Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Beyond Anthropology For Kids w/ Nika Dubrovsky
4 Plays1 month ago
My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children’s books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you’ll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia.
Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.
Most of Nika’s projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the “Museum of Care”, a nomadic ‘anti’ institute, and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. “Playgrounds are vital public spaces,” she writes, “—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They’re also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.”
https://museum.care/playgrounds-notes-from-the-curator/
Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration
Recommended
![Showcase: Spotlight on Bismarck Public Schools' Empower[Ed] image](https://media.zencastr.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=112,quality=85/image-files/5c7838c8f83db700141c53b1/6cacdde7-1b80-4c49-8f95-03eec9a94137.jpeg)
Transcript
Dystopian vs Utopian City Creations
00:00:00
Speaker
In different countries, it's always repeated two things.
00:00:03
Speaker
So first, the dystopian city is always poetic.
00:00:07
Speaker
So kids start to invent all kinds of crazy things like vampires.
00:00:13
Speaker
It's all very much poetry.
00:00:15
Speaker
But utopian city is very practical.
00:00:18
Speaker
They always try to solve practical problems.
00:00:21
Speaker
They're like, okay,
00:00:23
Speaker
We don't want to have hungry people.
00:00:24
Speaker
Where are we going to produce food?
00:00:26
Speaker
What kind of food are we going to produce?
00:00:28
Speaker
Like these kids in Amsterdam, they will like really spend a lot of time negotiating between each other.
00:00:35
Speaker
Should we have farms with animals?
00:00:37
Speaker
And who will kill them?
00:00:39
Speaker
Or they will just become all vegetarian, you know?
00:00:42
Speaker
So that was like a big topic of discussion.
00:00:44
Speaker
But they were like super practical.
Podcast Introduction and Highlights
00:00:50
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 167 of our podcast here at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:55
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:57
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Julia Valenti, Kimberly Baker, and Brandon Peters.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you all so much for your ongoing support.
00:01:09
Speaker
And with the help of teacher-powered schools, so-called Moran partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, the lineup for our fourth annual virtual conference to restore humanity is complete, focused this year on the quest for connection, running from July 21st to the 23rd.
00:01:25
Speaker
Between now and then, with each episode, we'll briefly spotlight one of our conference keynotes, workshops, and panel discussions.
00:01:31
Speaker
For 90 minutes on Tuesday, July 22nd, join V. Dow, Sociologist and Director of Learning and Practice at Cortico, Shaina V. White, Director of CS Equity Initiatives at the Kapoor Foundation, Charles Logan, PhD student at Northwestern University, and Audrey Waters.
00:01:49
Speaker
creator of Hack Education, writer of The Second Breakfast newsletter, and author of Teaching Machines.
00:01:55
Speaker
As we try to answer the question, what, if anything, should be the relationship of AI and ed tech to education?
00:02:02
Speaker
I'll be leading the panel in a Q&A with questions from the audience, and it should be a great conversation.
00:02:07
Speaker
If that sounds interesting, tickets for the whole conference start at just 50 bucks, and you can find the full lineup at humanrestorationproject.org slash conference.
Introducing Nika Dubrovsky
00:02:25
Speaker
My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky.
00:02:27
Speaker
Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally.
00:02:31
Speaker
Her children's books have been translated into several languages, and remarkably, as you'll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Seuss to post-Soviet Russia.
00:02:44
Speaker
Nika is also the co-creator of Anthropology for Kids, alongside her late husband, anthropologist, best-selling author, and activist David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020.
00:02:56
Speaker
A4Kids.org is an open source platform which experiments with new educational formats.
00:03:02
Speaker
After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.
00:03:11
Speaker
Most of NECA's projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the Museum of Care, a nomadic anti-institute, and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care.
Soviet Influence on Nika's Work
00:03:28
Speaker
Playgrounds are vital public spaces, she writes.
00:03:31
Speaker
They bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides.
00:03:35
Speaker
They're also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions.
00:03:42
Speaker
A network of community-built playgrounds designed around visual assemblies could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.
00:03:52
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining me today, Nika.
00:03:55
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me.
00:03:57
Speaker
So before we get into the incredible projects that you have been involved with and the plans that you must have for the future, you were born in the former Soviet Union.
