Theme: Communities

We asked people from different professional fields and of various interests to share their ideas for new agenda in Russian society.

St. Petersburg
Russia

Pavel Arsenyev

Pavel Arsenyev is a young poet, critic, researcher of soviet avant-garde, chief editor of Translit almanac, an activist of Street University.

Marina Gisich

Marina Gisich is the founder and curator of the most acknowledged galleries of contemporary art in St. Petersburg and Russia. It was one of a small number of pioneering galleries in the Saint-Petersburg, Russia to champion a generation of artists who were transforming the way art was made and presented, focusing on the idea or concept behind an artwork over expressive or descriptive aims. These artists – including Kerim Ragimov, Vladimir Kustov, Evgenij Yufit, Marina Alexeeva, Petr Beliy, Vitaliy Pushnizkij, Olga Tobreluts, Alya Esipovich, Sasha Chernogrivov - represented not a style but an attitude, an ethos concerning art's place in a wider intellectual, cultural and social context. Today Marina Gisich Gallery in collaboration with best russian curators supports young artists – Valeria Matveeva-Nibiru, Anya Zholud, Andrey Gorbunov. From its beginnings, Marina Gisich Gallery has been located in Fontanka embank near Sennaya square and Yusupovskij garden, close to old city center but also part of a dynamic and diverse local neighbourhood. It operates as a commercial gallery, its key objectives being to further its artists' careers by supporting the production, presentation and sale of their work.

Mikhail Gelfand

Mikhail Gelfand graduated from the Moscow State University with a degree in mathematics, and since then worked in various fields of bioinformatics and molecular evolution, such as gene recognition, comparative genomics, evolution of regulatory systems etc. Currently he is studying co-evolution of transcription factors and their recognition sites, evolution of alternative splicing, and microevolution of bacterial genomes on the strain level. Mikhail Gelfand is vice-director for science of the Institute for Information Transmisison Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences and professor at the Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinfrormatics of the Moscow State University. He was awarded A.A.Baev prize of the Russian Academy of Science for his work in bioinformatics (2007, with Andrey Mironov) and elected to Academia Europaea (2010).

Jenia Lubich

Jenia Lubich, a Russian indie pop singer-songwriter, coming from St. Petersburg. The turning point in her artistic life was her meeting with French producer Marc Collin, who suggested her to come to Paris and make a recording for the third and fouth albums of Nouvelle Vague "NV3" and "les couleurs sur Paris". Jenia's voice can be heard in "Marooned" , "Aussi Belle q'une Balle" and "La Crise economique". In 2008 JENIA recorded an aria of Violetta "Addio del passato bei sogni ridenti" from Verdi's "Traviata" for the "Private Domain" project by Iko and Marc Collin, held by Naïve Music. In 2009 JENIA presented her songs, accompanied by piano and guitar in Paris, at Le Reservoir music club and later on toured with Nouvelle Vague in France, Belgium and Canada, Switzerland, Turkey and Finland. And In 2009 she participated in Nouvelle Vague's "French tour", which had started in the famous Olympia concert hall in Paris. At the same time Jenia Lubich developed her own project, which she had started with the recording of her own album in Paris with Marc Collin as a soundproducer. It was previewed by her five-song EP "Russian Girl" in 2010 and in 2011 she had released her first solo-album in Russia. Called "C'est la vie," the CD was recorded at Kwaidan Records in Paris with French musicians and contains 11 songs that she wrote in Russian, French and English.

Natalya Slusar

Natalya Slusar is a theoretical and experimental linguist. She works at Utrecht University (UiL OTS) and at St.Petersburg State University (Department of General Linguistics and Laboratory for Cognitive Studies), doing theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. Her main areas of interest are word order alternations (syntax and processing), Information Structure, especially formal approaches to it, syntax-prosody relations, so-called EPP in the Tense domain, some aspects of inflectional morphology, Russian syntax and Russian verbs. Together with my husband Daniel Lourie I have a passion for pre-revolutionary Russian and Soviet antiques. The most notable outcome of this passion is Daniel’s collection of Soviet tin boxes: about 400 boxes from tea, coffee, candies, cosmetics and many other things made in 1920s-1970s.

Gleb Kalinin

Bloger, journalist, designer, owner of Raum 7 agency and startup LOCOLO

Aleksandr Sekatsky

Aleksandr Sekatsky is Russian famous philosopher and writer.

Homemusic

Live music project

Nikolay Vyahhi

Nikolay Viahhi is working in the Pavel Pevzner's Algorithmic Biology Lab in St. Petersburg, Russia. He is developing cool algorithms & software for genome assembly. Currenlty they challenge bacterial single-cell next-generation sequencing data with highly non-uniform coverage. The software is released to open-source in April 2012 and continues to improve.

Sergey Ilupin

LGBT Activist

Val Jerdes

Val has over 15 years experience in finance and entrepreneurship in the US and Russia. He worked at Apple Computer on the Newton product, the Advanced Tech Group at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, and subsequently co-founded three successful start-ups in Silicon Valley. He has worked and advised in Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry, and sits on the board of numerous companies, including ThinkWave. In Russia he has worked in Private Equity as well as for the government innovation program. Val received a B.A. at Pomona (California), M.A. at Stanford University and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, UK.