Human Restoration Project talks with artist & writer Nika Dubrovsky about her work on Anthropology For Kids and her vision for the Playground of the Future.
Listen here.
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Our guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children’s books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you’ll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia.
Most of Nika’s projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the “Museum of Care”, a nomadic ‘anti’ institute, and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. “Playgrounds are vital public spaces,” she writes, “—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They’re also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.”
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Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David’s passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.
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