm glad that no recording would exist.

823
01:07:33,100 --> 01:07:35,100
That's what I was going to ask.

824
01:07:35,100 --> 01:07:38,100
I don't think I was doing my research and I didn't see that.

825
01:07:38,100 --> 01:07:39,100
No.

826
01:07:39,100 --> 01:07:44,100
I wouldn't have put it online. I mean, it was fine. It worked. It was the concept was cool.

827
01:07:44,100 --> 01:07:47,100
I nearly poisoned myself.

828
01:07:47,100 --> 01:07:55,100
But it was cool because what I did is I got all these blue t-shirts from a charity shop.

829
01:07:55,100 --> 01:08:05,100
And I was just telling a story. I was telling stories of, you know, my mom as a teenager going to the fields and picking cotton

830
01:08:05,100 --> 01:08:12,100
and how she was talking about it and all these different things and some anecdotes and this and that.

831
01:08:12,100 --> 01:08:20,100
And then sort of slowly going into the more environmentalist narrative and the drying rivers and all of that.

832
01:08:20,100 --> 01:08:26,100
And as I was doing it, I was kind of pretending to wash the t-shirts.

833
01:08:26,100 --> 01:08:31,100
But then when you're in zoom, you don't know what it's not water. It's actually bleach.

834
01:08:31,100 --> 01:08:33,100
So it's like water with bleach.

835
01:08:33,100 --> 01:08:35,100
And I was sort of washing it and hanging it up.

836
01:08:35,100 --> 01:08:44,100
So from the other angle, you could see how the t-shirts through my narrative would turn from blue to like,

837
01:08:44,100 --> 01:08:46,100
to white, desert color.

838
01:08:46,100 --> 01:08:48,100
So like the color of this table.

839
01:08:48,100 --> 01:08:54,100
So it was like a metaphor, you know, all blue becoming deserts and all of that.

840
01:08:54,100 --> 01:08:56,100
But all the bleach.

841
01:08:56,100 --> 01:09:00,100
But all the bleach and I was like dying by the end of it because I was inhaling the whole thing.

842
01:09:00,100 --> 01:09:05,100
But yeah, that was the stuff we were doing.

843
01:09:05,100 --> 01:09:11,100
But then I was like, I like costume and I want to try and see if I can do digital costume.

844
01:09:11,100 --> 01:09:13,100
And how do you put a digital costume on?

845
01:09:13,100 --> 01:09:15,100
Oh, augmented reality.

846
01:09:15,100 --> 01:09:16,100
So I started learning that.

847
01:09:16,100 --> 01:09:18,100
I was just really throwing myself into these things.

848
01:09:18,100 --> 01:09:23,100
And what really helped is it was also time for all these online residencies.

849
01:09:23,100 --> 01:09:29,100
So artist residencies, as we know, an artist gets invited, they get a studio, they work in a specific area.

850
01:09:29,100 --> 01:09:34,100
Something happens, maybe a show or maybe not.

851
01:09:34,100 --> 01:09:36,100
But again, nobody can travel.

852
01:09:36,100 --> 01:09:41,100
So these art institutions start coming up with online residencies where you participate online.

853
01:09:41,100 --> 01:09:46,100
You have all these talks and classes and you work in groups or maybe not.

854
01:09:46,100 --> 01:09:48,100
And you present an idea and so on.

855
01:09:48,100 --> 01:09:50,100
So these things happened as well.

856
01:09:50,100 --> 01:09:58,100
Some of them happened in a program called Mozilla Hubs, which unfortunately, as of end of May this year,

857
01:09:58,100 --> 01:10:00,100
has been shut down.

858
01:10:00,100 --> 01:10:02,100
It was a great platform.

859
01:10:02,100 --> 01:10:05,100
I used it a lot for workshops as well afterwards.

860
01:10:05,100 --> 01:10:15,100
But it's a VR platform, like a social media almost, social platform where you could go into a 3D world,

861
01:10:15,100 --> 01:10:20,100
either in a headset or on your computer or on your phone, and sort of exist in the social environment but online.

862
01:10:20,100 --> 01:10:23,100
It was completely free and you could build your worlds for free.

863
01:10:23,100 --> 01:10:25,100
So we're using that a lot.

864
01:10:25,100 --> 01:10:30,100
So that got me into this immersive technology world.

865
01:10:30,100 --> 01:10:35,100
And then I never thought I would be able to earn money from that because I was just playing around.

866
01:10:35,100 --> 01:10:43,100
But then around end of autumn 2020, I got my first gig in like,

867
01:10:43,100 --> 01:10:47,100
oh, we need to make an augmented reality filter for the New Year's.

868
01:10:47,100 --> 01:10:51,100
We're going to pay you this amount of money.

869
01:10:51,100 --> 01:10:55,100
Do you want to do it? I was like, oh yeah, if you pay me.

870
01:10:55,100 --> 01:11:01,100
And then one thing led to another and I suddenly had a career in augmented reality.

871
01:11:01,100 --> 01:11:06,100
In some way, COVID was a good thing for you to try out different things to explore.

872
01:11:06,100 --> 01:11:08,100
It's a horrible thing to say.

873
01:11:08,100 --> 01:11:13,100
I always hesitate to say things this way because obviously COVID is a tragedy.

874
01:11:13,100 --> 01:11:22,100
Tragedy. My closest friend always says,

875
01:11:22,100 --> 01:11:25,100
projedy instead of prodigy.

876
01:11:25,100 --> 01:11:31,100
And I am now sort of, it's plaguing me in the same way now.

877
01:11:31,100 --> 01:11:33,100
I say, tragedy instead of tragedy.

878
01:11:33,100 --> 01:11:41,100
Obviously COVID itself is a massive kind of tragedy, as you said.

879
01:11:41,100 --> 01:11:48,100
But it was a different time and it allowed people to try different things.

880
01:11:48,100 --> 01:11:51,100
Yeah, if you're lucky to be healthy, yes.

881
01:11:51,100 --> 01:11:56,100
I am not, okay.

882
01:11:56,100 --> 01:12:03,100
Maybe I'm not complaining as much because I didn't actually spend a long time in lockdown.

883
01:12:03,100 --> 01:12:06,100
So I was in lockdown in the UK.

884
01:12:06,100 --> 01:12:15,100
And then I decided not to extend my visa because of COVID because there was really no work and it was still expensive to be moved.

885
01:12:15,100 --> 01:12:18,100
And I was just fresh out of my MA.

886
01:12:18,100 --> 01:12:22,100
So it's not like I was going to get an amazing job anyway.

887
01:12:22,100 --> 01:12:27,100
So I decided to go back to Moscow to my mom, to my dad.

888
01:12:27,100 --> 01:12:34,100
So I stayed there and what happened in Moscow that didn't happen in a lot of different places is that very soon in Moscow,

889
01:12:34,100 --> 01:12:37,100
everyone just pretended that COVID did not exist.

890
01:12:37,100 --> 01:12:40,100
I think similar things happen in Uzbekistan as well.

891
01:12:40,100 --> 01:12:42,100
Yeah, so people were working.

892
01:12:42,100 --> 01:12:52,100
I was going to different meetings, networking, trying to get contacts, trying to get a job, trying to find a way to survive, trying to do things.

893
01:12:52,100 --> 01:12:55,100
And I managed through that to find some gigs.

894
01:12:55,100 --> 01:13:05,100
As I said, the augmented reality, little gig that led to other things, I did a couple of designs for place through that.

895
01:13:05,100 --> 01:13:15,100
So the year and a half that I was there after I came back from London were quite fruitful because I was, as you say, in Russian,

896
01:13:15,100 --> 01:13:25,100
in every single word.

897
01:13:25,100 --> 01:13:26,100
We need to find out.

898
01:13:26,100 --> 01:13:27,100
We need to Google it.

899
01:13:27,100 --> 01:13:28,100
I'll Google it and let you know.

900
01:13:28,100 --> 01:13:30,100
I think I will understand what you mean.

901
01:13:30,100 --> 01:13:32,100
Be persistent, let's say.

902
01:13:32,100 --> 01:13:42,100
Yeah, I was trying to do a lot of things at the same time and trying to sort of find where I can be useful or where I can apply the knowledge that I have

903
01:13:42,100 --> 01:13:52,100
because I had a huge experience in all these different fields because this path towards doing what I'm doing right now wasn't obviously very straightforward.

904
01:13:52,100 --> 01:13:59,100
So you were talking about moving back to UK, sorry, from UK to Moscow.

