Nicole Garneau

#500Solidarity: A Series of Activist Performances in Solidarity with Yulia Tsvetkova, 2019-2021

How #500Solidarity Started, and How it has Evolved

by Nicole Garneau

In November 2019, I met Yulia Tsvetkova when we both showed work at a feminist art/theater festival in St. Petersburg, Russia. When Yulia returned to her home in Komsomolsk-on-Amur (far Eastern Russia), she was arrested for distribution of pornography and LGBT propaganda based on her visual art and theater work. She was placed under house arrest. In January 2020, her mother Anna made a Facebook post in which she photographed places in their neighborhood. She wrote that Yulia had been granted permission to travel 500 meters from their apartment for one hour each day, so she was out doing research to understand what the boundaries of 500 meters were. Yulia needed winter boots: which shoe stores were within that distance? Which dentist, who might fix Yulia’s toothache?

At that time I had been invited to lead 2 intensive weekend workshops in Russia on arts activism. Since I had just published a book entitled Performing Revolutionary: Arts, Action, Activism, I decided to build a curriculum from the content of the book. I translated 60 “Revolutionary Practices” into Russian, printed them, and posted them up on the wall. Workshop participants made new actions that were inspired by Revolutionary Practices of their choice.

The workshop participants were in Samara and Tolyatti, cities that are about 1,100 miles from St. Petersburg, and 4,800 miles from where Yulia Tsvetkova lives, but they all knew about the case. Many people who showed up for these workshops were already activists doing work around feminism and LGBT rights. We were learning about arts activism in a context in which we were getting daily news about a young person facing 2-6 years in prison for arts activism. The risks were extremely clear, and as a non-Russian citizen one of my main concerns was that no Russians get in trouble for activities in the workshop. We kept it mostly inside, but we did venture out in public.

Before lunch on Saturday of the first workshop, I made an invitation: put on all our winter gear, go outside, and walk for 500 meters from the door of our space, holding hands. I called it a demonstration of Revolutionary Practice #37: Make the road by walking. // Проложить дорогу пешком. We would not chant or hold signs. We would not go into public spaces for which we would need a permit to demonstrate. We made a safety plan. We consulted with a Russian lawyer. The lawyer went with us. We took our walk, and I documented it on my phone, and then we did the most important thing: we made a video of us sending love to Yulia and her mother.

I uploaded the video and sent a link to Yulia and her mother, and they received it as it was intended: as a message of solidarity and support. So I thought it was worth trying again during the second weekend workshop, in a different Russian city. I documented it better the second time.

I never thought of the solidarity walk as a way to affect the levers of power in Russia. No one from the Russian secret service cares about people taking walks in solidarity with Yulia. The purpose of the walks was always, and still is, to communicate to Yulia and her mother that people around the world care about them and support them. The worst thing that could happen in this case would be for Yulia and her mother to give up hope. They are very geographically isolated, and police in their city have intimidated so many people with their investigation that Yulia has said that she can count on one hand the number of people in her city who will speak to her. That 500-meter walk was a struggle for Yulia on many days this winter.

Yulia’s house arrest ended on March 16, 2020, just in time for COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. A week later, BBC Russia interviewed Yulia for a cheeky story with the headline: “How not to go crazy in quarantine: tips from people who survived house arrest.” Neither Yulia nor her mother have traveled much further away from home since then, as they await Yulia’s trial in July.

The Solidarity Walks felt like a collaboration—mainly between Yulia’s mother Anna and myself. Anna and I are the same age. She is Yulia’s lifeline and main support, and I am happy to be in touch with her about art and Yulia’s case and our mutual love of homemade costumes. Both Anna and Yulia are WILDLY creative and resourceful. I wish her daughter had not been targeted and arrested, but I am grateful for what feels like a friendship with a fellow creative person.

In February 2020, Yulia and her mother held a public event on the anniversary of “The Color of Saffron” social-justice festival that had been censored the year before. People gathered in a community center in Komsomolsk-on-Amur to watch and discuss video performances and interviews projected onto the wall. Yulia called in via Skype, and gave a talk about several cases of activists being persecuted in Russia. They also showed video I sent them of the two Solidarity Walks that had happened in Russia, and people there discussed this kind of art activism. I watched it via Facebook Live. Yulia’s mother reported that people were pleasantly surprised and intrigued by this form of activism.

After that video was shown in Russia, Anna set up a Skype call between me, her, and some of her young theater students who are also learning English. The young people interviewed me about my art and activism, and I explained in the simplest terms I could. After our conversation, they wrote and performed a scene in which they imagined what it would be like to be an artist working in public, encountering folks who are curious about what’s happening. They sent me a delightful video of the skit that had been inspired by our talk.

I left Russia in mid-February and headed to Berlin, where I planned to see art and friends, and perform at Colin Self’s show Clump. Yulia and her mother maintained that they wanted as much publicity as possible about this case, so I proposed to Colin that we do a Solidarity Walk in Berlin at the club where the show was taking place. At the end of the first act, I projected a slide about Yulia’s case on the wall, gave folks the headlines, and invited people in the club to take a 500-meter walk during the intermission. I had scoped out a route I thought would be conducive ahead of time. The Solidarity Walk in Berlin took place around 11pm, and included about 30 people holding hands.

For me this kind of activism feels right when it is combined with action that actually does affect the levers of power. So while I was in Berlin I got a meeting with the head of the Action Committee for Artists Rights (ACAR) of the International Theater Institute (part of UNESCO) and a local journalist, hoping to get them to work the international human rights levers to which they had access. I also started to build the website freetsvet.net which would provide resources in English and Russian and be a place I could send folks to get more info about Yulia’s case.

In Copenhagen, I used the occasion of a costume party to dress up as Judy Chicago and in that role, I handed out flyers that talked about Yulia’s case, illustrated with her drawing and one of Judy’s. I talked to folks at the party one by one about the case.

In London, I had been invited to perform at the event “Come Hell or High Water,” which takes place once a month at low tide on the foreshore of the Thames River. This was March 15, and anxiety about COVID-19 was already in full force. We decided that since the performances were outside, they would go on. I had proposed another Solidarity Walk, and it turns out that the distance from where the audience met at 3 Colt Gallery to the foreshore where the rest of the performances would take place was about 500 meters, so the walk was a natural part of the whole event. We gathered on the street, I told people about Yulia’s case, and we walked together to the foreshore of the Thames. But instead of holding hands, Anne Bean provided a roll of yellow caution tape to hold, which caught in the wind beautifully and created an unexpected visual element.

Through it all I kept sending photos and videos to Yulia and her mother, and they kept receiving them with the spirit of care and solidarity with which they were intended. The Solidarity Walks gave me an excuse to spread the word about Yulia’s case in my own words, with my own passion, which is a very good way to get people to care about a thing. The morning after the Solidarity Walk in London, Yulia’s house arrest order was lifted.

It’s hard to get Americans (or anyone) to care about a young artist a million miles away in a nation that many Americans still treat as the enemy. But if there’s one thing I can do, it’s collective activist art projects in which people participate in different ways from different places, and which accumulate into one big thing. Folks who know my work know that I love art that includes numbers and wildly ambitious goals!

In November 2022, after 3 years of judicial torture, Yulia Tsvetkova was acquitted, and she and her mother escaped Russia.