2018, video, 14:03
Escapism Training Program, Moscow, Fabrica CCI, 11. 5. – 10. 6. 2018, curated by Maria Sarycheva and Anna Remešová
Asylum
Whether you are not in your place or the place is not right. Either your style does not fit the landscape, or the landscape does not match the style. That is not unusual because the conditions of life in this place encourage you to change the location. The infrastructure ensures your escape plan and washes off the features of a familiar landscape like a melting glacier. You are up to feel that you are asphalt. The imperative of escape imperceptibly merges into one with an unrealizable dream of returning.
The exit to the bay is not yet the goal of the road, but an important intermediate stage. The bay stealthily gives you a promise of happiness, while presenting other shores as a blue line on the horizon. However, after a deeper examination, it turns out that these shores are for others. The bay would not let you out when you have to leave, and would not let you go back when you want to return.
So do not go too close to the horizon. Keep the distance – it will allow you to contemplate the horizon as an unfulfilled but still open opportunity. The bay will not allow you to escape, but it will become a refuge for the thought of escape.
While substituting the desire for a new life with the desire for a new shot you will show a tourist visa and get into your own destiny eventually.
You are entering the history of unsuccessful attempts to escape as you are entering the history of art – admiring a string of beautiful corpses. If art have a history, it must also have an end. And you are still just learning the art of equipping your own end while justifying a mediocre day as an aesthetic phenomenon, dialectically overcoming the split of life and art, concluding the movements of human and non-human actors into the perspective network, so it will look like on a postcard.
At the end of the course, you should be able to put your own figure in the center of the picture. To do this, you need to find a proper angle using a complex system of mirrors that will allow you to look at yourself from behind and slightly above.
This could attract the attention of energy vampires. To protect yourself from them, imagine that your body is enveloped by streams of fire, forming something like a cocoon around you.
There are other methods, for example, to laugh or complain to a boss. After all, a joke is an explosion of truth, and God does not yet know that he is dead. Unfortunately, for some reason it is always too late to discover that it is possible to move a piece of reality for a better composition.
The subject sentenced to life imprisonment becomes extraordinarily ingenious. Wasting all his energy at the start he finds a truly unlimited number of possible variants of movements, moves, positions, turns and trajectories that his body can accomplish in the space confined by the walls of the chamber.
The list of opportunities even includes radical actionism – under the precondition that there will be no visible traces left.
Is it convenient for the Olympians to watch you trying to an aesthetic pleasure of the first order from your own destruction? To get an answer to this question, you should look at yourself from behind and slightly from below so that you can see your own face.
As the detached observer, you are as much entangled as the active participant. Your own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers. This is why the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates.
The fault of being involved in a world you still cannot escape from is redeemed only by the fact that your end will be someone’s beginning.
_
This video contains of the material made in the Art Residence of the State Center for Contemporary Art in Kronstadt in the summer of 2017.
This video includes fragments of texts by Viktor Tsoi, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, Ilf and Petrov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Burger, Bruno Latour, Tamara Panina, Friedrich Schlegel, Slavoj Žižek, Søren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno.
Translated by Misha Griboedov.