905
01:13:59,100 --> 01:14:04,100
You said you were lucky because you didn't stay in lockdown quite a long time.

906
01:14:04,100 --> 01:14:09,100
Yeah, I did get COVID because of that, unfortunately.

907
01:14:09,100 --> 01:14:11,100
But it wasn't very terrible.

908
01:14:11,100 --> 01:14:21,100
So earlier you said one of the reasons you decided to move out of Moscow to UK is you couldn't find your community in Moscow.

909
01:14:21,100 --> 01:14:25,100
Coming back to Moscow, did you manage to find that community?

910
01:14:25,100 --> 01:14:26,100
To some extent.

911
01:14:26,100 --> 01:14:28,100
I came back a different person.

912
01:14:28,100 --> 01:14:34,100
I was way more confident about my own work and the way I present myself.

913
01:14:34,100 --> 01:14:45,100
And I think, unfortunately, as well, telling people that I just did my masters in England, just in their eyes, seems like something...

914
01:14:45,100 --> 01:14:46,100
Changed their perspective.

915
01:14:46,100 --> 01:14:47,100
Yeah.

916
01:14:47,100 --> 01:14:48,100
What was I trying to say?

917
01:14:48,100 --> 01:14:58,100
Oh yeah, so I came back and I did find the people that were interested in what I was doing and I was interested in what they were doing and I was great.

918
01:14:58,100 --> 01:15:09,100
And also I think in these couple of years some attitudes have changed because, for example, new buzzwords started to come up in different areas.

919
01:15:09,100 --> 01:15:13,100
Words like decolonisation.

920
01:15:13,100 --> 01:15:35,100
And that, again, has changed and maybe developed more interest in the relationships that were, like, inter, I guess, national relationships that were in that of a priority before.

921
01:15:35,100 --> 01:15:43,100
So this is when I kind of, initially when I came back, I came back with an idea of maybe I can stage my play in Russia.

922
01:15:43,100 --> 01:15:54,100
And there were some people who were interested in that and that was already something that I found curious because, oh, suddenly there were people who were interested in me talking about being in Pakistan,

923
01:15:54,100 --> 01:15:59,100
which is not something that would have been of interest really.

924
01:15:59,100 --> 01:16:14,100
Although, I might be wrong because I have a friend who is, he did a play in 2013, which was called Uzbek.

925
01:16:14,100 --> 01:16:15,100
Right.

926
01:16:15,100 --> 01:16:17,100
I think I've heard about it.

927
01:16:17,100 --> 01:16:23,100
I have not seen it, but it was about this experience of a migrant.

928
01:16:23,100 --> 01:16:35,100
So there was interest around that, but I think a much more, much bigger kind of interest and, in a way, positive interest.

929
01:16:35,100 --> 01:16:39,100
I think, like, curiosity that emerged.

930
01:16:39,100 --> 01:16:45,100
And then I did another project, so I applied because I was working around these subjects anyway.

931
01:16:45,100 --> 01:16:47,100
And then, so the play didn't work out.

932
01:16:47,100 --> 01:16:48,100
I was fine.

933
01:16:48,100 --> 01:16:49,100
Absolutely fine.

934
01:16:49,100 --> 01:16:51,100
I was not sad about it.

935
01:16:51,100 --> 01:17:01,100
But I was developing these ideas further and there was an open call for competition for artists, young artists for projects.

936
01:17:01,100 --> 01:17:07,100
And, like, if you win, you become one of the 12 finalists that get to do an exhibition and all of that.

937
01:17:07,100 --> 01:17:14,100
So I was like, well, may as well apply with this idea that I had that was developing from all the things that I was researching.

938
01:17:14,100 --> 01:17:24,100
And it was about working with communities, it was working with women and also women with experience of migration.

939
01:17:24,100 --> 01:17:28,100
And how do we bring people together and co-create?

940
01:17:28,100 --> 01:17:43,100
And through this co-creation, how do we explore our hopes and dreams, but also fears, and also how do we talk about the things that we don't get to talk about for different reasons?

941
01:17:43,100 --> 01:17:45,100
In a safe space.

942
01:17:45,100 --> 01:17:47,100
So that's what I did.

943
01:17:47,100 --> 01:17:52,100
And there was a project that I became a finalist, which was great.

944
01:17:52,100 --> 01:18:04,100
And again, it showed me that there was this kind of curiosity and interest and something that people wanted to be shown in public sort of spaces.

945
01:18:04,100 --> 01:18:14,100
And what I ended up doing was, so for the exhibition, you don't do the full project, but you do sort of a proposal version of it.

946
01:18:14,100 --> 01:18:21,100
So after that, they give you either a grant or something, an opportunity to continue doing it.

947
01:18:21,100 --> 01:18:23,100
So I ended up getting a grant.

948
01:18:23,100 --> 01:18:35,100
But this first iteration, I worked with several women of different ages, I think the ages were like between 16 and 50.

949
01:18:35,100 --> 01:18:42,100
All from Central Asia, not from a single country, but actually there was.

950
01:18:42,100 --> 01:18:45,100
There was every country except for Jiggy-san.

951
01:18:45,100 --> 01:18:54,100
They all came from Central Asia to Russia for different reasons.

952
01:18:54,100 --> 01:18:59,100
Some came as babies, some came to study, some came for work and all of that.

953
01:18:59,100 --> 01:19:07,100
And within these workshops, I was also working with, I guess, a trauma therapist.

954
01:19:07,100 --> 01:19:16,100
There was a psychologist in the sessions as well who was helping me to mediate all of that because we were making things and doing different exercises.

955
01:19:16,100 --> 01:19:24,100
Some performative, some maybe more art therapeutic. Art therapy.

956
01:19:24,100 --> 01:19:35,100
And then when you tell the stories, you start telling the things that you don't necessarily talk about with your, even with your clothes ones.

957
01:19:35,100 --> 01:19:41,100
I saw the clips and people were emotional when they were talking about the stories.

958
01:19:41,100 --> 01:19:42,100
You watched the video?

959
01:19:42,100 --> 01:19:43,100
Yes.

960
01:19:43,100 --> 01:19:45,100
Damn.

961
01:19:45,100 --> 01:19:47,100
Flattered.

962
01:19:47,100 --> 01:19:53,100
So, yeah, girls would cry and it was so emotional for everyone.

963
01:19:53,100 --> 01:20:04,100
And in the end, we sort of co-created these different pieces and partially they were displayed in the exhibition.

964
01:20:04,100 --> 01:20:08,100
And also from all the narratives that came together.

965
01:20:08,100 --> 01:20:13,100
Mostly for the lack of time, but my idea is that in the future that would change.

966
01:20:13,100 --> 01:20:28,100
I sort of found, again, reading between the lines and looking for similarities in terms of posture, gesture, and things that constrained the women physically, let's say.

967
01:20:28,100 --> 01:20:34,100
There was a lot of talk about, oh, I feel very limited in my space, I don't feel like I can take up a lot of space.

968
01:20:34,100 --> 01:20:36,100
My arms always feel very constrained.

969
01:20:36,100 --> 01:20:46,100
I can't sort of do anything with them because I feel like they always have to be close to my body and that reflects in my behavior and so on.

970
01:20:46,100 --> 01:20:47,100
There's a lot of that.

971
01:20:47,100 --> 01:20:54,100
And of course, we can go into analyzing whether it's gendered socialization or whatever it is.

972
01:20:54,100 --> 01:21:06,100
So I was taking these physical manifestations of what they were saying and trying to build this wearable piece that would be, I guess, an amalgamation of all of these experiences together.

973
01:21:06,100 --> 01:21:18,100
So the costume that came out, it was this piece that was visually sort of put together using the drawings and the little sculptures that they made.

974
01:21:18,100 --> 01:21:26,100
But then when a person wears this piece, their arms are sort of constrained in the air and they can't put them down.

975
01:21:26,100 --> 01:21:34,100
So you're sort of in this position the whole time and that limits your movement and you have to exist within this limitation.

976
01:21:34,100 --> 01:21:41,100
So it's a way to sort of convey an embodied memory or like an embodied collective memory.

977
01:21:41,100 --> 01:21:53,100
And this is something that I've carried on all the way to the Biennale because the sculptures that you see in the Biennale also have the same kind of idea behind it.

978
01:21:53,100 --> 01:21:58,100
So initially this project was meant to happen in cycles.

979
01:21:58,100 --> 01:21:59,100
So it's not a one-off thing.

