#BUIDL Week Fireside Interview with Nadya Tolokonnikova, Founder of Pussy Riot

well i guess i'm always questioning um every possible status quo and every privilege that i see in front of me every stereotype or trope that exists in culture cultural paradigms um that's that's my job as an artist and i feel actually that artists are not some magic god like individuals given by gods to create i do not believe in this genius romantic model of art i believe that artists are workers they're cultural workers and they're their goal is to exam examine right this word examine um cultural um norms and paradigms and see what can be done better and criticize what doesn't work um market i really love making fun of things that don't actually work um yeah um i definitely do not do a lot of physical stuff but um my recent uh my recent artwork which was um nft youth was called drink my blood it had a physical component to that so it was an nft uh it was also my prison paper um that was given to me upon my release from jail and i spilled my own blood on on top of this prison paper to express pain that i experienced i was in jail and also i made a vial with my own blood um that uh i'm sending to my collectors who is blizzard yay for pleaser dao and blood for pleaser now um your sentencing papers were like which is super insatiable because i'm also in blizzard though um emily wait so your sentencing papers were like over a thousand pages right sentencing papers no i think it was like 45 pages or something so i mean my previous artwork uh that blizzard also bought was virgin mary please become a feminist and i drew virgin mary in the shape of vagina which is like you know if you really take a look at uh like without what happens in churches it like for the most part it already has shape of vagina so i guess just for making it obvious i'm being accused of blasphemy and just have a lot of criminal cases on me in my home country well i'm glad you're in the u.s now for today just today i mean i'm pneumatic and also geographically anonymous so like whenever people ask me where i'm based or where i'm at like if it doesn't matter if it if it doesn't affect the conversation so like most of conversations that can be held without mentioning where the person is right yeah well i think that's increasingly true um so you start talking about some of your nft projects i know you also had a project that i think raised quite a bit of eat for domestic abuse victims um is there anything you want to say about just other nft or dao or cryptos or cryptocurrency project that you've been involved with over the past couple years because i know you've even just for like payments because you guys would have your bank accounts frozen crypto is really useful that's right that's how we started to explore um cryptid first besides drugs and then um well we're building right now something that's called [ __ ] verse um which is an organization of um that actually has a lot of prominent individuals including people blizzard who is going to come here on stage later and people like jen stark and blake catherine and um alex charles and betty from that fellas lyranna and like pretty much every um strong female artist you can name they're all came together in this organization to make sure that um female and lgbtq plus created um artworks are not undervalued because that's the case right now in slam um yeah we want to be more we want to be represented better and also we're collaborating with a bunch of other dows like her story dao um blizzard flamingodo tribute helps us to set up the whole thing so it's gonna be really um it's gonna be really i guess influential i hope so uh because when you just put a lot of whales and influential artists in the room it really can define what the future of nfts will look like and the future of nfts is going to be female [Applause] so with nfts or dows or crypto uh in general are there like new kinds of possibilities that you feel like are opened up like it seems like artistically financially and maybe like organizationally there's some new things but what has you most excited um i'm excited about crypto because it provides you tools to build um sustainable and scalable anarchy that's how i define it so meaning that you don't have to rely on centralized systems in order to redistribute goods which is a big big thing for me and someone who actually kind of from soviet union in 1989 so i witnessed a lot of problems that soviet union and centralized economy created i'm in solidarity with a lot of um a lot of goals of redistribution and making people feel more comfortable and more just yeah more comfortable in society and feeling supported feeling like they they have someone something uh to rely on so i'm i'm definitely in tune with that but also at the same time i always have problems with uh centralized models to um to to make it work because i saw it didn't work so i guess that's why i'm really excited about uh thousand blockchain in general is a tool for that definitely fundraising is um is a big big um big thing um and yeah you mentioned we raised um quite a bit of money for this organization um that helps women who suffered from domestic violence in one of regions of russia that i can't even name because it's too dangerous and uh there it's it's somewhere around chechnya and they could probably heard about chechnya from this documentary welcome to chechnya done by hbo it's a place where people are being abused for just being different uh and um i feel like this is a with using blockchain um it helps you to reach really global community a and b i mean like this ecosystem definitely has a lot of money and also a lot of people who really honestly genuinely want to build better future which is the best combination for um for for activism and i really believe that over the next few years we're going to be seeing more people who are showing off their wealth with helping other people rather than going to strip clubs and um renting like buying really expensive tables which is uh i mean i don't know like i i love i love strip clubs um i just like i would rather uh spend one hundred thousand dollars on charity than on a bottle of expensive vodka um yeah i think just methods of showing up should be a little bit different cool well you might have just touched on some of them but you've you've talked about part of the reason you wanted to get involved in crypto was to help kind of drive its evolution um so yeah what are some things that you'd like to change i mean one is there are a lot of people that look like you look just fine like i like trippy style a little bit more but um no i mean i know what you're talking about um so historically unfortunately women were told that we are not technical that we are supposed to go study philosophy sociology i was a good girl i followed what i was told and that went to study philosophy um but i was quite tech oriented when i was um it was really a little girl and so i i just believe that we should um somehow balance it out because so right now big bags of yeast are being held mostly by white meals and i think it's just because women felt that they are not welcome to that party not all of them obviously but generally statistics is is pretty sad for girls but i think it's changing right now and that we see um with the rise of uh female lead nft's project and um i mean and we're happy as possible to be part of it and we're going to be doing a lot of um rl events to just make sure that we're creating safe and really attractive space for female and lgbtq plus folks because like right now when i'm inviting them to crypt events they're often bored to be honest or um or worse they're being harassed and i was i was verbally sexually harassed by a person who was supposed to be my collector not naming him but that was lame didn't like it and that was one of the reasons why i decided to create this [ __ ] versus safe space for women thank you um all right so i think we have time for one more question then we'll hop off then emily from pleaser dial is going to jump on talk with caroline for about 20 minutes and then we're going to do kind of a shared hybrid qa but i have one last question so one thing i've heard you talk about is a better planet i really like this expression um what does a better planet look like to you and what can the artists technologists um community i don't know what can the people in this room kind of best do to help facilitate that it's a long long answer but i think it's like important to acknowledge when we talk about utopias that there should not be just one utopia because it's again like falling back into this ussr model when i know what what to do for everyone else that's not ideal but my top is gonna be um a planet where i mean we have better uh global coordination because i feel like we do have a lot of issues like climate change or global inequality that will inevitably cause um conflicts and worse and it's not gonna feel nice or cute it's not gonna be comfortable um so we'd better try to decide to solve it a little bit earlier before it actually um you know develops into real conflict so i think we should and and in our organizations like the un they don't really work anymore and they don't really have any respect or or authority so that's number one um and i really believe i didn't have an answer how it's gonna work but i really believe that um all of us in this room people who interested in blockchain models of governance we can actually um combine this very very local approach where we decide um like how our communities look like and i could know how our cities look like what kind of ads do we see do we see any ads and stuff like that but with like at the same time really global approach um yeah so i guess greener planet with better connection between different parts of the planet um what else um and definitely would love to see a distribution of public goods uh done better in um in a lot of places including united states of america feel like countries like russia they're being looked down at often but actually you know if you if you walk around moscow even with all the corruption um it's it's like pretty incredible you feel yourself rich and uh and and like like phyllis is important if you just like walk around moscow and you don't have to own anything just because public spaces are really beautiful the subway subway looks like palace the question how it was built because it was built by a slave labor of prisoners and that's something we want whether or not we want but all right well thank you very much um everyone let's thank nadia and we'll be back on stage in a few minutes thank you