SADYRIA Exhibition(Posthuman Studies Lab) Moscow, 2020
installation, wooden relief with video projection, 100 × 100 cm, loop 10 min, video projection on the wall, 30 min.
Sinkholes
The city was planted on waste ground by the stiff hand of industrialization. It was the project of “the garden city” that should have made it take root and flourish – a small detail of the great plan of transforming the nature. The kilotons of dug-out salt, the industry emitted smoke, and the sizzling azure slime were supposed to be processed by the extra forces of the green proletarians. Lime trees, birches, poplars, hawthorns, phloxes, Rosa rugosa created the dendrological paintings for the greening plan. The young naturalists and workers, deeply in love with greenery, moved the plants to the City in order to create benevolent soil so that the Soviet man could flourish.
Decades later, the great plan, as well as its small detail, ended in failure — a bunch of sinkholes at the very heart of the Garden City. Seizing municipal buildings and apartment houses, they swallowed the areas of the green city exhausted by industry. The gaping earth interrupted the long history of folding, which had been carefully putting one era upon another and synchronizing the times. It mixed all the periods of the Earth, pulled the deep time to the surface, and brought the human time away to the outskirts and under the ground. New vegetation, often exuberant and invasive, infiltrated this abandoned portal of eras. Growing on the edges of the sinkholes, it built its own plan which hid beyond the high fences marking the perimeter of the territory of the state of emergency.
What can we see here? What is there, at the bottom of the sinkhole? Merely a hole? Merely water?
Using various materials — the lines of the surface-piercing vegetation, the buzz of the water which has filled the gaping hollows, the detrita and echo from abandoned buildings – we created a system of signs which reconstructs the plan of the nature-born transformation —SINKHOLOGY. It does not have a project designer and “the author of vegetation”, it is composed of a large number of draft fragments from different times and spaces which happened to get together on the spirals of the karst formations.
