Druzhba
LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Draugystės projektas; Naftotiekis; Druzhba project; Oil pipeline.
ENThe Druzhba Project performs psycho-geographic readings - fictional journeys - into Druzhba, the world’s longest crude oil pipeline, a web of lines stretching four thousand kilometres from Siberia, through the Baltic states, into Eastern and Central Europe (27-29). Druzhba, or "friendship" in Russian, is a master signifier, a grand-narrating, imperial structure meant at its inception in 1960 to "lead the world into a new dawn". It is an immense machinery of infrastructure and capital, ideology and sentiments, labor and leisure, meant to tie together in friendship regions under immense political pressure and mutual suspicion, from the Cold War to the present day. This pressure twists and distorts the path of Druzhba. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly founded companies of the former Eastern bloc, now backed by American capital, began to use their old networks of influence and steal into the oil-rich fields of Siberia and the Urals. The privatization of the pipeline infrastructure was seen to be a symbolic gesture indicative of the new liberal democratic-oriented political direction. Power and colonization had moved from one compass point to another: the shoe was on the other foot... But underneath all of this grand narrative and maneuvering, what is Druzhba? A network of cultural, political, geographic, machinie tropes - it is a reel as much as a pipeline; a string of images and memories and symbols; a technology of actor-network theory; a system of eponymous places and things that carry this invocational name of Druzhba, spanning the gamut of human enterprise from an ensemble of performers or spreadable cheeses, to a series of Sanatoriums or plastic figures, to sport clubs, cinema theaters, or automobiles. When one follows the Druzhba, one finds oneself in Druzhba, at Druzhba, meeting Druzhba. [...]. [Extract, p. 44-45]
