DIKOROSIA
# HERE & NOW
IN RUSSIA BEFORE
THE 24th FEBRUARY
links for download printable pdf version
‘Dikorosia’ is a newspaper about the diverse thoughts and actions that make up today’s Russia. We want to show that society is not monolithic, but consists of a variety of voices. These voices can break through the fake ‘unity of opinion’ constructed by the authorities.
We planned for the first issue of ‘Dikorosia’ to be called ‘here and now’. However on the 24th of February, when Russian missiles struck Ukraine, the world changed dramatically. Instead, our first issue became a document of the recent past: how we have been living and what we have been feeling since the start of the war. We have invited authors to share their thoughts on a ‘Dikorosia’ that is already history.
M.
Borschevi_chka* Party is a community of post-enslaved.
We've been peacefully growing in our natural habitat. Led our lives without disturbing the natural order. In the second half of the 1940s, we were snatched away from our native lands. Stalin himself gave the order. Soviet modernization existing in the totalitarian regime he has created called for cheap if not even completely free tools. We've been forcefully bred and given as feed for cattle.
Communism, a perfect utopian society on paper turned into a fanatical disaster in reality, was built by inbred slaves who mutated from us. The Soviet government had colonized the wilderness in the attempt to conquer "the dark bog", meaning they had been trying to conquer us, the ones who used to be free. "Taming" the wilderness with violence they were enslaving every living thing they could get their hands on. Thinning us and exhausting our soil the Soviet government had been descending further and further into hell.
After the system's fallout some of us tried to not only learn more about but also speak out on its atrocities. We wanted to begin healing our collective trauma so the pain and memory of this pain could set us free. But it was so terrifying, so unbearably hard, and so dark. Most couldn't bear it when the wound was opened in an attempt to remove the pus so they'd rather let it fester and suffer through the pain.
The wound hasn't healed still. So half a century later we still exist in the dichotomy of the executioners and the condemned. The former oppresses the latter.
We were the victims of the system. The system has fallen and we were what it has left behind. We couldn't go back to the land of our ancestors where they were snatched away from. The post-Soviet land has become our new home. We were different. We were the descendants of the enslaved, the mutants created by the fallen system who had to learn to navigate their way through the new order.
Having lost the control we previously had, we once again "gone wild". We gained unlimited freedom to speak what we think, to express ourselves and not hide anything, and it made us lose our minds a little bit. We were intoxicated by this feeling. Overflowing with energy our community grew day by day. We overtook the land left without masters with our free thinking and freedom-loving way of living.
Our zeal for life was so great that it scared the ones who decided to lay low for a while. The ones on the other side of the fallen system. Its beneficiaries, that's who they were. They had loyal followers, the victims of the regime who hadn't yet realized their own oppression and for that reason turned into the weapon in the hands of the executioners.
They didn't know there were other ways to live. They didn't value their lives, didn't know they could. They kept on obeying the masters, soaking up the violence and inflicting it on their own peers. On us.
We were free, but the freedom lasted only a moment, so beautiful yet fleeting. The descendants of the executioners who once colonized our ancestors decided to take their power back. We were free and full of life, and they saw us as a threat. We were declared a biological hazard threatening the new system. The system that was just restoring the old regime.
The victims want to take revenge on their oppressors. They often seek vengeance mirroring the aggressor and returning violence for violence. This is a direct continuation of non-freedom. We encourage you to admit your own enslavement as it's the first step of freeing yourself and becoming who you really are. S you don't pose as a mere shadow of someone else.
We are post-enslaved. We are the descendants of slaves but are not slaves ourselves. We are who we are.
We are angry. We are furious. And we have the right to be. We are free to do with these emotions what we please. We are not avengers. The pain caused by what happened to our ancestors still lives within us, yet it doesn't control us. We don't want to live in a society of the executioners and the condemned. We are not the victims. We used to be, but now we are free.
Join us!
NATASHA BUDANTSEVA
My dacha was built in a swamp, and when I was little, my mother and grandmother often told me that I had to be careful, the place was devilish, the swamps could steer you in the wrong direction. You come back in the evening, walk along your road, and it looks like your street, but everything is wrong, there are houses, but not the same ones, the fence is similar, but different, not a soul around, and no sounds. Then you need to return to the crossroads, stand for a bit and go again, and voilà, the street is already alive, familiar, and you will get home.
In Slavic beliefs, special attention is given to the crossroads as a threshold, an area of transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In such places, the world becomes thinner, and a careless person may accidentally find themselves on the other side, in a world inhabited by demons and evil spirits.
