9 minute read
An Interview with Victoria Lomasko
Victoria Lomasko by Audra McNamee
Victoria Lomasko
Victoria Lomasko was born in Serpukhov, Russia in 1978, and graduated in 2003 from the Moscow State University of Printing Arts, where she majored in graphic art and book design. She works as a graphic artist and has lectured and written widely on graphic reportage. Lomasko draws on Russian traditions of reportage drawing (as practiced during the Siege of Leningrad, in the Gulag, and within the military). In her own graphic reportage work, Lomasko explores current Russian society, especially the inner workings of the country’s diverse communities and groups, such as Russian Orthodox believers, LGBT activists, migrant workers, sex workers, and collective farm workers. As a graphic reportage artist, she has collaborated with both the mass media and human rights organizations, and her work has been exhibited at numerous shows in Russia and abroad. Lomasko is the coauthor of the book Forbidden Art, which was nominated for the Kandinsky Prize in 2010. Her book, Other Russias is in its third printing from n+1, and she has written many additional works of graphic reportage documenting life in Russia and its neighboring countries. She is also an established curator of major international exhibitions, including The Feminist Pencil and Drawing the Court. Her work has been exhibited in numerous shows in Russia and abroad. As a volunteer for the Center for Prison Reform, Lomasko visited Mozhaysk Juvenile Prison and taught inmates to draw. She additionally taught drawing classes at girls’ penitentiaries in Novy Oskol and Ryazan, and the boy’s penitentiary in Aleskin. She lives in Moscow.
Interview with Victoria Lomasko
By Debhargya Sanyal, translated by Kit McDunn
https://jsma.uoregon.edu/VictoriaLomasko
Debarghya Sanyal: How did you begin your career in graphic reportage? Victoria Lomasko: After graduating from Moscow State University of Printing Arts specializing in book art, I worked for a few years as a commercial illustrator, studying the subjects and forms of modern art, which at that moment were fashionable in the Moscow art scene: semi-abstract painting and multimedia projects. As a creator I was deeply unsatisfied with what I was doing. Only when I began to write and include text in my work did I realize that I was moving in the right direction. The synthesis of text and image—this is what truly interests me. At the same time as I was discovering my format, I also found my subject: the shadowy, invisible sides of Russian society. For the local artistic community my stories about the life of socially vulnerable groups and my realistic style of portraying them appeared to be something entirely marginal. In Russia there were no artists like Joe Sacco; at that time, I myself didn’t know of his work, nor the work of other Western graphic journalists. My first success came from the book Forbidden Art, which I co-authored with Anton Nikolaev, and which was published in Russian, German and French. Then a series of my graphic reports from the 2012 Moscow protests appeared in the Western media and international exhibitions. Finally the book Other Russias, which was distributed by six publishers, including n+1 (New York) and Penguin (London), changed my situation and allowed me to work in the international scene.
DS: You have spoken about the need for a hybrid form of journalism that might address the problems with journalism specifically in Russia. What do you imply when you speak about a hybrid form of journalism? What do you think are the benefits of using comics and illustration as a form of documentation? How do comics address journalism’s issues? VL: When I reflected on hybrid forms of reporting in 2017, a small but active liberal part of Russian society had their own independent media and if I published in Russia, it was only in their media. Before us stood the task of broadening our audience; for instance, grabbing the attention of those who were interested in politics, but weren’t ready to read long journalistic texts about political trials, prisons, or rallies. In my opinion, it is obvious that today the majority of people read only short texts, and so a part of that information ought to be conveyed through images. Graphic reporting is perfectly suited to such a task.