980
01:21:59,100 --> 01:22:06,100
You know, I would do a new cycle with new people who create a new costume all together and there would be a third cycle.

981
01:22:06,100 --> 01:22:12,100
So it's like an ongoing research with people coming in and out, maybe staying and so on.

982
01:22:12,100 --> 01:22:16,100
But unfortunately due to...

983
01:22:16,100 --> 01:22:19,100
Infamous events in Russia?

984
01:22:19,100 --> 01:22:22,100
I was not able to continue.

985
01:22:22,100 --> 01:22:33,100
And it's a shame because it was really a moment where there was definitely a quite an interest in engaging with Central Asian culture.

986
01:22:33,100 --> 01:22:43,100
And you know, this complex relationship that exists between people who migrate from Central Asia to Russia for obvious reasons.

987
01:22:43,100 --> 01:22:48,100
And then their relationship with the local community and so on.

988
01:22:48,100 --> 01:22:59,100
There were some plays coming out made by actors who came from Central Asia talking about their experiences and getting really popular and getting great reviews.

989
01:22:59,100 --> 01:23:04,100
So this subject was sort of building up and there was promise.

990
01:23:04,100 --> 01:23:10,100
But then, you know, things can change like this.

991
01:23:10,100 --> 01:23:17,100
So I was not able to continue this project and I unfortunately do not think this project can exist outside of the context of Russia.

992
01:23:17,100 --> 01:23:20,100
Because it's very specifically about...

993
01:23:20,100 --> 01:23:28,100
So it's not something you can continue from here comparing the experiences of migrant women who migrate to the UK and compare it with their experiences in Russia?

994
01:23:28,100 --> 01:23:31,100
I could still do it. It would be a different project.

995
01:23:31,100 --> 01:23:38,100
Because that one was specifically about this sort of post and new colonial relationship that exists.

996
01:23:38,100 --> 01:23:47,100
So things happened. Events that all of us know happened in Russia and you decided again to come back to UK?

997
01:23:47,100 --> 01:23:50,100
I went straight to Uzbekistan.

998
01:23:50,100 --> 01:23:52,100
You went to Uzbekistan?

999
01:23:52,100 --> 01:23:56,100
I realized that for many reasons.

1000
01:23:56,100 --> 01:24:02,100
I could not stay and I just got the first flight to Uzbekistan.

1001
01:24:02,100 --> 01:24:05,100
So I went to Uzbekistan.

1002
01:24:05,100 --> 01:24:15,100
So you went back to Uzbekistan and is that when you have decided to be a founder of the collective?

1003
01:24:15,100 --> 01:24:25,100
Not necessarily. I went to Uzbekistan thinking that I just need to get away and I did not want to do anything related to art because it just felt meaningless.

1004
01:24:25,100 --> 01:24:31,100
For quite a few months I was just sitting there thinking...

1005
01:24:31,100 --> 01:24:35,100
There is no point in doing what I'm doing because...

1006
01:24:35,100 --> 01:24:36,100
Why?

1007
01:24:36,100 --> 01:24:48,100
Well, you know, when you're in that state of shock, I guess, over the events and you kind of see a bigger picture and you're like,

1008
01:24:48,100 --> 01:24:55,100
well, how is my art going to change the world? In the moment, you think that. And I was quite happy.

1009
01:24:55,100 --> 01:24:58,100
I sort of formulated for myself. At that point I was in Tashkent.

1010
01:24:58,100 --> 01:25:04,100
I was like, I am happy doing educational things. I love sharing the things that I know.

1011
01:25:04,100 --> 01:25:09,100
I was doing some workshops around augmented reality. I was doing workshops around virtual reality.

1012
01:25:09,100 --> 01:25:17,100
I was feeling really happy contributing to the local community in Tashkent, which I wasn't very familiar with.

1013
01:25:17,100 --> 01:25:24,100
I knew some people through Instagram. I knew some people because that's how all of us connect in the art world through Instagram.

1014
01:25:24,100 --> 01:25:35,100
So I had these connections and some people that I knew from Russia also came to Uzbekistan, even though they did not have any connection to the country.

1015
01:25:35,100 --> 01:25:37,100
A lot in the state.

1016
01:25:37,100 --> 01:25:47,100
But mostly it was a time for me to really familiarize myself with the community and meet people and talk to people.

1017
01:25:47,100 --> 01:25:56,100
And one of my realizations was that, you know, I was asking all these questions for half of my life.

1018
01:25:56,100 --> 01:26:02,100
And then I come here and I meet people who have very different upbringings and very different backgrounds for me.

1019
01:26:02,100 --> 01:26:08,100
But they're asking the same questions and I sort of found this connection in there.

1020
01:26:08,100 --> 01:26:14,100
It was a realization that gave me a lot of hope in a way of like finding my community.

1021
01:26:14,100 --> 01:26:21,100
I was sort of introduced to this group of people. It was quite a big group.

1022
01:26:21,100 --> 01:26:27,100
Like the artistic community is not very big, I would say.

1023
01:26:27,100 --> 01:26:32,100
And everyone sort of knows each other and people were like already working together doing things.

1024
01:26:32,100 --> 01:26:38,100
Like on the basis of like there was one, three, nine gallery, for example.

1025
01:26:38,100 --> 01:26:43,100
Documentary center. Documentary center. Other places.

1026
01:26:43,100 --> 01:26:48,100
People are already existing and mixing. And I sort of came in as a South Sider and I was really accepted.

1027
01:26:48,100 --> 01:26:59,100
I don't know why they accepted me. But it was a wonderful thing to have in this really strange time that we were all going through.

1028
01:26:59,100 --> 01:27:07,100
In a way, there was already this synergy that was existing between all of these wonderful people, these wonderful women especially.

1029
01:27:07,100 --> 01:27:13,100
I think we all just needed to come together and sit down and be like, this is what we want to do.

1030
01:27:13,100 --> 01:27:17,100
We're ready. We want to try. We have all these things that we want to achieve.

1031
01:27:17,100 --> 01:27:20,100
We don't know how. We can try and see.

1032
01:27:20,100 --> 01:27:25,100
Because we care about this and that. We care about women's rights.

1033
01:27:25,100 --> 01:27:31,100
We care about women working in creative industries having their own voice and not being silenced.

1034
01:27:31,100 --> 01:27:41,100
We care about women being safe. We care about having these cross-border relationships with other groups, maybe in neighboring countries.

1035
01:27:41,100 --> 01:27:49,100
Because still, the context in Central Asia, we're all kind of interconnected despite our differences.

1036
01:27:49,100 --> 01:27:55,100
So we formulated all these things and we decided to try and create a collective.

1037
01:27:55,100 --> 01:28:02,100
Alive and kicking. It's been a bit more than two years, I think, we formed in April 2022.

1038
01:28:02,100 --> 01:28:09,100
And in the beginning, it was slow, of course. You kind of figure out things and some of the members changed.

1039
01:28:09,100 --> 01:28:13,100
There was somebody left. We're still really great friends. Somebody came in.

1040
01:28:13,100 --> 01:28:17,100
It was this moment of shuffling and understanding how we can do things.

1041
01:28:17,100 --> 01:28:24,100
And I left to London afterwards. So how was I going to exist in that reality?

1042
01:28:24,100 --> 01:28:30,100
A lot of questions. But I think right now we're doing quite a few very interesting projects.

1043
01:28:30,100 --> 01:28:33,100
And I'm really excited about all of them.

1044
01:28:33,100 --> 01:28:40,100
Looking into the collective, Qizlar, feminism has come up a number of times.

1045
01:28:40,100 --> 01:28:49,100
And especially in Uzbekistan where the traditionalist layer of the society is quite strong,

1046
01:28:49,100 --> 01:29:02,100
do you think that feminism has perceived in our society is true spirit of feminism and why feminism is so misunderstood in our culture?

1047
01:29:02,100 --> 01:29:12,100
There's a lot of reasons for that. I think it's maybe the lack of proper resources that explain what feminism actually is about.

1048
01:29:12,100 --> 01:29:22,100
Perhaps there is desire for escape goat kind of word that can be blamed when something goes wrong.

1049
01:29:22,100 --> 01:29:26,100
You can easily blame things on feminism.

1050
01:29:26,100 --> 01:29:35,100
Your wives are divorcing you always because of feminism. It's easy to come up with this kind of escape goat.

1051
01:29:35,100 --> 01:29:52,100
There's some influence coming from the neighboring country as well where in media feminism is being equaled to extremism and terrorism and all of that.

