Artist Talk with Emanuel Almborg

Public Event: Artist Talk with Emanuel Almborg / Screening of the film "Talking Hands" (2016)

Talking Hands/Говорящие руки (48 min, 2016) is a film about the 1960s Zagorsk School for deaf-blind children outside Moscow and its “cultural-historical” pedagogy.  The school was established by Marxist philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who, in contention with dominant Soviet ideology, began developing ideas of how human consciousness is socially and spatially constituted, arguing that it emerges in relation to material culture, objects, tools and other people. The film includes 16mm archival footage which documents the teaching and activities around the Zagorsk School in the late 60s to early 70s. Its filmmaker and exact date is unknown; the only information attached to the reels when Almborg found them in the archives in Moscow was the title “Talking Hands”.

Emanuel Almborg is an artist based in Stockholm and London. His practice is primarily moving image-based and has developed through an engagement with pedagogy, developmental psychology and drama. His films often draw on research into the history of schools and institutions that grapple with relations between theory and practice. He finished a PhD at The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm (KKH), 2021, with the dissertation; Towards a Pedagogy of the Utopian Image.