Finding an answer to the question «who we are» is a way to feel your freedom and significance in the overall picture of the world. The Local Stories Historical Festival suggests we begin this search from May 14 to 16.

— In today's humanitarian space, there is obviously a lot of interest focused on local history: in many regions you can find projects and initiatives related to studies and popularisation of everything local. The work on comprehending local historical experience is a tool of self-identification, a way to define oneself, one's uniqueness in the big world. The focus of the new project is the life of local communities and the individual in all its diversity.

Cultural programme 

The programme is dedicated to the intellectual and artistic understanding of the phenomenon of locality and will consist of exhibitions, plays, performances, livestreams, podcasts and presentations.

Among the events of the Festival's cultural programme:

• Interactive performance «1000 years together» (Yekaterinburg) — presents the results of an experiment in which participants collected and processed interviews of Krasnoyarsk residents in February 2020. 

• Recording of the podcast «Is Russia, too» by anthropologist Dmitry Oparin and journalist Maria Semendyaeva (Moscow). The audience will have a conversation about what Russia is made of: about our cultural heritage, which we do not always notice, about the values around us that we must learn to appreciate.

• Premiere of an audio promenade livestream «Pascal-second per meter of Ploschad Mira» that explores the site-specificity of the Museum Centre, and its interaction with the city space through sound. 

• «Culture of Quarantine» (Yaroslavl) — a witty stream about local entrepreneurship and conversations with representatives of regional cultural institutions, organised jointly with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. 

• Project of a poet Andrei Rodionov, within which contemporary Russian poets will read their poems about the local.

  
  

Scientific conference

Here the participants will discuss the theoretical framework of regional studies, the issue of correlating local history as an actual scientific historical knowledge and local history as a part of the historiographic tradition and a form of mass consciousness.

Among the speakers are experts and professors from Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow), Moscow State University (Moscow), South Ural State University, SFedU (Rostov-on-Don) and others.​​​