I have always been fascinated by this world of Slavic folklore; it seemed very close and real. The neural network became the threshold from which I finally managed to look inside.
The neural network knows what reality looks like, but does not fully understand how it works, so a very strange Otherworldly Russia appears in its pictures. At first glance, its inhabitants look like people; but they have elusive and incomprehensible features.
Mythical evil is often described as a person with a strange head, it can simply be disheveled, or even combine human and animal features.
In the pictures from the neural network not only people, but objects too look not quite familiar, confusing. Legs instead of wheels for cars, a hut growing into city houses, gravestones turning into a crowd of people...
The longer you look, the more it sends chills down your back.
SONYA kiddo
When the quarantine started, I quickly realized that I no longer have any long-term plans, which means that today I only think about surviving tomorrow. This sort of simplification has helped me avoid the panic and keep myself on track. I definitely lucked out when I chose to quit my master's program and move out of the dorm right before all this. But now I lived in a room on Tretyakovskaya – I now had the life I ’jokingly’ told my friends I would have. I wanted to throw myself as hard as possible into the real adult world, and it worked out 100%.
The combination of empty central streets of Moscow, which at that time had already become my everyday life, with a complete lack of work and money, gave birth to one endless anxious day. Time has completely lost its perceived linearity for me and collapsed into a single point – ‘Now’. With no "Back then" and "In the future" around this point my presence in it turned into imprisonment.
I'm still not good with the dates of the month and the months themselves too. I'm not late for anything, but I'm always in a hurry. The only time delimiter I can understand is the sun. It's hard for me to argue with such an archaic sign that time’s running out. I haven't really kept track how many suns I've seen since I got stuck in this endless day. Definitely a lot - worth starting to count. I go through different emotions whenever I see the sun, but I definitely notice them every time. I see my path lead me to ‘Here’ and the proof of ‘Now’. You can see it even with your eyes closed, which means outside of my day too.
faf
MARINA LACINSKA
SEND NUDES
BZZZZZt! – my hand vibrates. This is my smart watch telling me we got a message on Telegram. I see Ania’s name on the tiny screen (It really does say “Ania Shevchenko”). I jump out of my shower cabin, almost slip on the wet tiled floor and grab my phone. It’s hard for me to leave Ania waiting for my reply – she rarely texts me and I’m always waiting for the times she does.
I open our chat and see the curves of Ania’s pale naked body through the cracked screen. I try to blink through water dripping off my hair – the image is still somewhat blurred. The photo is blurred with filters but I manage to make out her nipples (petite and sharp) through them. Ania’s bitting her lower lip and looking into her phone’s screen which she used to take the mirror photo. 3-2-1 and the picture is gone. Auto-delete feature trains our imagination and nurtures our memory. And protects the sender from any unpleasant situations, of course. There’s no image anymore but I keep staring at my screen – water, still dripping off me on the floor, could as well be mixed with secretion at this point. Ania follows up with the text: “I finally found a filter using which I could do away with the Close Friends stories 😂. Sowrry”
I answer with a flame emoji but I would prefer to answer with three droplets, to be frank. Ania continues: “As I took the pics I realized I’ve got something to show too. Well, if we’re talking figure. Lemme show ya”. Ania send me another photo. Now it’s a selfie taken in a tub. With the same blurry effect on. My eyes manage to take out a narrow line of pubes and a birthmark under her left breast before the picture disappears. I text her: “Wellll, you got something to envy”. And I go on: “We only got shower cabins here in Tbilisi, no tubs”. I put the phone back and jump back into shower. The cabin turned into one big cloud of steam in moments of my absence.
I put L'occitane almond oil on my legs (if there’s heaven, it smells like this oil) and I think that Anya has never sent me nudes before. Girls generally rarely send nudes to anyone – let alone their partners and crushes. I know that I am not her crush and not a potential girlfriend of Anya, we’ve discussed this numerous times in the three years of our acquaintance. I also know that personal nudes are too much when one of you is in the friend zone. Carried away by thoughts of Anya's photographs, I leave a cut on my leg (if there is a hell, then women are constantly forced to shave their legs and cut themselves in it). A trickle of blood is leaking down to the drain.
At that same moment, someone's nudes are leaking on the Internet. 10 years ago, the ex of my ex, after she left him, threatened to post her nude pics on social media and send them to her friends and acquaintances. Even though he didn’t do it, the girl still decided not to take such pictures of her again. Actually, she stopped taking pictures altogether. At least while we were in a relationship – I got a couple of her portraits and a few joint shots left. One of them is super cozy, taken on Christmas in Krakow - the self-timer and tripod helped to remember us tender and bright under a giant Christmas tree. Another shot – in the deep blue and sparks of the southern sea. It was Simeiz and the only actual sunny day we had on our trip. The trip was drowned both by rains and constant quarrels. But on the day we took this photo, it was all really good.
