savva e dudin

(b. 1994)
NL/RU
savvadu at gmail
Leiden/Berlin

 





artist
game-designer
researcher,


 


who investigates the vicissitudes of playing in the political infrastructures, Savva is recognised for developing the practice of epistemic diplomacy — a methodology distinct from propaganda aimed at fostering reflexive judgments and multiperspectivism. Designing participatory rule-plays as technologies, Savva investigates how infrastructures carry deep ideological assumptions which can be shifted while playing. Such an approach positions games as spaces where withdrawal from complexity is politicised, enabling participants to navigate their interdependent political, economic, and ecological implications.

Growing up in Moscow Savva studied political philosophy at the Higher School of Economics with exchange fellowships at Humboldt and Stanford universities, focusing on the utopian Soviet cybernetic social-engineering projects of the 1920s and 1960s, asking how multidirectional memories formed intergenerational subjectivity. In 2022 he began studying the algorithmic regimes of seeing images during the military emergency state at the Dutch Institute of Arts.  

Currently Savva is pursuing an Artistic PhD project in Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts named "Playing against the End" examines how participatory games can act as architectural spaces for civic repair and collective action. The work emphasises the transformative potential of legal fictioning — a playful approach to distributing law-making and governing agency from the top down to more equal power constellations. Through various speculative organisations, rehearsals, and real work councils, Savva explores generative aspects of alienation, positioning it as a productive tool to foster resonance and long-term solidarity

During years of practice as a learning designer, Savva was focused on tools developing a better capacity to navigate one's attention from easily manipulated fast, semi-automatic judgments to vigilant, effortful, and slow thinking, thus enabling one to tolerate ambiguity through somatic, affective, and reflective awareness. The recurrent query of artistic research goes: How can alienation from the self be designed as a more generative than an extractivist form of attention?



2025  
Stagnation Council - Knowledge Workers pre-enactment workshop

Leiden University
2024

Juggling participation: Power-over, Power-to and power-with

KABK Den Haag 
(teaching)

2023  
Script and protocols as Sound Games for Cottbusser Chor

Grand Prix d’Amour Productions: KM28, Silent Green

2024

Playwriting and learning design for Angelic Materialism as Profession - performative workshop
Centrale Fies, Dro, IT
Vleehsaal, Middelburg, NL

2024

“Borders Crossed, Images Seen: Iconology In the Time of War” - Master Thesis

Dutch Institute of Arts


2024

Forest as a Long Term - Game design, workshop facilitation and performaceLithuania, Curonian Spit – Morrocco  

2022-24  
Game design for educational experiences in Philosophy

Stradarium School

2022
Facilitator and Cinematogrpaher for the summit at The Lost Art of Organizing SolidarityDocumenta institute,Kassel, DE

2021
Designer in Residence - Designed p2p tools for collective problem-solvingTripleTen (ex-Practicum)

2023  
Script and protocols as Sound Games for Cottbusser Chor

Grand Prix d’Amour Productions: KM28, Silent Green

2020

Performative community theater residency for Luminary Foundation  Khrug, Dagestan Republic,

2019
Playwriting/performing durational performance about post-soviet Russia

PERMM Contemporary Art centre