The InVersiya Poetry Festival: The Creativity of Communication and Collective Authorship

Abstract

This article analyses three projects created within the framework of the Chelyabinsk poetic laboratory festival InVersiya (photograph album Developer, calendar Dogs and Baobabs, and the film Walking Man) in the aspect of the features of modern media poetry in its regional refraction. Poetry festivals are characterised by a combination of experimentation and accessibility to the public, the subordination of individual poetic ideas to the general conceptual framework of the project, and quite often the dominance of creativity over artistry, performativity, and procedurality. The InVersiya festival is a part of the Ural poetic movement, which is quite developed today. The author concludes that the Ural authors are open to interaction with poets and artists from other cities and countries, overcoming the complex of “provinciality”, fitting into the all-Russian poetic context. The analysis of the projects the author refers to demonstrates the dominance of the communicative function of poetry and the importance of the pragmatics of the poetic text. The article examines specific methods of interaction between verbal and visual components, revealing strategies of collective authorship. According to the author, among the “Ural” poetic traditions proper, one can name the preservation of the dual addressing of works (elitist and mass), the implicit presence of the gender and environmental components of the figurative range, and a drive towards experiment.