00:04:06
Speaker
Is that right?
00:04:07
Speaker
Yes.
00:04:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:04:09
Speaker
And I left when the Soviet Union was still together.
00:04:12
Speaker
It was 1989.
00:04:13
Speaker
So I left a town called Leningrad.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:17
Speaker
So I'm a little bit like I left a country that didn't exist, the city that didn't exist.
00:04:24
Speaker
Soviet Union was my motherland and the big part of what formed me.
00:04:31
Speaker
And that's a big part of the project Anthropology for Kids that is based on the ideas of the Soviet literature, avant-garde Soviet literature.
00:04:43
Speaker
And you write about your childhood growing up there.
00:04:45
Speaker
I read the wonderful little biography you have on your website that
00:04:49
Speaker
I was never sure, I was sure I was never going anywhere.
00:04:53
Speaker
And you have several excerpts on the site about your adolescence and your experience at school.
00:04:57
Speaker
You say, I was a serious girl, studied a lot.
00:05:00
Speaker
The characteristic they gave me at school was, she is withdrawn, has no friends.
00:05:05
Speaker
engaged only and exclusively in art projects for public work, politely but firmly refuses.
00:05:10
Speaker
And you say, I'm still proud of that piece of paper.
00:05:13
Speaker
And I'm incredibly curious, and I'm sure listeners are too, about that background and to hear you speak about some experiences that most shaped you, be they inside of school or outside of it.
Creative Freedom in Soviet Union
00:05:24
Speaker
outside of school, of course.
00:05:25
Speaker
And it's very interesting how the word activist changed if you compare it in Soviet Union.
00:05:31
Speaker
Because in Soviet Union, the public sphere was totally organized by administration and by officials.
00:05:40
Speaker
And there was no freedom or privacy in this public sphere.
00:05:45
Speaker
So in Soviet times, a lot of artists and a lot of public space, what we call now,
00:05:53
Speaker
would exist in private spaces like Soviet kitchen.
00:05:56
Speaker
That's where people feel themselves free and liberated.
00:06:01
Speaker
And a lot of ritual practices came out of Soviet Union, like apartment art exhibitions or self-made magazines called Samozdat.
00:06:12
Speaker
and other cultural institutions, I would say, that was formed to preserve and to develop freedom and reproduction of culture.
00:06:27
Speaker
So it was a very strange combination of private and public in the Soviet Union, very different from the US.
00:06:38
Speaker
And you had mentioned the Anthropology for Kids books sort of began as a reaction to those books that you experienced growing up.
00:06:45
Speaker
There's another great excerpt I pulled out here that says, what horrible children's books are published in Russia?
00:06:50
Speaker
Nasty, glossy pictures, hyper-drawn illustrations that are the worst mixture of advertising drawings on kafir and half-forgotten ideas about cartoon childhood.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:00
Speaker
So I'm so curious then about how those memories of those horrible children's books influence the art that you create today and your work with Anthropology for Kids.
Critique of Post-Soviet Literature
00:07:13
Speaker
This is very interesting.
00:07:15
Speaker
Maybe I should revisit the biography that I put on my website because actually Soviet children's literature and Soviet children's books was brilliant.
00:07:26
Speaker
Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was quite a suppressive regime, they produced an amazing Soviet literature.
00:07:34
Speaker
But after Soviet Union collapsed,
00:07:37
Speaker
and then Perestroika came and the wild market came as well, then the post-Soviet Russian literature was a disaster.
00:07:49
Speaker
And that's exactly the time when I had kids.
00:07:52
Speaker
And my kids were born outside of Russia or Soviet Union, but I wanted to share my culture with them.
00:07:59
Speaker
So I started to buy these books and started to read it to my kids.
00:08:04
Speaker
And then I was horrified.
00:08:06
Speaker
And I said, no, no, no, no.
00:08:08
Speaker
I have to make my own because this is very bad.
00:08:13
Speaker
And I was also living in the US at that time.
00:08:16
Speaker
So that's when I started to read Dr. Seuss.
00:08:20
Speaker
And that was amazing.
00:08:23
Speaker
And that was another project that I did.
00:08:25
Speaker
I bought the rights and I published Dr. Seuss in Russia in Russian.
