In the period from 2024 to 2026 Paci Dalò investigates the work of the Jewish-Russian poet Osip Mandel’štam (1891-1938) and intends to start from the practice of samizdat to develop a cycle of artistic actions made up of workshops, conversations, theatre, drawing, performances, concerts, sound, films, editions. Starting from these practices the artist will then create a show entitled Sole nero that will debut in 2024 in Italy.
The project starts from the writing of Mandel’štam (who died in 1938 while traveling to a gulag in the Far East of the Soviet Union, not far from Vladivostok) intertwining it with the practice of samizdat. The term indicates the activity of clandestine dissemination of illegal writings reproduced by hand, because they were censored by the authorities or in some way hostile to the Soviet regime. самиздат in Russian means “self-published” and indicates a spontaneous social, cultural and political phenomenon that exploded in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries between the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is used in a similar sense to indicate all journalistic and literary productions forced into secrecy due to a government censorship regime. Soviet samizdat was a unique phenomenon. Reproducing on one’s own (by hand or with a typewriter, rarely with a mimeograph machine) texts that state censorship would never have allowed to pass was not an activity that concerned only literature, on the contrary; in the beginning it included documents of all kinds, secret materials, protests and appeals, verses, novels, philosophical essays. Samizdat were different not only for the ideas and debates that they spread to a larger audience, but also for their format. Typed, often stained and creased, with numerous typographical errors and anonymous covers. The samizdat format arose from a lack of resources and the need to remain unnoticed. Over time, dissidents in the Soviet Union began to admire these qualities for their own sake; the slapdash appearance of samizdat contrasted sharply with the well-crafted, regular volumes of state-sanctioned texts. The samizdat format gained importance beyond the ideas it expressed and became a powerful symbol of the rebellious but materially deprived spirit of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union; the format itself elevated samizdat reading to a clandestine act of value.
Along with the paper world we have the so-called contraband audio. A homemade “bone disc” Ribs, “rib music”, “bone discs” or roentgenizdat (roentgen- from the Russian for X-ray, named after Wilhelm Röntgen) were homemade phonograph records copied from banned recordings that were smuggled into the country. Their content was Western rock and roll, jazz, mambo and other music, and music of banned emigres. They were sold and traded on the black market. Each disc is a thin, flexible sheet of plastic recorded with a spiral groove on one side, playable on a standard phonograph turntable at 78 rpm. They were made from a cheap and available material: used X-ray film (hence the name roentgenizdat). Each large rectangular sheet is cut into a circle and individually recorded using an improvised recording lathe. The discs and their limited sound quality are reminiscent of the mass-produced flexible disc and may have been inspired by it.