Creative Activism in Soviet Wave Community Ghosts of a Dreamed Future

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the images of the soviet wave musical genre from the aesthetic function of nostalgia as a result of the temporal rupture that the fall of the former Soviet Union and other related disasters such as Chernobyl meant. To this end, the article studies the aesthetic function of nostalgia as a creative artistic and cultural project that ultimately manages to develop an aesthetic sensibility, but which implies a political anti-activism, since it does not restore the old political, artistic, economic and social forms, nor does it produce new active forms of sensibility. The images and lyrics of the soviet wave genre project a nostalgic sensibility that keeps them within a mercantile logic or one of social failure. Consequently, nostalgia cannot generate political activism because it refers to inactivity, rather than action. The article is divided into two parts. The first part studies the temporal resizing after the fall of the former Soviet Union and the Chernobyl disaster as triggering events to propose that the soviet wave establishes three aesthetic categories based on the new temporal perception: melancholy, nostalgia and “retro”. The second part studies the nostalgic or “retro” images produced by the new technological devices that shape the soviet wave aesthetic, based on a multimodal analysis of the construction of meaning in the image. In conclusion, it is possible to postulate that the soviet wave functions as an exposition of the crisis of social democracy and current capitalism in its neoliberal version by means of technical devices and forms of visual organization that recall the seventies and eighties.