00:08:33
Speaker
Just to want to share with my former Russian fellows the great, great literature that I found in the US.
Translating Dr. Seuss into Russian
00:08:46
Speaker
That is incredible.
00:08:47
Speaker
So is it safe to say that a Russian translation of Dr. Seuss exists because of you then?
00:08:53
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:08:53
Speaker
I wasn't a translator, but in this case, I was a publisher and producer of this project.
00:09:00
Speaker
But definitely it was a lot of research and absolutely a lot of work.
00:09:06
Speaker
My work was putting into that.
00:09:08
Speaker
It's also for me was in the research project trying to merge the...
00:09:13
Speaker
Soviet literature and American literature and to try to find these differences and similarities.
00:09:22
Speaker
Dr. Seuss was published once in 1960s by the Soviet children's writer called Tchukhovsky, who was
00:09:34
Speaker
who was born before revolution.
00:09:35
Speaker
So that was still this early Russian avant-garde Soviet literature that was very close to Dr. Seuss, who is absolutely amazing author for me.
00:09:49
Speaker
I was so proud to bring it to Russia.
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, that is such an awesome accomplishment.
00:09:56
Speaker
What an awesome thing to be able to attribute yourself to.
00:10:01
Speaker
I also think Dr. Seuss is a very rare author now because his children's literature was absolutely political.
00:10:10
Speaker
So he was just writing anti-war books and climate change books, you know, and so on and so forth.
00:10:17
Speaker
And it also was very folk, you know, so it's like so much, for me, the beauty of English language is all in Dr. Seuss.
00:10:26
Speaker
It's almost like singing.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:29
Speaker
Amazing person.
00:10:30
Speaker
And I'm also curious then too, Nika, getting past the growing up that you had in the Soviet Union, obviously you've traveled the world, had these wonderful experiences.
Anthropology and Education with David Graeber
00:10:41
Speaker
What values and ideas most influence your world and your work today or in the course of your life?
00:10:48
Speaker
So here I should say that before I met David, I didn't really know what is anthropology.
00:10:55
Speaker
And yeah, and then he was, so I met him after he was kicked out of Yale, when he appeared on his first TV program with Charlie Rose.
00:11:10
Speaker
And then he was writing, in that moment, 5,000 years of death, that he was sending me chapter by chapter in board.
00:11:19
Speaker
And that was like, I was reading that and it's literally changed my old perspective.
00:11:24
Speaker
And I also was wondering what could be a good education for my kids in general, because human beings is all about reproduction of culture.
00:11:34
Speaker
And then I was like, yeah, so this is how it should be actually, you know, this, you have to share people, um, not a one culture and one perspective, but of course you should share the same core value through the lenses of, um,
00:11:50
Speaker
of different cultures.
00:11:53
Speaker
And so from Soviet Union, I think the major things that was also in Soviet literature is internationalism.
00:12:01
Speaker
So despite the fact that Soviet Union was an empire, it's still
00:12:07
Speaker
was carrying out all these anti-colonial international values, at least declaring them.
00:12:15
Speaker
And this declaration was happening through children's literature.
00:12:19
Speaker
And the things that would be censored in the adult literature would still exist in the children's literature.
00:12:27
Speaker
So that's why this was a very unique moment for children's literature to bloom.
Anthropology for Kids Series
00:12:34
Speaker
And that's a fascinating transition to speaking directly to the work that you and David collaborated on for Anthropology for Kids.
00:12:42
Speaker
It describes itself as re-describing essential aspects of human life in simple terms, accessible for everyone,
00:12:49
Speaker
challenging people to reconsider who we are and how we see ourselves in others.
00:12:54
Speaker
And for the benefit of our listeners, I'll just describe a little bit of what it is.
00:12:57
Speaker
There are these wonderful free downloadable doodle books with incredible illustrations that you and David co-wrote.
00:13:03
Speaker
They're act-
00:13:04
Speaker
sort of as invitations for kids to explore and recreate these ideas.
00:13:09
Speaker
There's titles like Cities Made Differently, What Are Kings?
00:13:12
Speaker
There's one that challenges kids to invent a new nation together and think about where nationality comes from.
00:13:19
Speaker
They reflect on school and when and how schools were created.
00:13:22
Speaker
It's such a fun resource.