1052
01:29:52,100 --> 01:30:07,100
Which is just the most ridiculous narrative because what we care about as a group is we want to have a voice, we want to have a choice,

1053
01:30:07,100 --> 01:30:14,100
and we want to be able to define ourselves with our own words.

1054
01:30:14,100 --> 01:30:28,100
One of our principles is nothing about us without us. We want people not to speak for us because our experiences are as valid.

1055
01:30:28,100 --> 01:30:35,100
Who would better represent our experiences than ourselves?

1056
01:30:35,100 --> 01:30:46,100
That is the first thing because if we talk about the creative sector, still it is quite male dominated and women are not given a lot of opportunities to express themselves on the media.

1057
01:30:46,100 --> 01:30:53,100
And if they do, then often it's met with a lot of negativity and so on.

1058
01:30:53,100 --> 01:30:57,100
So women are feeling quite restrained and restricted in what they can say.

1059
01:30:57,100 --> 01:31:19,100
Secondly, having a choice, again, just having the same number of choices as men do and not having any choices imposed on us.

1060
01:31:19,100 --> 01:31:27,100
So many opponents of feminism say that first of all it's foreign to our culture.

1061
01:31:27,100 --> 01:31:46,100
And second of all, they assume that feminism means equal rights to men and women in all areas, which means in some respect they consider it as if it's not physically possible

1062
01:31:46,100 --> 01:31:50,100
because obviously, biologically, men and women are different.

1063
01:31:50,100 --> 01:31:58,100
So if you go back to my first kind of point, do you believe that feminism is foreign to our culture?

1064
01:31:58,100 --> 01:32:11,100
Or do you think it is actually something that has existed maybe in different shape or name, but has always been part of who we are historically?

1065
01:32:11,100 --> 01:32:15,100
I don't feel I'm qualified enough to talk about this.

1066
01:32:15,100 --> 01:32:18,100
That's a good response.

1067
01:32:18,100 --> 01:32:22,100
There's other people who would be way better at responding.

1068
01:32:22,100 --> 01:32:39,100
There is a great book and some great researchers that we can link in the comments that talk about actually the position of the woman and also for example, the unveiling of women and how this has happened and all of that.

1069
01:32:39,100 --> 01:32:49,100
There's a lot of great resources, so if you're interested, we can give you those resources.

1070
01:32:49,100 --> 01:32:55,100
However, you mentioned equal rights and all of the everything.

1071
01:32:55,100 --> 01:33:12,100
I think the better way to say it is equal opportunities because it's about, again, having a choice.

1072
01:33:12,100 --> 01:33:13,100
So if you want to work as a metro train driver, you should have that opportunity.

1073
01:33:13,100 --> 01:33:19,100
It doesn't mean that now 50-50 women are forced to do that.

1074
01:33:19,100 --> 01:33:26,100
But for the longest time women just couldn't apply to this job, even if they really wanted to.

1075
01:33:26,100 --> 01:33:28,100
Imagine I'm just obsessed with trains.

1076
01:33:28,100 --> 01:33:31,100
I want to drive a train, but I cannot.

1077
01:33:31,100 --> 01:33:40,100
So it's about creating this opening and allowing women who are qualified and who want to be qualified to do that.

1078
01:33:40,100 --> 01:33:45,100
And then a lot of people bring up, oh, military service, or you want women to serve as well.

1079
01:33:45,100 --> 01:33:50,100
Well, if women were in charge, they wouldn't start wars.

1080
01:33:50,100 --> 01:33:53,100
That's the thing.

1081
01:33:53,100 --> 01:33:57,100
So maybe we wouldn't need military service at all.

1082
01:33:57,100 --> 01:33:59,100
I mean, this is very generalizing.

1083
01:33:59,100 --> 01:34:06,100
It's absolutely not in the reality of what we exist in.

1084
01:34:06,100 --> 01:34:17,100
But it is just not speaking for the people whose experience you know nothing about,

1085
01:34:17,100 --> 01:34:20,100
because this is a lot of times what's happening.

1086
01:34:20,100 --> 01:34:27,100
So what we're doing is trying to create these spaces where we can represent our own experiences by ourselves.

1087
01:34:27,100 --> 01:34:37,100
And in many ways, the opportunity to do the Venice Biennial and the National Pavilion was exactly that.

1088
01:34:37,100 --> 01:34:46,100
We had this incredible chance to talk about our own personal experiences and experiences of women in our community, young women,

1089
01:34:46,100 --> 01:34:52,100
and show that to people, to the international community, and not just international to the community of, you know,

1090
01:34:52,100 --> 01:34:57,100
it was like it's an essential age as well. And this is one of the things that we really strive for.

1091
01:34:57,100 --> 01:35:07,100
Of course, it cannot happen. I don't think it can happen as like, you know, one revolution, like, oh, now all women in charge.

1092
01:35:07,100 --> 01:35:17,100
It's a gradual development. And it's about education and it's about talking to each other and not being afraid to talk to each other.

1093
01:35:17,100 --> 01:35:25,100
And through these kind of conversations and discussions, people learn and they realize that it's not a scary thing.

1094
01:35:25,100 --> 01:35:32,100
And would you agree that the fact that people are now discussing about these topics in different forms,

1095
01:35:32,100 --> 01:35:38,100
even if they are opposing, which is triggering these discussions, is a good thing that eventually it will educate people,

1096
01:35:38,100 --> 01:35:44,100
it will kind of bring different perspectives to the topic?

1097
01:35:44,100 --> 01:35:55,100
Well, yeah, I guess discussing it. That's a great question. I don't know if bashing, discussions about bash feminism actually.

1098
01:35:55,100 --> 01:36:03,100
I guess if people read that and then they're like, oh, actually, I don't really, let me go check out some sources.

1099
01:36:03,100 --> 01:36:08,100
That probably happens. I don't know if that happens a lot.

1100
01:36:08,100 --> 01:36:24,100
Yeah, now there are quite a lot of young women who are trying to sort of generate knowledge about these subjects that are, that are successful.

1101
01:36:24,100 --> 01:36:33,100
For example, there's a wonderful collective of young women in Uzbekistan called Makal, which is newly formed, but they're amazing.

1102
01:36:33,100 --> 01:36:46,100
And what they're focusing on is the research collective. They're focusing on creating knowledge with the colonial and feminist perspective in Uzbek,

1103
01:36:46,100 --> 01:36:55,100
which is going to be an amazing resource for all of the young women and young men who want to get access to these things.

1104
01:36:55,100 --> 01:37:05,100
So they're translating text from English and from other languages into Uzbek, they're writing their own texts in Uzbek, so they're creating this wonderful,

1105
01:37:05,100 --> 01:37:12,100
they've only started, but it's going to be great, this wonderful database where people can access.

1106
01:37:12,100 --> 01:37:16,100
It's not for money, it's free.

1107
01:37:16,100 --> 01:37:23,100
A lot of interesting things are happening in Uzbekistan to kind of enlighten, educate people.

1108
01:37:23,100 --> 01:37:25,100
Just good.

1109
01:37:25,100 --> 01:37:32,100
Biennale, something that we haven't discussed, but I think we should.

1110
01:37:32,100 --> 01:37:38,100
For people who don't know what the Venice Biennale is, why is it a big deal?

1111
01:37:38,100 --> 01:37:46,100
So the Venice Biennale of art, being an Italian word, so I guess in English it's the biennial, Venice Biennale of art,

1112
01:37:46,100 --> 01:37:54,100
is a big event that happens in Venice and Italy every two years. Well, the art won't happen every two years,

1113
01:37:54,100 --> 01:37:57,100
and then on the other years it's the architecture of Biennale.

1114
01:37:57,100 --> 01:38:05,100
So the whole lab Biennale actually consists of so many events, so there's also theatre and music and other things.

1115
01:38:05,100 --> 01:38:19,100
But yeah, it's one of the biggest art events in the world, and it brings together in its main exhibition always around 3-400 artists from all parts of the world.

1116
01:38:19,100 --> 01:38:24,100
It's curated every time it's a different curator, and they curate the theme and all of that.

1117
01:38:24,100 --> 01:38:34,100
But besides that, there's also national participations, so countries with pavilion is where they show people,

1118
01:38:34,100 --> 01:38:45,100
not necessarily from the country, there's all kinds of different artists that they feel can represent the art of their nation.

1119
01:38:45,100 --> 01:38:51,100
And besides that, there's also collateral events, so a lot of other exhibitions happening at the same time.

