Kazakhstan Za Bez’iadernyi Mir: Sbornik Documentov I Materialov (Kazakhstan for a nuclear-free world: A collection of documents and materials), ed. Vladimir Shepel (Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2011), 64.
Kazakhstan Za Bez’iadernyi Mir, 65.
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule … It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 2007), 257.
Sergey Kalmykov, Guide to Sergey Kalmykov, trans. Alex Warburton et al. (ORTA Collective, 2022). On the first Kazakhstan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, see Inga Lāce, “ORTA’s ‘LAI-PI-CHU-PLEE-LAPA Centre for the New Genius,’” e-flux Criticism, June 10, 2022 →.
This is the date of the last underground explosion. The official closure date of the test site was August 29, 1991, when Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a decree.
All historical facts and evidence about the Semipalatinsk test site are taken from Togzhan Kassenova, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022); and Kazakhstan Za Bez’iadernyi Mir.
Kassenova, Atomic Steppe, 13.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 44.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 123.
From the author’s personal correspondence with ORTA members.
One of the main concepts behind ORTA’s work is that every person is possessed of genius, which can be awakened by Spectacular Experiments. As Rustem Begenov, ORTA’s cofounder and theater director, explains: “Kalmykov called himself a genius—and he was one. ‘Was’ as an active action, and not as a third-party assessment of his condition. Any person can do the same: call yourself a genius and be one. Claim. Decide. Practice. And do not compare yourself with anyone: genius is not an assessment of abilities. Genius is an absolute category from the Fourth Dimension: in this dimension there is no relativity, no dimensionality.” Cited in Arseny Zhilyaev and Rustem Begenov, “How Do You Transfer an Entire Country to the Fourth Dimension? This Is a Task,” Cosmic Bulletin, no. 3 (2022) →.
A reference to the particles of genius, “genions,” first identified by ORTA in its Venice Biennale project LAI-PI-CHU-PLEE-LAPA Centre for the New Genius. As Rustem Begenov explains: “Genions are the fundamental particles in the New Genius that are the manifestation of the Fourth Dimension in a person. Each person exists in the Fourth Dimension through their genions, and the Fourth Dimension exists in a person in the form of genions. The mechanism of the Manifestation of the Fourth Dimension in other known dimensions is not yet fully understood. But it is known that in some existing systems this mechanism manifests itself as ‘nonlocality,’ ‘singularity,’ or ‘magic.’ That is, genions are the particles that make up a genius.” Cited in Zhilyaev and Begenov, “How Do You Transfer an Entire Country?”
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. Edward Said problematizes this continuity between majority and minority, calling on European and American orientalists to stop “keeping pure” and finally discern the colonial politics that has shaped their knowledge and writing. Said discovers, in the Western “us”—supposedly superior to “Oriental backwardness”—the same operations of power as the East that been “orientalized.” Hence his demand to eliminate not only the “Orient” but also the “Occident.” Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Vintage Books, 1979), 13, 7, 28.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), 109, 108.
As Dilip Da Cunha explains, terra nullius is a legal term used by Europeans during the colonization of Australia and Africa, as well as when moving westward into North America. The people who lived in these areas were believed to be savages or nomads who had no concept of land ownership. “Terra nullius,” however, means not only “no-man’s-land” but also “land open to be shaped.” Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 1–17. On “translucent bodies” see Laporte, History of Shit, 82.
Kassenova, Atomic Steppe, 85.
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 109, 85.
Kalmykov, Guide to Sergey Kalmykov.
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 110.
The Theory of New Genius, directed Taisiya Krugovykh, 2021, 0:19:28. From ORTA’s archive.
Zhilyaev and Begenov, “How do you Transfer an Entire Country to the Fourth Dimension.”
Kalmykov, Guide to Sergey Kalmykov.
Sergey Kalmykov, “Laws of Composition,” Cosmic Bulletin, no. 3 (2022) →.
I thank Denis Shalaginov for his editorial input on this text, without which it would not have been published.
Translated from the Russian by Denis Shalaginov.