It seems ridiculous and strange to me that crooks, incel pissbabies, and sorry-ass blackmailers think that someone can be shocked or offended by pictures of a naked body. People willingly share their nude flicks online these days – usually tagged #нюдсочетверг (#nudethursday). Feminist activist Daria Serenko wrote about this: “I received threats on Instagram that if I continue to take part in protests, my nude photos will be leaked to the Internet. I have ‘em all over my twitter, I leaked them MYSELF.”
In personal chats, nudes are an element of flirting or frank articulation of desire (depending on the level of nudity and the context of the relationship between the sender and the recipient). On public social media accounts – they show the desire for validation, an attempt to come to terms with one’s body image or to control the situation. If you post your nudes yourself, they can't be leaked. Like in that meme with a black guy banging on his temple – Can't fail if you drop out.
I've been posting little bits of my naked body in closed stories for several months now - the ones with the green circle. I try to love myself; I want to capture (most often) pleasant changes and to get comments from girlfriends and friends. Women, non-binary people, cis-gays, and one heterosexual cis-male all made the green list. Sometimes I jokingly imagine what kind of party it would be if everyone turned up in one place.
By the way, Ania once mentioned my naked pictures in DMs stating shortly that they’re “actually beautiful”. Queer ladies usually don't comment on my photos in the private part of Instagram. For several months that I’ve been experimenting with this, I noticed how active men are in the comments. Heterosexual girl-friends follow them in the second place, they notice every change in my body. They cheer me on and send colorful hearts. Non-binary people are always silent. Lesbians and bisexual women are also almost always silent. Their silence seemed treacherous to me – I'm a lesbian! Damn, I gotta be of interest to queer women. Bitter indignation took over me and I shared my thoughts in stories.
“I stopped flirting and seeing opportunities to reproduce chemistry because of one nasty case! But honestly, I gotta say – great tits!” - replied homosexual Lena.
“Queer women are just shy” - stated pansexual Julia.
“First you say that the photo is beautiful and then you worry that you weirded the person out for a week” - shared bisexual Varya.
Ania said nothing.
Every time I post a new "closed" photo, I ask followers to let me know if someone wants to unsee it – I understand how it might be unpleasant to suddenly see such pictures. Nobody ever replied to this. I know that naked bodies on the social media feeds sometimes make people mad or even angry. Sex educator Sasha Kazantseva prefers to photograph herself without clothes, pushing the limits of Istagram’s policy. And such a basic decision causes bouts of stifling hate from some randos in the comments. Sasha reacts philosophically: “I want the body to be treated more calmly. I want the tension around it to go away from people and society: the body’s just a body.” Time and time again, the sex educator fights with Instagram, which deletes even innocent photos – either it detects a nipple, or reacts to user complaints, or completely confuses an elbow with a naked female breast. Sasha argues, hard and long, and more often than not, she comes out of these digital fights victorious. Along with this, she tests the limits of Instagram. For example, Sasha discovered that you can take a picture of a vagina and post it if you cover up the vulva. She posted such a picture in her Stories and it stayed for a day with impunity.
Men threaten women to leak their photos or shame them for nudity, yet they send pictures of their dicks everywhere. The band “кис-кис” put it perfectly in one of their tunes: “You send me a dickpic in DMs. Tell me why?" Nearly one in two women received photographs of male penises, according to one British study. Most women are dissatisfied with dickpics and consider them an attack on personal boundaries. I’ve never received such pictures, but I would also be unhappy.
“The Village” once devoted an entire piece to dikpicks. “The penis is the first toy of a boy who can play with it like a cannon, turn it in different directions: there are more manipulative actions one can do with a penis than with a clitoris, and they are generally less taboo” - the expert commentary said. I agree with the author (she’s my friend's ex-girlfriend). Girls rarely send clitpics and pussypics. By the standards of intimate photography, the female naked body is only the chest and pubis (as it was with Ania's photos). The vagina and clitoris, the entire vulva are out, left out of brackets, they do not exist.
My friend Zoya jokes that lesbians should send women photos of hands or tongues. I like this idea – fingers can be very sexy and, at least to my liking, they are exciting to look at. When I see beautiful female hands, the lower abdomen gets warm, just like after a good ab workout (I actively do them all month to make the “Close Friends” posts even better).