1120
01:38:51,100 --> 01:38:58,100
Venice becomes this incredible place with more than 500 exhibitions.

1121
01:38:58,100 --> 01:39:04,100
This is an arbitrary number, but I feel like it's more than that. For good 6-7 months a year.

1122
01:39:04,100 --> 01:39:07,100
So it starts in April and ends in the end of November.

1123
01:39:07,100 --> 01:39:10,100
So this year it was the 60th anniversary?

1124
01:39:10,100 --> 01:39:11,100
60th, yeah.

1125
01:39:11,100 --> 01:39:12,100
60th anniversary.

1126
01:39:12,100 --> 01:39:15,100
I don't know if there's any significance in that.

1127
01:39:15,100 --> 01:39:16,100
Well, it's a round number.

1128
01:39:16,100 --> 01:39:17,100
Yeah, it looks good.

1129
01:39:17,100 --> 01:39:19,100
It's an anniversary, yeah.

1130
01:39:19,100 --> 01:39:32,100
And this is the second time Uzbekistan has participated with their national pavilion, and you have been commissioned to set up the exhibitions in the pavilion.

1131
01:39:32,100 --> 01:39:34,100
How did that happen?

1132
01:39:34,100 --> 01:39:36,100
So yeah, so you mentioned I was commissioned.

1133
01:39:36,100 --> 01:39:41,100
So the commissioner is the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Foundation.

1134
01:39:41,100 --> 01:39:50,100
And it was all under the curation as well of the Center for Contemporary Art in Tashkent.

1135
01:39:50,100 --> 01:39:56,100
So these are the main institutions that manage all of this.

1136
01:39:56,100 --> 01:40:01,100
And I was incredibly lucky.

1137
01:40:01,100 --> 01:40:06,100
I think I don't know how that happened.

1138
01:40:06,100 --> 01:40:11,100
But of course, I feel incredibly humbled and grateful for this opportunity.

1139
01:40:11,100 --> 01:40:14,100
I was contacted and I was offered this opportunity.

1140
01:40:14,100 --> 01:40:24,100
I think there was sort of a selection committee that was looking at different options and they ended up sort of asking if I would be interested.

1141
01:40:24,100 --> 01:40:34,100
And I think now when I think of the reasons that I was picked, it probably has to do...

1142
01:40:34,100 --> 01:40:37,100
One of the reasons it has to do with the theme of this year's biennial.

1143
01:40:37,100 --> 01:40:42,100
So there is general theme every year that all the exhibitors will follow.

1144
01:40:42,100 --> 01:40:44,100
And what was the theme of this year's biennial?

1145
01:40:44,100 --> 01:40:50,100
So the theme this year was called Foreigners Everywhere, which is by itself quite a controversial statement.

1146
01:40:50,100 --> 01:41:02,100
But it was actually sort of flipping this idea upside down, this phrase that you hear in a lot of maybe contexts that are not very friendly.

1147
01:41:02,100 --> 01:41:17,100
And actually highlighting the experiences of people, artists with experience of migration, artists from marginalized backgrounds, different sort of minorities, diasporos.

1148
01:41:17,100 --> 01:41:26,100
So these artists that exist sort of in between these borders and divisions and stuff.

1149
01:41:26,100 --> 01:41:34,100
And also, for example, in the main exhibition, there was a highlight on artists who have never participated in the biennial before.

1150
01:41:34,100 --> 01:41:44,100
So it was also about novelty and looking at the artists that were historically maybe unseen or overlooked.

1151
01:41:44,100 --> 01:42:08,100
So in a way, because again, I look at the topics of migration and displacement and identity and my work is about women, my work is about diaspora and all of that in a way that fits in the subject, the overall topic of the theme of the biennial.

1152
01:42:08,100 --> 01:42:24,100
And also, I believe maybe my background in, you know, scenography and working with spaces and working with narrative spaces, site-specific performances and exhibitions.

1153
01:42:24,100 --> 01:42:37,100
This is all the things that I've done because the space that you work with when you do the national pavilion of Uzbekistan, it's very tricky because it's huge.

1154
01:42:37,100 --> 01:42:48,100
It's a large warehouse space. The ceilings are like seven, eight meters tall. You've got about 30-something meters this side, about 20 meters this side.

1155
01:42:48,100 --> 01:43:02,100
Do the math yourself, it's huge. It's right sort of at the end of Arsenale, which used to be the docks, I think, and I think I read somewhere that this specific space was used to make sales for boats.

1156
01:43:02,100 --> 01:43:14,100
So it's an industrial space, it's a huge warehouse space that was then turned into a theater as well, which I connected to what we did in the pavilion.

1157
01:43:14,100 --> 01:43:30,100
So how do you actually come up with something scenographically and spatially that will fill the entire space, make it not look empty but also not look like things are done for the sake of filling the space.

1158
01:43:30,100 --> 01:43:46,100
It has to work narratively, it has to work for the viewer. So I believe my experience in theater has actually really helped in that sense because I could envision large-scale things existing in that space.

1159
01:43:46,100 --> 01:44:11,100
So I think what is special as well is that my participation was suggested by the younger employees of ACDF, of the foundation, and it was a huge risk for the management, for the people who actually managed all these huge projects to take on somebody who, you know,

1160
01:44:11,100 --> 01:44:28,100
I wouldn't say that I'm a very established artist, I'm still early in my career, my career being very turbulent and different. So if you talk about me as an exhibiting artist, as an artist who's doing contemporary art and exhibitions, I haven't been doing that for very long.

1161
01:44:28,100 --> 01:44:47,100
So it was a huge risk to invite somebody in the 20s basically to do something of the scale, which is a very important project, you know, for the foundation and for CCA, it's always like a massive undertaking.

1162
01:44:47,100 --> 01:44:58,100
Because you know, you say it's second participation in Art Biennale, but they also did two participations in the architectural Biennale, so overall it's the fourth project.

1163
01:44:58,100 --> 01:45:26,100
And yeah, it's a testament to their trust in us and the fact that they let not just me, but also Kuzla to participate and do something about our own experiences and something that is very sincere, I think, because we didn't come up with things out of the blue,

1164
01:45:26,100 --> 01:45:43,100
we didn't pull things out of the thin air, everything that we did in the pavilion is something that we're already doing. As a collective or as individual artists, it's things that we care about, things that we already practice in our everyday lives and in our professional lives and in our interactions with each other.

1165
01:45:43,100 --> 01:46:03,100
So I just really want to believe that what we did is representative to some extent of the community that we work with, which again, I'm not saying that we're speaking for all women in Uzbekistan because I know that we're not talking about very small community, an urban community.

1166
01:46:03,100 --> 01:46:11,100
But again, I just, I believe that we managed to do something very honest.

1167
01:46:11,100 --> 01:46:17,100
What was the feedback? How was it received from both the public and from the curators as well?

1168
01:46:17,100 --> 01:46:30,100
So the overall reception was positive, I think. I think a lot of people didn't expect it to be so immersive.

1169
01:46:30,100 --> 01:46:41,100
And when I say immersive, I don't mean that we used augmented and virtual reality because actually we didn't use any of that. People were asking me, oh, are you going to do AR, VR, and all of that.

1170
01:46:41,100 --> 01:46:55,100
And I said that I'm not planning to because in the context of the things we wanted to do and the themes and the concept of the exhibition, it just didn't really fit in.

1171
01:46:55,100 --> 01:47:04,100
It felt like a gimmick. So we just discarded the idea altogether. We do talk about technology quite a lot, but not in a very straightforward way.

1172
01:47:04,100 --> 01:47:14,100
The only straightforward thing about technology is this interaction of Suzanne A. Embroidery and AI.

1173
01:47:14,100 --> 01:47:16,100
She trained an AI too.

1174
01:47:16,100 --> 01:47:26,100
I'll talk about it. In terms of reception, so people didn't expect it to be so immersive and so interactive as well.

1175
01:47:26,100 --> 01:47:31,100
Because what I wanted to create is not just a visual journey but an emotional journey.

1176
01:47:31,100 --> 01:47:39,100
So what happens when you walk in is you find yourself in this theater backstage.

1177
01:47:39,100 --> 01:47:48,100
And coming and returning to all the things I told you about earlier in the conversation. In many ways, it is a reflection of my personal migration experience,

1178
01:47:48,100 --> 01:47:55,100
where I existed in these backstages in different countries, sort of growing as an artist and understanding who I am.

