Conversation

Not an hour after those conversations, Strelka Director Benjamin Bratton emailed all of us faculty to let us know they'd decided to suspend all programming indefinitely. I was glad that they had made the right decision. The suspension was announced officially on that Monday.
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I'd done my due diligence on Strelka in the past, they were founded and funded by a Russian billionaire banker, Alexander Mamut, along with a media guy, Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, and another Ukrainian billionaire telecoms guy, Sergey Adonyev.
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Strelka Institute is, in one sense, an org that demonstrates Russian soft power to a global audience, and, like other design oriented institutions - Goethe, Canadian Centre for Architecture, The Graham Foundation - they do real research work that the state also benefits from.
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This work, as I see it, is a way to leverage state power and private funding to speculate about possibilities that are, especially in Strelka's case, literally and explicitly extra-state and even post-state or anti-state.
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There aren't many other places out there that host conversations about design at the planetary scale and beyond. And while I'm not un-complicit, I see that as a legit use of the platform.
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Strelka's work is a net good, and suspending their programming was a difficult, and correct, decision on the part of Bratton and others. I hope the war ends with Russia's loss, reparations, and the resumption of conversations about worlds, at Strelka, in Ukraine, and elsewhere.
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Replying to
It may be worth noting at this point that instead of being seen as some Goethe institute broadcasting Russia to the world, by the end the whole Institute was seen as a potentially negative source of foreign ideas and influence, which was quite perilous position.
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