00:13:24
Speaker
It's a joyful resource.
00:13:25
Speaker
And it's one that we at HRP first encountered when we were working on our global interdisciplinary curriculum.
00:13:32
Speaker
that we made a few years ago and sort of stuck with us since.
00:13:34
Speaker
How did that project get started between you and David and what were its goals and mission at the time?
00:13:41
Speaker
So I think David is a teacher mostly.
00:13:44
Speaker
So he was always an academia and he was a really, really good teacher in a way that he was absolutely not suppressive and really not snobbish.
00:13:59
Speaker
And that's, you can see it in his books.
00:14:02
Speaker
And so that's, yeah, first time I encountered this guy who was totally smart, absolutely, like, absolutely genius, but he also was like,
00:14:15
Speaker
super eye to eye you know very supportive and yeah i i just talked to uh yesterday to one person who a student in fact who just wrote me an email describing how he fell in love with david how he uh he encountered his books and they changed his life and so on so forth and i just was thinking okay generally we can tell
00:14:40
Speaker
about family members or about loved ones that changed our lives.
00:14:45
Speaker
They mean the world for us.
00:14:50
Speaker
Actually, they did it to so many people around the world.
00:14:55
Speaker
So many people can tell it about him.
00:14:57
Speaker
So the anthropology for kids was just, I was thinking, okay, how I can connect it to myself.
00:15:03
Speaker
What can I contribute to all of this?
00:15:08
Speaker
enormous new world that I opened through his text and through being in touch with him.
00:15:14
Speaker
And also I had a son who was very small back then.
00:15:20
Speaker
And I was just doing projects with him and for him.
00:15:24
Speaker
And that's how it's all merged.
00:15:26
Speaker
And I also should say that I was living in New York in Lower East Side.
00:15:30
Speaker
And suddenly not only David, but a bunch of my friends was anthropologists around me.
00:15:38
Speaker
like Anna Bernstein, who is now a professor at Harvard, and Niko Davidov, who is also a professor at New York University.
00:15:44
Speaker
So we all were like kind of young, I'm an artist, and they were like anthropologists and a bunch of other people.
00:15:54
Speaker
So anthropology, that's become probably a buzz at that time in the very early 2000s.
00:16:04
Speaker
It's kind of an unexpected through line that I wasn't anticipating to come up with this conversation, but it's like your involvement in work that's directly targeted towards kids.
00:16:13
Speaker
I mean, I didn't know about this Dr. Seuss story.
00:16:16
Speaker
Would you say that that's influenced by, you know, your own experiences as a child and a parent and education and the resources you would want your own kids to have access to or what you wish you had access to as a
Dr. Seuss's Impact and Nika's Approach
00:16:28
Speaker
child?
00:16:28
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:16:30
Speaker
I actually read so much about Dr. Tews.
00:16:32
Speaker
I was surprised to find out that his books were kicked out of the libraries, you know, like Cat in a Hat was really like...
00:16:44
Speaker
average Americans didn't like it.
00:16:47
Speaker
He wasn't able to find a publishing house.
00:16:50
Speaker
Random House was so tiny.
00:16:53
Speaker
The only way Dr. Seuss is with us is because of his commercial success.
00:16:59
Speaker
Schools, libraries, all the government institutions didn't like him.
00:17:06
Speaker
I want to repeat now and make a mistake.
00:17:08
Speaker
I don't want to say that average Americans didn't like him.
00:17:11
Speaker
I want to say that American
00:17:13
Speaker
institution in these times didn't like him.
00:17:18
Speaker
That's what I want to say.
00:17:19
Speaker
And I don't know, you probably, I'm not now, but maybe I should say my admiration for Dr. Seuss too, because his first book was published as a reversal textbook, because in that time in America, in the US, some crazy lobby one that was trying to teach kids to read books
00:17:46
Speaker
with non-phonetical ways, so they just remember the words as they were Chinese hieroglyphs.
00:17:53
Speaker
And so that's why in this cat in the hat, he's using, I think, 203 or 220 words.
00:18:01
Speaker
But what he did with that, he created songs, and this is subversive songs, and it's very mind-blowing.
00:18:09
Speaker
And that's why he was kicked out of the libraries, because
00:18:14
Speaker
librarians would say that, you know, what is that?