Also, studying some subjects over a period of months, I made regular short publications on my social networks. Such a format worked especially well; for example, after regular posts in juvenile prisons some readers joined volunteer efforts. In 2021 political scientists assert that there is an established dictatorship in Russia, and I agree with this opinion. Many independent media groups have closed or have been declared foreign agents. New laws enable the discovery of evidence of crimes in practically any journalistic text, and in publications on social networks. An author can be fined, sent to jail, or declared a foreign agent. If I saw myself before as a participant in a political struggle, promoting oppositional views, then now I want to engage not in the journalistic, but the literary. I am using the poetic language of symbols and metaphor and I write a lot about my own personal perception of what is happening. At first such a change was a forced step under the pressure of circumstances, and then I realized that this step was long overdue. I much prefer to consider myself not a journalist, but a writer or even a poet. DS: What are the greatest challenges that you face as an artist doing the kind of work that you do? Are there specific aspects of your process which you enjoy most, or any which you wish to improve/develop upon? VL: To do work on contemporary Russian society, broaching certain social subjects while physically located in Russia is, of course, a challenge. But it is an important challenge, in specific situations in a specific country, to see universal stories. For instance, I am interested in individual transformations against the background of events which can be called “dramatic,” in the changing of generations that is reminiscent of the changing of the seasons. Speaking in a narrowly professional context, I want to work on the format of an art book. In Other Russias the text and images are connected very freely, and the drawings are able to be shown like a separate graphic series without text. In my new work I am interested in thinking about compositions in which text and image are inextricably joined.
DS: While revealing political struggles, your work also reveals the diversity of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Were there any particular revelations for you that stand out through your travels? Were there places or people that surprised you? VL: Trips through post-Soviet space showed me how heterogeneous the “Soviet reality” was in fact. It seems that each of the fifteen Soviet republics had their own version of the Soviet Union and their own relationships with the Kremlin. For example, in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic the Georgian language remained the state language; the Georgians defended their churches and their right to be religious; a rally for Georgian independence was held as early as 1989. And Belarus is still totally dependent on Russia, and their peaceful revolution of 2020 was defeated. During trips to Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, and the North Caucasus I drew typical everyday life and only in Belarus did I document a revolution and, one might say, took some part in it. I saw how many cultural figures—artists, journalists, sociologists, researchers—were the instigators of the protest, but after its crushing defeat almost all of them emigrated and began to earn money in exile with their protest materials. And I know that I would do the same. At the same time ordinary participants remained shut out of the country, many ended up in prisons and survived torture. When I see such a situation, I don’t want to create any more agitation. DS: How do you hope that readers in Russia read your work? How do you hope readers in the U.S. read your work? Furthermore, how do you approach, or even respond to, the different reader sensibilities in Russia and the U.S.? How do you hope readers in each nation will read your work? VL: I think that a Russian audience will read my work in the English translation. To publish and show off my work—this is the task of publishers, and museum and gallery curators. Because of the pandemic I have already been stuck in Russia for a year and a half, but during all that time there was only one tiny order for illustrations from a Russian institution. In the beginning I made my work just for a Russian audience, including in it a multitude of details that were incomprehensible to people of other cultures. Now I try to tell stories that can be understood by a reader from any country, and so that they can arouse the interest of those who are not interested in Russia. For instance, I can use a specific rally in support of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in order to show what different choices are made by the participants of one of these events, so that readers from some wealthy country can ask themselves the question: “And how would I act in such a dramatic situation?”
DS: What is your greatest goal for your work? How do you hope your reporting will change or affect your readers? And what do you believe should be some of the most essential goals of comics journalism? VL: My goal is to perceive everything that is happening around me sensitively and to the maximum and to consciously and maximally describe it. DS: What story would you most like to document in the future?
VL: I am going to continue working on my new book, The Last Soviet Artist, until the end of the year. The first part of the book, which includes reporting on the post-Soviet space, is already done, but the second part, in which I describe various events in Moscow, is a work in progress. In the second part I am combining the reportage sketches with symbolic compositions that are reminiscent of murals that I was making before the pandemic. For me now the more important question by far is not “What am I going to depict?”, but “How am I going to depict it?” DS: What advice would you give an aspiring journalist? VL: I know a lot of artists who paint like virtuosos, who make masterful sketches from real life, but can’t tell a story simply and absorbingly. Most often in graphic reporting and in documentary comics, it is the text that suffers; the artist never becomes a journalist. Some have insufficiently studied the subject about which they write, and have not collected enough material. Others are not careful or respectful enough when they work with vulnerable groups. Still others write too briefly or vaguely from a lack of confidence in their literary style. Therefore it makes sense to study journalistic literature, maybe even to take a short journalism course and to work for some time in a pair or on a team with regular journalists. All this at the initial stage will discipline the artist and give confidence in their work.
