Closing Event Featuring a Reading with Irina Rastorgueva and Exhibition Tour
While, within Russia, the banning of critical media and the homogenization of state-controlled broadcasters produce an almost caricature-like narrative about traditional values and the necessity of the “Special Military Operation,” carefully planned actions in the rest of the world work to destabilize democratic societies.
Putin’s propaganda machine generates a toxic amalgam of religious, pseudoscientific, and nationalist ideas, drawing on esotericism and a language built on neologisms—and, through the visual culture of social media, it no longer targets only the intellect, but unapologetically appeals to emotions and the basest instincts.
With an unmistakable voice—precise as well as ironic—Irina Rastorgueva reveals, in a montage of newspaper clippings and independent reports, of personal experience as well as analyses by Kremlin-critical and pro-Russian authors and media, how Russian propaganda functions as a means of self-poisoning an entire country.
Irina Rastorgueva, born in 1983 in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, studied philology at Sakhalin State University and worked as a cultural journalist for several Russian magazines and radio stations. Since 2017 she has lived in Berlin as a freelance writer and graphic artist; she writes, among others, for the Berliner Zeitung, FAZ, NZZ, and the journal Osteuropa. In 2022, her book Das Russlandsimulakrum was published. For Pop-up Propaganda, she received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the nonfiction category this year.