00:18:17
Speaker
Where are the moms?
00:18:18
Speaker
Where are actually moms?
00:18:19
Speaker
And why did she go away?
00:18:21
Speaker
You know, and who is this thing?
00:18:23
Speaker
It's one thing too.
00:18:25
Speaker
That sounds like really like not okay.
00:18:28
Speaker
And yeah, and so I think it's just was so brilliant that by being so
00:18:37
Speaker
amazingly beautiful and taking a route in very deep folk American culture.
00:18:45
Speaker
It can push it way through all the censorship that also exists there.
00:18:52
Speaker
And I hope our books will do the same.
00:18:54
Speaker
We still cannot find a publisher in English for what are kings.
00:19:02
Speaker
These books didn't publish.
00:19:03
Speaker
Also, pirates didn't publish.
00:19:05
Speaker
But the MIT book, Cities Made Differently, it was sold out.
00:19:10
Speaker
The whole copies were sold out in 20 days.
00:19:13
Speaker
So now it's a second round.
00:19:16
Speaker
So I just...
00:19:18
Speaker
And it's a quite expensive book to buy that I'm not happy with.
00:19:23
Speaker
But yeah, it looks like it's doing very well on the market.
00:19:27
Speaker
And in this case, market maybe will help us once in a while.
00:19:35
Speaker
It is fascinating to think about how subversive Dr. Seuss was in his own time and to think about the evolution of culture and our perspectives on childhood.
00:19:45
Speaker
You don't really see childhood as a place of
00:19:52
Speaker
exploration and subversion of topics.
00:19:54
Speaker
It's mostly fantastical or otherworldly.
00:19:57
Speaker
And I think that's where, you know, the anthropology for kids work really brings, it brings the joy, the exploration, the re-imagination space that kids have in droves to actual real world topics to ask kids to invent and reinvent institutions.
00:20:14
Speaker
Why do you think that publishers won't
00:20:18
Speaker
take on what are kings and won't publish a third round of the cities and everything else like that.
00:20:24
Speaker
Why is there such a lack?
00:20:27
Speaker
They didn't publish immediately the first round, but city made differently.
00:20:32
Speaker
They removed everything about kids.
00:20:34
Speaker
This is not a kid's book anymore.
00:20:36
Speaker
And it's not a Doodle book.
00:20:38
Speaker
It's just Cities Made Differently published by MIT.
00:20:42
Speaker
Thanks very much that they did it.
00:20:44
Speaker
And so they sold all the first run of the books and they immediately published another one.
00:20:52
Speaker
white publishers didn't publish children's books publishers.
00:20:55
Speaker
So my understanding, you have like a big mainstream publishers who just want to publish books about kittens and, you know, flowers and so on.
00:21:06
Speaker
And then you have a niche publishers.
00:21:08
Speaker
You do have them in the U.S. and an English-speaking world book about like gay rights and, you know, whatever.
00:21:14
Speaker
But it's never, it's never coming to the, like,
00:21:20
Speaker
We didn't want to do a niche books.
00:21:23
Speaker
David and I wanted to do books that will be for everyone, you know, like an anthropology is for everyone because the major attempt of anthropology is try to figure out how we similar to each other with keeping our differences.
00:21:40
Speaker
So it's not like the book for the leftist kids, you know, or for the right kids.
00:21:45
Speaker
It's, it's try to, it's try to make bridges.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's just such like a dirt, there's such a lack of actual substantive nonfiction material for children.
00:21:58
Speaker
It's a real fascinating topic that I wasn't expecting to get to unpack with you today.
00:22:03
Speaker
I wonder too, Nika, about just perspectives generally about education.
00:22:09
Speaker
I mean, David was quoted as saying, revolution happens when there's a transformation of common sense.
00:22:15
Speaker
And that, of course, we're all in this process of mutual creation together.
00:22:20
Speaker
I'm curious, too, about your own perspectives about the relationships between students, teachers, and schools, perhaps coming out of that anthropology for kids exploration.
Teaching Collaboration Over Competition
00:22:29
Speaker
What should learning in society look like in your mind?
00:22:34
Speaker
I just come back from Amsterdam where in the Central Library we did a workshop with kids about city of care, so build the city together.
