Hello everyone, it’s good to be back!
Samizdat is here with Season 2, and this time we decided to go to Casa Imago — the home of imago.fm radio, our beloved partners with whom we have collaborated since day 1, and have a chat with its founder and our dear friend, Olga Radu.
During our conversation, we managed to review Season 1 and all the talks we had with the guests that were on the podcast. Here’s a quick reminder of all the women with whom we managed to talk during last season:
- Natalia Blanari — Cartego bookstore founder
- Cristina Cerescu — head of production at Combinatul Poligrafic from Chișinău
- Violeta Zabulică-Diordiev — graphic artist, book illustrator and History of Books teacher at the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts in Chișinău
- Lucia Ciocan — acquisition manager for foreign children’s books at ARC publishing house
- Aliona Bereghici — freelance designer and book illustrator
- Tatiana Lagaeva — graphic artist (illustrator), lately teaching Art Management and Expressive Drawing at the State Pedagogical University of Moldova
- Anya Glazkina — founder of the media platform Locals.md
- Tatiana Fiodorova — contemporary artist, book artist and fine arts teacher
- Natalia Gârbu — photographer, artist and the creator of Mahala magazine
The reason behind continuing Samizdat Season 2
According to Moldova’s Creative Industries Profile, The Creative Industries sector in Moldova has progressed rapidly in the last 3–5 years. Industries such as fashion, interior, industrial and graphic design, managed to direct the generously offered support from the donors and gained momentum, allowing these particular fields to bring professionals, communities, education and visibility to different aspects of each aforementioned field. While the great benefits of such growth and exposure of these industries cannot be understated, some smaller creative fields have been attracting less attention and support along the way.
The Samizdat project aims to address one of these untapped fields, namely the publishing field. The project targets the micro-community of writers and book designers, visual and narrative storytellers (cultural journalists, writers, poets, artists, etc.) to generate informative and research content for the local publishing field, an umbrella industry that originated during the Soviet times and nowadays considered on the verge of extinction, remaining local creators of which being recognized internationally. Publishing field is often disregarded, industries having a radical shift towards digital, leaving the creation of the physical medium behind.
The goal is to bring awareness and cultivate the relevant audience about the publishing field, process that goes into it, contemporary creators and documenting the publishing works on the digital space, giving the publishing a digital presence and a voice in the online space.
And in the context in which the culture is a bit underestimated locally, the editorial field in particular doesn’t get much attention, do you think that a podcast about this subject makes sense?
It makes a lot of sense! The more we talk about a subject, the more necessary it becomes. The need comes with information, states Olga Radu.
Forming a micro-community
The Samizdat team manages to keep in touch with most of our Season 1 guests, and we start to sense the establishment of a micro-community around the Samizdat subject, which makes us happy and eager to continue the work. Thanks to the podcasts and the articles available on the online platforms, interested people, as well as the younger generation, can easily access the information and become familiar with the publishing field from the Republic of Moldova.
Micro-communities are vital in our contemporary life, with concrete, micro themes, where a small number of people can find their interest.
In fact, what micro-communities do is very valuable, because they naturally bring together a community of people who have deep and passionate common interests, resulting in making people happier. And here, at Samizdat, we feel that due to our guests who are powerful women with passion and love for their jobs, we came at a good speed to gather a number of people that have similar thoughts and values as do our guests, Samizdat team included. The very idea that we succeeded in uncovering the stories of some of the women from the publishing field and bring a public gratitude for their efforts in the field, made us willing to continue these conversations, this time including men with their own stories to tell.
Season 2 is here — signed, sealed, delivered! We are working on 10 podcast episodes with interviews with people from the publishing field, accompanied by articles and visual support.
The exciting news is that we launched our Patreon page where you can help us keep the Samizdat spirit going.
Thank you for choosing to be part of our micro-community and we can’t wait to share with you what we have prepared!
Signing out,
Eva & Anna
