The film will be screened as part of the conference Experiencing the Museum. After Inclusion. Utopias and New Scenarios.
Emanuel Almborg’s picture explores the history of the Zagorsk experiment, an educational project implemented at a boarding school for deafblind children located in Zagorsk (now Sergiev Posad) outside Moscow.
A female pupil of one of the leaders of the experiment, Ivan Sokolyansky, became the world’s first deafblind scholar: from 1948, Olga Skorokhodova, a defectologist and a candidate of pedagogical sciences, worked as a researcher (later, as a senior research fellow) at the Russian Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.
Aimed at proving the learning ability of deafblind people and the possibility for them to complete a higher education program, an important role in the Zagorsk experiment belonged to the ideological component, the Marxist-Leninist dialectics, an adept of which was the outstanding Soviet thinker Evald Ilyenkov and according to which the development of the psyche and thinking is determined by physical labor. “Personality not only exists but is also born for the first time precisely as a ’knot‘ tied in a network of mutual relations arising between individuals in the process of collective activity (labor) in relation to things already created and being created by labor,” wrote Ilyenkov. The participants in the experiment were four pupils of the boarding school, who were later enrolled in Moscow State University’s Faculty of Psychology and successfully completed their studies.
The film combines archival footage from the late 1960s and early 1970s, documenting the education and life of boarding school students, while weaving Evald Ilyenkov’s ideas like a red thread throughout the narrative. The viewer also meets Alexander Suvorov, a boarding school graduate and participant in the experiment, whose interview frames and ties the picture into a single whole.
Talking Hands
Dir. Emanuel Almborg
Sweden, 2016. 48 min. 12+