00:22:43
Speaker
This was extremely interesting.
00:22:45
Speaker
The kids were from seven to 12 years old.
00:22:51
Speaker
But I would say each of them already had a formed political opinion.
00:22:57
Speaker
They didn't pronounce it, nobody asked them, but they did have.
00:23:01
Speaker
And I can give you an example of what was the topics to discuss between them.
00:23:08
Speaker
But another thing was very interesting that when I'm doing these workshops with kids, almost none of them had an experience of how to work together and how to make a...
00:23:20
Speaker
decisions together.
00:23:21
Speaker
This is like the first thing and then life happens.
00:23:24
Speaker
So when this workshop is generally started from
00:23:28
Speaker
Each kid is drawing from their own side of a pre-prepared big piece of paper.
00:23:35
Speaker
And then that's worked very well because everybody likes to draw their cows.
00:23:41
Speaker
So if it's a playground, something that they're going to play with.
00:23:44
Speaker
But then they have to go out, they have to do shopping, they need roads, and then they encounter other people and then they need to negotiate.
00:23:54
Speaker
other people on the same table, how they will build this social space together.
00:23:59
Speaker
And they don't know how to do that because in schools, in every institution, they trained how to compete, how to become better than others.
00:24:08
Speaker
But nobody's
00:24:10
Speaker
providing them with the space where they actually can do things with others.
00:24:16
Speaker
And that's like the major survival skills for every human being.
00:24:21
Speaker
That's what we should teach children and ourselves to do.
00:24:26
Speaker
Are there plans to bring City of... Is this the first time that you've done a City of Care with kids?
00:24:31
Speaker
Are there plans to bring this to a bigger audience outside of Amsterdam?
00:24:36
Speaker
No, I did it in many countries actually.
00:24:38
Speaker
You can see on the website and it was done in Iceland and in Berlin.
00:24:44
Speaker
But maybe so, it's always like an artistic project that I'm doing.
00:24:51
Speaker
And now what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to print these maps and find the partners who will just print them or download them from the website where I'm going to put them and do it themselves and start to do it on their own because this is, in a way, you can look at this as an educational technique that people are welcome to use.
00:25:16
Speaker
And it's still be great to find some organization or some group of people who will help to facilitate that and will be able to do it in their own communities.
00:25:25
Speaker
Because I absolutely convinced that this is a crucial knowledge.
00:25:31
Speaker
And it's also like a lot of fun.
00:25:33
Speaker
So kids love to do that, especially like I didn't do it in Amsterdam this time.
00:25:39
Speaker
It was a utopian city, the city of care.
00:25:43
Speaker
But generally what's working really well, if you put
00:25:46
Speaker
two tablecloths i call them one is dystopian and with the proposal to build a city that you don't want to leave and then another one is utopian and then this is like such an amazing relationship between these two groups of people kids and now the way how they react to to that and what is in their minds place that they don't want to be in
00:26:11
Speaker
and it's very interesting that in different countries it's always repeated two things so first the dystopian city is always poetic so kids start to invent all kind of like crazy things like vampires you know like it's it's all very much a poetry but utopian city is very practical they always try to solve practical problems they're like okay
00:26:36
Speaker
don't want to have hungry people where we're going to produce food what kind of food we're going to produce like these kids in amsterdam they will like really spend a lot of time negotiating between each other should we have farms with animals and they who will kill them or they will just become all vegetarian you know so that was like a big topic of discussion but they were like super practical like how do we deal with trash
00:27:02
Speaker
how we can deal with the migrants if they come, if they build such a great city.
00:27:07
Speaker
All these people come, so what are we going to do?
00:27:12
Speaker
The kids in Amsterdam are a multiracial city.
00:27:17
Speaker
They suddenly start to tell something that,
00:27:21
Speaker
We will let them stay for two years, but then they have to leave.
00:27:24
Speaker
That was one of the concepts.
00:27:26
Speaker
And I was like, oh, they invented temporary visas.
00:27:32
Speaker
So that was a lot of fun.
00:27:35
Speaker
That's great.
00:27:36
Speaker
And they essentially build these side by side.
00:27:38
Speaker
So just visually, you can get the sense of comparison and just kind of reflect on that together as they're going through it.
00:27:45
Speaker
Is that the process?