1179
01:47:55,100 --> 01:48:03,100
But also a reflection of this overall idea of going through this labyrinth of a backstage.

1180
01:48:03,100 --> 01:48:10,100
And as I said, all these random props and costumes come together, but not really come together because they're all from different plays.

1181
01:48:10,100 --> 01:48:13,100
And they're all snippets of different stories that you can't really piece together.

1182
01:48:13,100 --> 01:48:23,100
And in a way that, for me, metaphorically, is like, you know, we walk around looking for bits and bits and different parts of our different identities and piecing together

1183
01:48:23,100 --> 01:48:27,100
and not really knowing how they come together. So there was this metaphor.

1184
01:48:27,100 --> 01:48:35,100
You go through and you see these objects and there is a way, you can see it, that we kind of laid out clearly.

1185
01:48:35,100 --> 01:48:39,100
And I was working with a wonderful architectural studio as well called Adra Studio,

1186
01:48:39,100 --> 01:48:46,100
who helped me sort of elevate the whole concept to a whole new level.

1187
01:48:46,100 --> 01:48:56,100
So I created this path and you sort of go through these different stages, I guess stages of migration, because what the girls from Kuzlardu do.

1188
01:48:56,100 --> 01:48:59,100
And they're amazing. I love them so much.

1189
01:48:59,100 --> 01:49:12,100
They worked with the community and they did this extensive research where they talked to our peers about their experiences,

1190
01:49:12,100 --> 01:49:28,100
their experiences of migration, about their migration from maybe rural areas to the cities, or maybe different cities, or from Tashkent to another country, all these different internal-external migration routes.

1191
01:49:28,100 --> 01:49:32,100
And what they lived through every time. And again, similar process.

1192
01:49:32,100 --> 01:49:34,100
We were then gathering all these together.

1193
01:49:34,100 --> 01:49:45,100
We were putting it into themes, looking for similar ideas, categorizing, and looking between the lines, reading between the lines and texts,

1194
01:49:45,100 --> 01:49:55,100
finding ways we can represent these experiences in a more poetic, sort of non-figurative way, I guess,

1195
01:49:55,100 --> 01:50:09,100
which could be represented through sound or embodied memories in costume, or embroidery, video, poems.

1196
01:50:09,100 --> 01:50:12,100
So all of these came together in different ways.

1197
01:50:12,100 --> 01:50:19,100
I was doing more stuff connected to textiles and installations, and the sonography, the girls.

1198
01:50:19,100 --> 01:50:29,100
So there were a few, there was Nysda and Sofia, there was Kuzlar, there was Camila, another Camila.

1199
01:50:29,100 --> 01:50:33,100
They were working more with the video. There was Gulnoza who was working.

1200
01:50:33,100 --> 01:50:40,100
A performance video where she invited 13 other women to participate and create their own little performances in their domestic spaces.

1201
01:50:40,100 --> 01:50:51,100
So it sort of brought together a lot of people, but all from this generation that grew up post-independence after 1991.

1202
01:50:51,100 --> 01:51:04,100
And so the feedback, coming back to the feedback, was that it really, and again, there was an exhibition leaflet.

1203
01:51:04,100 --> 01:51:10,100
And you always think about your audience, like who are you actually speaking to when you're making your work,

1204
01:51:10,100 --> 01:51:16,100
because for me art is a dialogue. It's never, it cannot exist in a vacuum.

1205
01:51:16,100 --> 01:51:21,100
So art is always a dialogue, and it's really important to know who you're talking to, who you're trying to connect with.

1206
01:51:21,100 --> 01:51:29,100
And in the booklet I say that I would love for people with these similar experiences of young people from different countries,

1207
01:51:29,100 --> 01:51:39,100
similar experiences of migration, or maybe living in a diaspora to come in, to experience and see what they feel.

1208
01:51:39,100 --> 01:51:47,100
And a lot of these people, you know, they would come out to me during the opening week and they'd be like,

1209
01:51:47,100 --> 01:51:54,100
we're not from Central Asia, we don't know much about Central Asia, but I came out of the exhibit crying,

1210
01:51:54,100 --> 01:52:03,100
because it touched me so much and I could see so much of myself in these, in this journey, I guess.

1211
01:52:03,100 --> 01:52:10,100
Because in the end there's also plot twists when you get to the end of this labyrinth and you suddenly find yourself in a completely different space.

1212
01:52:10,100 --> 01:52:16,100
So for a lot of people it's kind of a wow moment, like where am I?

1213
01:52:16,100 --> 01:52:22,100
Because suddenly, I don't know if I should spoil it, I guess I should spoil it. Not everyone's going to go.

1214
01:52:22,100 --> 01:52:28,100
You go through this really dark backstage and suddenly you see all these pieces of costume and like different

1215
01:52:28,100 --> 01:52:35,100
railings that turn into different shapes of like the tap-chan or street lights and stuff.

1216
01:52:35,100 --> 01:52:41,100
Then you go out and then you're surrounded by these huge blue curtains and then you find yourself on a stage.

1217
01:52:41,100 --> 01:52:48,100
So you are suddenly blinded, like I'm blinded right now with this light, you're blinded by all these stage lights.

1218
01:52:48,100 --> 01:52:56,100
You're like, you know, deer sort of in the spotlight.

1219
01:52:56,100 --> 01:53:01,100
Of the car, yeah. You're like, oh what am I doing?

1220
01:53:01,100 --> 01:53:11,100
To add to this trauma, there's this audience area, so like we put some chairs, so the people who have gone through this experience,

1221
01:53:11,100 --> 01:53:17,100
they can sit down and look at other people. So you're not just blinded, there's people sitting there.

1222
01:53:17,100 --> 01:53:19,100
Looking at you.

1223
01:53:19,100 --> 01:53:26,100
Looking at you like this. Or what happened quite often, apparently.

1224
01:53:26,100 --> 01:53:31,100
I witnessed it once, but then I left and then the girls who were mediators, they would send me videos.

1225
01:53:31,100 --> 01:53:38,100
People would start their own performances. So sometimes, you know, enough people would gather in the audience seats

1226
01:53:38,100 --> 01:53:43,100
and then they would be like, oh, let's do something silly and they would start applauding people who were coming out.

1227
01:53:43,100 --> 01:53:50,100
And the people were either startled or they anticipated because they heard the clapping and they would come out with like a performance or something.

1228
01:53:50,100 --> 01:53:57,100
You know, I was scrolling on TikTok the other day and suddenly I get this video and there's, I'm like, I know what this is.

1229
01:53:57,100 --> 01:54:08,100
This is my pavilion, this is the pavilion. And there's this guy who filmed himself on the backdrop of these curtains on the stage dancing and put it on TikTok.

1230
01:54:08,100 --> 01:54:21,100
It's like, oh. So to me, in a way, I wanted to create a sense of discomfort initially when the person comes out because that space is really about this idea of visibility and visibility.

1231
01:54:21,100 --> 01:54:26,100
We talk about, you know, social visibility and visibility, especially with women.

1232
01:54:26,100 --> 01:54:34,100
But also this relationship of being observed and being the observer. How do you switch between that?

1233
01:54:34,100 --> 01:54:43,100
So it's all a metaphor for us existing. We live in a society, us existing within different societal constraints.

1234
01:54:43,100 --> 01:54:45,100
Don't miss a cue.

1235
01:54:45,100 --> 01:54:53,100
Yeah, and don't miss the cue is actually connected to theatre as well because you tell an actor, don't miss your cue.

1236
01:54:53,100 --> 01:54:55,100
Before they go on to say.

1237
01:54:55,100 --> 01:55:04,100
Oh, this is your cue. Don't miss it. But then also there's a word play with the word cue because you can say social cues, right?

1238
01:55:04,100 --> 01:55:08,100
You have to navigate certain social cues. So there's a connection with that.

1239
01:55:08,100 --> 01:55:12,100
And also someone told me a funny thing because don't miss the cue.

1240
01:55:12,100 --> 01:55:14,100
Key also sounds like cue as in like queuing.

1241
01:55:14,100 --> 01:55:15,100
Yes.

1242
01:55:15,100 --> 01:55:19,100
And then at the opening week of Venice, cues were everywhere.

1243
01:55:19,100 --> 01:55:23,100
So people were like, oh, what is that cue I should miss?

1244
01:55:23,100 --> 01:55:35,100
I want to, we came up with this name with the Dennis Slirov who was sort of a technical coordinator of the team doing a lot of admin and like really important logistical work.

