Anna Aslanyan

Two members of the Pussy Riot collective were in London last week to meet their supporters and discuss future plans. They had to keep a low profile for security reasons – the meeting I went to was in a room at the back of a nondescript café. The activists, who introduced themselves as Serafima and Schumacher, spoke about the difficulties they face in Russia. Four of their videos have been placed on the Federal List of Extremist Materials; though not officially banned, the group is a de facto underground movement; and of course two of its members remain in prison. There are currently eight people in the collective, flanked by a support group, which has been infiltrated by government spies.

‘What is “experimental” art,’ the late Christine Brooke-Rose once asked, ‘or an “experimental” novel? Is it a genre?’ The question was the theme of a symposium on her life and work at the Royal College of Art last week, organised by Natalie Ferris. Tom McCarthy, like Brooke-Rose mistrustful of the label, suggested that the question had to be: ‘Experimental compared to what?’

The Freedom Press bookshop in Whitechapel was firebombed in the early hours of last Friday morning. The ground floor of the premises of the anarchist publisher, founded in 1886 by Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin, appeared to be in for a long, costly refurbishment. There was an emergency meeting in a nearby pub, and a clean-up scheduled for the next day.

In 2009 John Berger donated his archive to the British Library. Some of the drawings, manuscripts, correspondence and other papers can be seen at Somerset House until 10 November. The title of the exhibition, Art and Property Now, is taken from an essay Berger wrote for New Society in 1967. The show is one of several events taking place in London this autumn to mark the 40th anniversary of both Berger’s TV series Ways of Seeing and his novel G.