00:27:46
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:47
Speaker
So cool.
00:27:48
Speaker
How neat to watch.
00:27:49
Speaker
How long does it take them to go through that and collaborate and do that all together?
00:27:54
Speaker
What's the timeline?
00:27:54
Speaker
It depends on the kids, of course.
00:27:56
Speaker
But so because I did it in many different settings, like in Iceland, for example, we got a grant from Ministry of Culture.
00:28:05
Speaker
So my partner was an Icelandic artist and also quite famous rock star.
00:28:12
Speaker
So everybody knew him and he also knew how to control the crowds.
00:28:16
Speaker
So Icelandic government gave us a little plane.
00:28:20
Speaker
So we were like flying through these different villages, starting from Rikjavik and then in different places.
00:28:26
Speaker
And so it's an isolated places.
00:28:28
Speaker
Kids have nothing to do.
00:28:30
Speaker
So they make us to do like one workshop was with, I think, 200 kids.
00:28:36
Speaker
They just bring them from all different places together.
00:28:40
Speaker
So we put them in the different tables.
00:28:43
Speaker
And then while they were like drawing,
00:28:46
Speaker
the city that they want to leave, we ask them to move to the other people's table and then rearrange the rules.
00:28:58
Speaker
And that was also like really strange social exercise because, for example, one group of kids
00:29:06
Speaker
The boys immediately said that the woman would not have rights in this city.
00:29:13
Speaker
And Iceland is like a famous feminist place, you know, they have like a first female prime minister.
00:29:20
Speaker
And so the girls immediately said, oh, okay, so no kids.
00:29:25
Speaker
This is the border.
00:29:26
Speaker
This is a part of the town for the female.
00:29:28
Speaker
That's out of you live alone.
00:29:30
Speaker
but then uh we move them uh to another table and then somebody else came some other group and they were rearranging their rules i reflected on this other kids was saying so i it's it's many ways to do that and i think if it's hopefully will spread i mean other groups will invent their own rules how to how to arrange the social situation but it's also you have to think about physical part so kids
00:29:57
Speaker
Even as 12 years old, they don't want to stay in the same place more than an hour.
00:30:05
Speaker
So with a lot of trying out, I figured out that one hour is like the best time to spend.
00:30:13
Speaker
But then you can invite another group in the same place.
00:30:18
Speaker
sometime later or hour later and they can do it, you know.
00:30:22
Speaker
So that would be like the best.
00:30:26
Speaker
So ideally, I think, in my opinion, every school should have some place in the lobby or library where they have the special place where the kids can elaborate, fantasize, comment on the social places they build together.
00:30:43
Speaker
That will be super useful for the students, you know.
00:30:49
Speaker
and for the teachers, I think, for humans.
00:30:53
Speaker
That is so fascinating.
00:30:55
Speaker
We will have to have a sidebar conversation about the city of care because I'm so fascinated by this and bringing that to other places.
00:31:02
Speaker
And I think that's a great bridge to build into another thing that I was looking at.
00:31:07
Speaker
One of the exhibits that you have in the Museum of Care is about playgrounds.
Playgrounds as Public Art Projects
00:31:12
Speaker
And you say the playground is an amazing way that gathers the hopes and despair of today's society, perhaps much more than any other public art project.
00:31:21
Speaker
because it needs fewer resources to build and is immediately accessible to the public.
00:31:25
Speaker
And we had met a few weeks ago to talk about developing a playground project that seems aligned to this idea.
00:31:32
Speaker
So I guess as an artist in the scope of your work, where does your interest in playgrounds come from and where do you hope that project will lead?
00:31:38
Speaker
Is that related to the City of Care idea?
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, definitely because playground is such a... So ideally you want it to not to go to the school, the place for visual assembly.
00:31:49
Speaker
You want to build it in the middle of the playground because playground is like a desirable place.
00:31:55
Speaker
School is not always something where kids want to go.
00:32:01
Speaker
And yeah, I have a long interest in the playground.
00:32:03
Speaker
Also as a mom, many moms spent, or many parents spent hours and hours in the playground.
00:32:09
Speaker
And often they're annoyed about what they see and they want to rearrange it and fantasize about that.
00:32:14
Speaker
So of course, there is a whole theory that's slowly building up.