1245
01:55:35,100 --> 01:55:46,100
And we were just brainstorming and I was like, I don't want, I want a name that will be very catchy and snappy and also make people think, what does this mean?

1246
01:55:46,100 --> 01:55:55,100
So this is how it came up with the word don't miss the cue, the name don't miss the cue because it's, first of all, just when you listen to it, don't miss the cue.

1247
01:55:55,100 --> 01:55:57,100
Very short words.

1248
01:55:57,100 --> 01:56:02,100
Remember it really immediately. Then it's an imperative. Don't miss the cue.

1249
01:56:02,100 --> 01:56:07,100
People are going like, what cue shouldn't I miss? What does that mean?

1250
01:56:07,100 --> 01:56:09,100
And they would come in and like question.

1251
01:56:09,100 --> 01:56:10,100
Curiosity.

1252
01:56:10,100 --> 01:56:11,100
Yeah, what.

1253
01:56:11,100 --> 01:56:14,100
So in like, it's a marketing strategy.

1254
01:56:14,100 --> 01:56:26,100
And then, yeah, it would, it also, I was also connected to this theme of theater, theatricality and being an actor on stage or performer or not.

1255
01:56:26,100 --> 01:56:32,100
So, yeah, and on this stage, you would find yourself and you could hide.

1256
01:56:32,100 --> 01:56:41,100
But then even when you're hidden and you think you're, you're not visible to the audience, you're still visible because there's cameras pointing at you, live streaming you to another layer in the back.

1257
01:56:41,100 --> 01:56:48,100
With little screens. So, yeah, it's about this extreme visibility to invisibility.

1258
01:56:48,100 --> 01:56:58,100
And to me, it was the most heartwarming part because I could see that the spaces are being activated by the audience.

1259
01:56:58,100 --> 01:57:00,100
It is essentially an empty space.

1260
01:57:00,100 --> 01:57:11,100
It has created a sort of narrative environment that has, doesn't have a live narrator, like nobody's telling you what to do.

1261
01:57:11,100 --> 01:57:19,100
But you go through it and then you activate it by being an audience member.

1262
01:57:19,100 --> 01:57:26,100
So the fact that people were engaging and keep engaging is really important to me.

1263
01:57:26,100 --> 01:57:33,100
And to people who want to experience that, the Pavilion is still on and it's on till 24th of November.

1264
01:57:33,100 --> 01:57:37,100
24th of November. I'm sure our episodes will be released before that.

1265
01:57:37,100 --> 01:57:44,100
So anyone who wants to experience what Aziza has described, the Pavilion is still on till November.

1266
01:57:44,100 --> 01:57:52,100
Aziza, there's a lot of things I want to discuss, but unfortunately the time is limited.

1267
01:57:52,100 --> 01:58:00,100
I'm sure that we will have a few more episodes with you covering other topics.

1268
01:58:00,100 --> 01:58:02,100
Diving deep into the topics that we didn't dive deep.

1269
01:58:02,100 --> 01:58:05,100
We have a few traditions on our podcast.

1270
01:58:05,100 --> 01:58:10,100
The first one is the book recommendation.

1271
01:58:10,100 --> 01:58:16,100
We ask the guests to recommend one book to the audience and explain why.

1272
01:58:16,100 --> 01:58:26,100
I am a big fan of magical realism, as you might have realized with 100 years of solitude and all of that.

1273
01:58:26,100 --> 01:58:34,100
And there is this book by an Iranian author, Women Without Men, a novel of modern Iran.

1274
01:58:34,100 --> 01:58:39,100
And it's by the author called Shahr Nush Parsipu.

1275
01:58:39,100 --> 01:58:46,100
Put the link in the description for people who want to...

1276
01:58:46,100 --> 01:58:49,100
And I read it on the plane. It's not a very long book.

1277
01:58:49,100 --> 01:58:53,100
I read it on the plane on my way to...

1278
01:58:53,100 --> 01:58:58,100
I was flying, I was flying. It was like a two and a half hour flight.

1279
01:58:58,100 --> 01:58:59,100
Not as good.

1280
01:58:59,100 --> 01:59:02,100
No, no, no. I can't remember where it was.

1281
01:59:02,100 --> 01:59:06,100
It was two and a half hour, three hour flight. I read it back to back.

1282
01:59:06,100 --> 01:59:09,100
It was pretty interesting, first of all.

1283
01:59:09,100 --> 01:59:21,100
And it is this fable slash phantasmagorical story about different women in Iran.

1284
01:59:21,100 --> 01:59:25,100
And their lives sort of come together and they set apart.

1285
01:59:25,100 --> 01:59:29,100
So it's got these several narrative lines.

1286
01:59:29,100 --> 01:59:40,100
It is about the plight of a woman in a way, but it's written in a very tender, sort of beautiful way.

1287
01:59:40,100 --> 01:59:43,100
And it's got a lot of magical realism in it.

1288
01:59:43,100 --> 01:59:46,100
A woman turns into a tree, that kind of thing.

1289
01:59:46,100 --> 01:59:52,100
And it's very poetic. And it's something that I really like in art in general.

1290
01:59:52,100 --> 01:59:57,100
In a way, that's why I also really enjoy, for example, the Egyptian pavilion at the binari,

1291
01:59:57,100 --> 02:00:12,100
because it is about, it was this, so it's an opera about an uprising against the colonial powers in the end of the 19th century in Egypt.

1292
02:00:12,100 --> 02:00:19,100
And it's about very tragic events, but it's done in such a poetic way in this beautiful opera.

1293
02:00:19,100 --> 02:00:22,100
And you just have to see it. It's wonderful.

1294
02:00:22,100 --> 02:00:41,100
That's why I like this kind of art, because you can weave these narratives in a very soft way, talking about something that can be quite traumatic and difficult to digest otherwise.

1295
02:00:41,100 --> 02:00:43,100
That's the book.

1296
02:00:43,100 --> 02:00:52,100
As I said, I will put the link on the show notes. Do get a copy and read it. I am certainly curious.

1297
02:00:52,100 --> 02:01:00,100
Right, Aziza. Another tradition we have is we ask each guest to leave a question to the following guest.

1298
02:01:00,100 --> 02:01:02,100
I didn't prepare my question.

1299
02:01:02,100 --> 02:01:04,100
It's fine. You don't have to ask it now.

1300
02:01:04,100 --> 02:01:05,100
Okay.

1301
02:01:05,100 --> 02:01:14,100
I can ask it off the record, but the person who was recorded before you has asked the following question to you.

1302
02:01:14,100 --> 02:01:16,100
I'm scared.

1303
02:01:16,100 --> 02:01:17,100
The question is...

1304
02:01:17,100 --> 02:01:18,100
Should I be scared?

1305
02:01:18,100 --> 02:01:21,100
No, it's an interesting question.

1306
02:01:21,100 --> 02:01:24,100
What kind of...

1307
02:01:24,100 --> 02:01:29,100
It's translated. The question is in Uzbek and it's translated in English.

1308
02:01:29,100 --> 02:01:38,100
What kind of heritage you want to leave after yourself and what are you doing now to make it happen?

1309
02:01:38,100 --> 02:01:42,100
Oh my God. That is very profound. It's like...

1310
02:01:42,100 --> 02:01:46,100
What's the meaning of life? What kind of heritage?

1311
02:01:46,100 --> 02:01:54,100
Hmm. I think it's something I always tell people in a jokey way, but I'm actually quite serious about it.

1312
02:01:54,100 --> 02:02:00,100
When I get rich... Not if. When I get rich.

1313
02:02:00,100 --> 02:02:09,100
I want to create a foundation that will... Not a foundation, maybe a fund. Something.

1314
02:02:09,100 --> 02:02:19,100
Something that will support creatives that need support.

1315
02:02:19,100 --> 02:02:29,100
In Central Asia, maybe. Something that can provide more resources.

1316
02:02:29,100 --> 02:02:41,100
I don't know exactly yet, but I feel like a lot of times what we really need is just money to do things and to get things done.

1317
02:02:41,100 --> 02:02:43,100
And it would be something that I would love to do.

1318
02:02:43,100 --> 02:02:48,100
And it is an extension of what I'm trying to do already.

1319
02:02:48,100 --> 02:02:52,100
With the exception of not being rich.

1320
02:02:52,100 --> 02:02:55,100
That's the second part of the question. What are you doing now to achieve that?

1321
02:02:55,100 --> 02:03:01,100
Yeah. I think, again, it's coming from what I'm doing and what we are doing with Klaslar, for example.

