Saturday February 22 at 11:00 am, carte blanche for Pavel Arsenev.

Pavel Arsenev, born in 1986 in Leningrad (USSR), is a poet, artist and theorist.

He currently lives in Marseille, where he is one of the bearers of the independent literary magazine [Translit], which brings together texts (both reflective and creative) by authors and activists who have fled post-Soviet countries. This magazine, which he directed in St. Petersburg from 2006, was one of the few literary journals in Russia devoted to political and aesthetic dissidence. In 2012, he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in the “literary projects” category.

His poetic texts have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, Roman and Hebrew, and published in collections, magazines and artists’ journals.
As a textual artist, he works on the graphic aspects and materialization of poetic text, creating textographic videos, textual objects and installations, and poetic readings-performances.

After preparing his doctoral thesis on ‘littérature du fait’ at the University of Geneva (defended in 2021, a book based on this work has just been published), he was welcomed to France as a researcher thanks to the PAUSE Program at the Collège de France. He currently teaches at the Sorbonne on the material history of the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes through the prism of questions of medium.

Books published :

– Things that don’t fit in your head (AnnaNova, St.-Petersburg, 2005),

– Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Kraft, Moscow, St.Petersburg, 2011)
– Spasm of accomodation (Commune editions, Berkeley, 2017)
– Reported speech (Cicada Press, New York, 2018)
– Lo spasmo di alloggio (Arcipelago Itaca Edizioni, Bologna, 2021).
– Russo lingua non materna (Seri Editore, Macerata, 2024).
– Le russe comme non maternelle (Vanloo éditions/CIPM, Aix-en-Provemce , 2021).