00:32:18
Speaker
And also recently, my friend, Joanna Warschau,
00:32:22
Speaker
did this big exhibition in Gropius Bau in Berlin that's called Radical Playground, where she invited artists from many different countries that did projects about playgrounds.
00:32:38
Speaker
So the exhibition was outside of the museum and for quite some time people were able to visit and use the exhibition.
00:32:45
Speaker
So this exhibition was suffering from the very specific problem
00:32:50
Speaker
It has too many people who want to visit it.
00:32:55
Speaker
I just was in New York and this exhibition called Luna Luna.
00:33:01
Speaker
It's an exhibition about a project in the 70s in Germany about construction of Lunafark, like an amusement park.
00:33:11
Speaker
uh and it's also has so many people so i think people i wanted to to build together to be part of something fun and collective and that's how we have hope to to solve most of our problems so yeah like playgrounds is um kind of a bigger longer term and like a dream project how to how to build up on top of all these experiences in uh um
00:33:40
Speaker
Yeah, this radical playground project, this exhibit looks so cool.
00:33:46
Speaker
And I think what I so appreciate about your perspective, and the one that you co-created with David as well through all of this is just like, again, that idea that this reimagination isn't, it is on the one hand, you know, serious academic, you know,
00:34:01
Speaker
There's a discourse and a dialogue happening there, but it's also playful, joyful, you know, collaborative, collective work of play and getting through this together.
00:34:12
Speaker
And I think the more that we can embrace those things in schools and public places, in places where kids and adults can
00:34:19
Speaker
congregate, collaborate, reflect together.
00:34:21
Speaker
So often those spaces are separated, right?
00:34:24
Speaker
Adults go on the one side and do serious adult work and kids are out on the playground playing.
00:34:29
Speaker
And very rarely do those spaces intersect.
00:34:31
Speaker
And it sounds like you're headed in a direction and a vision where it's like bringing those playful, imaginative spaces together.
00:34:38
Speaker
So looking ahead to the future, what
00:34:42
Speaker
What's next?
00:34:42
Speaker
I mean, we've talked about anthropology for kids, the museum of care, the city of care.
00:34:46
Speaker
Where do you imagine the next five years of Nika Dubrovsky going?
Future Projects and Real-world Change
00:34:52
Speaker
What's the next big thing?
00:34:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm doing the series of books.
00:34:58
Speaker
So the first book was City Made Differently and the second book will be Museums Made Differently.
00:35:03
Speaker
So a collection of the social situation.
00:35:08
Speaker
Museums is about collection where value created.
00:35:12
Speaker
Why do we find something valuable so it should go to a museum and something should go to a trash bin.
00:35:17
Speaker
And the third book is about Artists Made Differently.
00:35:22
Speaker
So it's about different ideas of what is human being.
00:35:26
Speaker
So artist as a business person, artist as an activist, artist as a philosopher or artist as a madman.
00:35:33
Speaker
That's a very common Western idea actually about artists.
00:35:38
Speaker
And then I'm working on a book with Michael Hudson.
00:35:44
Speaker
a very good friend of David about times made differently.
00:35:48
Speaker
So that's a fascinating project.
00:35:49
Speaker
So mostly I hope to write books, but I also hope to have partners who will help to organize the playground project, visual assembly project.
00:36:00
Speaker
So make my work not private, but more, you know, collective and in the real world.
00:36:06
Speaker
So, you know, change life of people to the best, hopefully.
00:36:11
Speaker
And if people wanted to reach out to help or get involved or learn more about any of the projects that we've been talking about, what would be like the best way for them to do that?
00:36:22
Speaker
So one of the things we are running is David Graber Institute, David Graber Institute website, where now actually a lot of volunteers are congregated.
00:36:34
Speaker
So we hope to
00:36:35
Speaker
yeah, to make this project collective.
00:36:38
Speaker
And then anthropology for kids, a4kids.org is mostly a site where the free resources about anthropology for kids series is distributed.
00:36:50
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Nika, for taking the time to chat with me today.
00:36:53
Speaker
Thank you very much for inviting me.
00:36:55
Speaker
Thank you.
00:36:58
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:37:02
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
00:37:05
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:37:10
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
00:37:16
Speaker
Thank you.