1322
02:03:01,100 --> 02:03:15,100
Of course, we're not creating this huge platform that gives a lot of money and resources to people, but we're doing what we can within the limits that we have.

1323
02:03:15,100 --> 02:03:25,100
And the restrictions. Because, again, most of the women in Klaslar also have full-time jobs. Some have children.

1324
02:03:25,100 --> 02:03:30,100
So you have to juggle all of that. And then on top, also do things for Klaslar.

1325
02:03:30,100 --> 02:03:40,100
But because we all are so passionate about doing this, I have believed that something good will happen.

1326
02:03:40,100 --> 02:03:45,100
And that maybe we're at least inspiring some people.

1327
02:03:45,100 --> 02:03:51,100
Because, I mean, it's a selfish thing to say.

1328
02:03:51,100 --> 02:04:06,100
But one of the reasons I really want to do Klaslar, I want to keep doing it, is because when I was younger, I didn't have a kind of a role model that was doing things that I wanted to do and who was also from Central Asia.

1329
02:04:06,100 --> 02:04:19,100
And I kind of, if we can become these kind of role models, but something that doesn't sound as pompous, you know, something that sounds better than that,

1330
02:04:19,100 --> 02:04:28,100
maybe inspiration for the younger generation that can look at what we're doing and say, oh, we can also do these things. I didn't realize.

1331
02:04:28,100 --> 02:04:32,100
That is something I really, really care about deeply.

1332
02:04:32,100 --> 02:04:44,100
So to people who want to find out more about Klaslar, maybe want to be part of it, either by joining it or by supporting it financially or other how, where can they find out more information about it?

1333
02:04:44,100 --> 02:04:47,100
So we have an Instagram page.

1334
02:04:47,100 --> 02:04:50,100
We should repeat on the notes.

1335
02:04:50,100 --> 02:04:53,100
Check the description.

1336
02:04:53,100 --> 02:05:00,100
We have an Instagram page. We are working on a website. Again, resources. We have to find time to do it.

1337
02:05:00,100 --> 02:05:03,100
We have a very active Instagram page.

1338
02:05:03,100 --> 02:05:06,100
And you can find our contacts on it.

1339
02:05:06,100 --> 02:05:09,100
We also have several different projects happening.

1340
02:05:09,100 --> 02:05:18,100
So we're now developing an online video course that's going to be free and translated into different languages that are spoken in Uzbekistan.

1341
02:05:18,100 --> 02:05:21,100
So Uzbek, Tajik, Karakalpak as well.

1342
02:05:21,100 --> 02:05:26,100
And it's going to be a course from women artists to women.

1343
02:05:26,100 --> 02:05:32,100
And it is related to using technology in the arts. And I'm really excited about it.

1344
02:05:32,100 --> 02:05:36,100
Sort of came up with it end of last year.

1345
02:05:36,100 --> 02:05:41,100
And now it's sort of coming to some point where we have an open call.

1346
02:05:41,100 --> 02:05:44,100
It's going to be closed by the time this comes out.

1347
02:05:44,100 --> 02:05:46,100
But we're doing an open call.

1348
02:05:46,100 --> 02:05:52,100
We're looking for people who want to submit and do these things because we're able to pay.

1349
02:05:52,100 --> 02:05:55,100
The contributor is really happy about it.

1350
02:05:55,100 --> 02:05:59,100
So it's one of the things, but there's also a bunch of other initiatives that we're working with.

1351
02:05:59,100 --> 02:06:04,100
If they follow you on Instagram, they'll know about different things happening.

1352
02:06:04,100 --> 02:06:10,100
Yes, yes. And hopefully, things will be okay.

1353
02:06:10,100 --> 02:06:12,100
Yeah, well, what you're doing is quite cool.

1354
02:06:12,100 --> 02:06:18,100
And I'm sure many people will be interested in finding out more about it.

1355
02:06:18,100 --> 02:06:22,100
The last tradition is the free microphone.

1356
02:06:22,100 --> 02:06:27,100
It's you and the audience. You can say whatever you want.

1357
02:06:27,100 --> 02:06:31,100
You're free to say whatever you want. I will not be interrupting.

1358
02:06:31,100 --> 02:06:35,100
So this is the camera.

1359
02:06:35,100 --> 02:06:38,100
I need to, I'm glad that you're here.

1360
02:06:38,100 --> 02:06:41,100
And I'm glad that I was able to share my story.

1361
02:06:41,100 --> 02:06:47,100
And if it resonates with any of you, that will make me very happy.

1362
02:06:47,100 --> 02:06:57,100
I know it is hard, and especially if there's people here who want to do the arts or try themselves in the creative sector.

1363
02:06:57,100 --> 02:06:59,100
I know it can be very difficult.

1364
02:06:59,100 --> 02:07:05,100
And one of the main things that I've realized is the path is never straightforward.

1365
02:07:05,100 --> 02:07:07,100
You're going to bump into obstacles.

1366
02:07:07,100 --> 02:07:11,100
You're going to find yourself doing things that you're not really necessarily enjoying.

1367
02:07:11,100 --> 02:07:20,100
But all of this builds up your experience and builds up your outlook to the world.

1368
02:07:20,100 --> 02:07:27,100
And in the end, all of this knowledge, even the knowledge that you thought wasn't going to be useful, is going to be useful in things that you do.

1369
02:07:27,100 --> 02:07:30,100
So hold on to that.

1370
02:07:30,100 --> 02:07:35,100
And I'm going to do a shameless plug.

1371
02:07:35,100 --> 02:07:41,100
I think, I don't know, when is this going to come out? I don't know.

1372
02:07:41,100 --> 02:07:42,100
September, let's say September.

1373
02:07:42,100 --> 02:07:46,100
Yeah. So it is September now, most likely.

1374
02:07:46,100 --> 02:07:54,100
So I'm having, I'm participating in a group exhibition in Berlin in a place called Kindle.

1375
02:07:54,100 --> 02:07:57,100
And the link is going to be in the description.

1376
02:07:57,100 --> 02:08:02,100
So please come along if you want to support and see my work.

1377
02:08:02,100 --> 02:08:16,100
And if you're in Berlin, we're also having some exhibitions coming up with Kuzlar and also my own kind of projects in different cities in Italy and also in London.

1378
02:08:16,100 --> 02:08:23,100
So subscribe, I guess, to my Instagram where I'll be posting more about it.

1379
02:08:23,100 --> 02:08:39,100
Yeah. And also, if you're interested in Susan the embroidery and the AI experiments that I do and all the kind of art and technology stuff, subscribe to my Instagram.

1380
02:08:39,100 --> 02:08:41,100
I do a lot of reels.

1381
02:08:41,100 --> 02:08:43,100
I talk about my research.

1382
02:08:43,100 --> 02:08:45,100
I talk about, I do tutorials.

1383
02:08:45,100 --> 02:08:52,100
And yeah, you can always message me there if you have any questions.

1384
02:08:52,100 --> 02:08:54,100
Great.

1385
02:08:54,100 --> 02:08:56,100
That's a long one.

1386
02:08:56,100 --> 02:08:58,100
No, that was a good one.

1387
02:08:58,100 --> 02:09:06,100
Thank you very much for your time, for sharing your story and for inspiring our audience.

1388
02:09:06,100 --> 02:09:12,100
As I said, I'm looking forward to our many more other episodes in the future.

1389
02:09:12,100 --> 02:09:17,100
We will dive deeper.

1390
02:09:17,100 --> 02:09:21,100
We will dive deeper to the topics that we haven't had opportunity.

1391
02:09:21,100 --> 02:09:24,100
In a couple of years, I'll be able to do it in a spec.

1392
02:09:24,100 --> 02:09:26,100
What's a challenge?

1393
02:09:26,100 --> 02:09:28,100
That's a good challenge.

1394
02:09:28,100 --> 02:09:31,100
I hope this stuff I said was actually interesting.

1395
02:09:31,100 --> 02:09:33,100
Thanks a lot.

1396
02:09:33,100 --> 02:09:35,100
That's it.

1397
02:09:35,100 --> 02:09:39,100
Quick thing. Thanks a lot for supporting us and for watching us.

1398
02:09:39,100 --> 02:09:46,100
Please click the subscribe button because the bigger we grow, the bigger guests we will bring to the podcast.

1399
02:09:46,100 --> 02:09:53,100
And to return, we promise to create the most engaging and interesting and insightful content.

1400
02:09:53,100 --> 02:10:17,100
Thank you.