A couple of years ago, Zoya told me that queer people’s ring and index fingers are supposedly different in length, unlike heterosexual people’s fingers that are usually the same. This, of course, is a myth, but we decided to conduct a makeshift study anyway and wrote to our non-heterosexual friends asking them to send pictures of their fingers. We had a good collection of queer palms that day.
“Hi, Katya! Take a picture of your hand now, don’t ask why.”
“You and Zoya both texted me this at the same time, I’m a little scared,” – Katya answered mere moments later and then sent a photo of her palm. A laptop with Telegram opened in the background. Katya has long thin fingers, the tip of the big one is slightly protruding. I feel a little jealous because my thumb is completely straight and does not bend, and it’s also a bit fat. In the Telegram app on Katya's laptop, I saw work chats, a chat with me, Zoya and the “Lesbian Lobby” channel. The three of us are the “Lesbian Lobby”.
In return, Katya asked for my hand pics. My friends started to suspect I lacked queerness – the ring and index fingers turned out to be the same length. I only noticed a slight difference of a couple millimeters.
“Just in case, you can start dating men,” she taunted me.
“But I dont wanna!”
“What do you mean you don't wanna? God gave ya a ring finger that’s not long enough, so he’s gonna give ya a two on the Kinsey scale.”
Our little convo with Katya seemed funny to me, so I posted it in a Story with the caption: “When you try to understand how lesbian your hands are, but your girlfriends say that they’re not queer enough.” Couple of hours later, Ania replied to the Story:
“What's with that fingers thing? Not long enough?”
“Briefly and without formulas, there’s a theory that the ring and index fingers of lesbians should be very different in length. Zoya and Katya have them very fucking different in length, but mine are the same.
“There you go,” Ania sent me a photo of her palm. She also almost doesn’t have this difference between the ring and the index fingers. Thin pale fingers with wide bones – this is probably one of my kinks. I would love to touch these palms and fingers, I would love them to touch me. There weren’t as many details in the photo unlike the Katya’s pic, but I noted very short neat nails. I thought that Ania probably has a girlfriend, although she stayed quiet about it. Six months later, I found out that this was the case.
Since the day we met (we matched on Tinder and immediately switched to Telegram), Ania has sent me different photos. The very first picture from her in our chat – a flick of her near the Baltic Sea in the sun. Only the silhouette of a thin figure standing on stones is visible, her arms stretching towards the light.
Then there were photos from Lake Baikal, from Ossetia and Sochi, as well as lots of shots of flowers and trees. Our chat became somewhat like a botanical garden. In the first year of our acquaintance, Ania was like a forest nymph to me, cut off from all city life. In her pictures there were walls decorated with dried flowers, leaves underfoot and berries within her palm’s reach. Her arms had fern (on the left) and basil (on the right) tattooed on them.
At some point, random selfies were added to the greenery blooming in our Telegram dialogue, followed by beautiful staged portraits. Sometimes Ania sent me photos in lingerie and swimsuits with the caption “look how my body changed after three weeks in Sekta”. I didn't think there was any subtext in those pictures. Once she sent me a photo of her hugging a cat. There was no face in the shot, but the arm hugging the cat, and her chest covered with a tight T-shirt with a huge neckline caught my eye. I wrote it off as a coincidence, though.
“My phone autocorrects my favorite word ‘блядский’ (‘slutty’) replacing it with ‘боярский’ (‘boyarish’),” – said Ania in response to my rant about some autocorrect nonsense about a year ago. Probably, like, ‘Каир’ (‘Cairo’) instead of ‘Квир’ (‘Queer’) in Queer Revolution, idk. Ania continued: “I was just telling my sister what a ‘boyarish’ bodysuit I got”. I didn’t have the courage to text her “show me” then and I just replied with a laughing emoji. An opportunity wasted, I guess.
I turn off the water and get out of the shower. Instead of a tower I reach straight for my phone – memories, thoughts about Ania and hot water really warmed me up.
“If you’ll have anything else to show – send it over, don’t be shy.”
“Haha. Okay,” – Ania replied.
GALYA TSEPILOVA
EVGENIYA BOVA
"The Shadow"
A fragment of everyday life: a hurrying delivery person casting a shadow on the wall of the building. A single second, a single movement, a person that to some extent became a symbol of change of society as a whole.
Deliverymen became the links between the disturbing outside world and the safety of our homes and it seemed that there was nobody left on the streets of the city but them at some point.
Now that the townspeople have returned to the streets, the deliverymen, despite their bright uniforms, have become inconspicuous shadows, part of the bustle of the city. Until one of them appears on our doorstep. Frankly speaking, the society is not interested in the personality of those making deliveries, it only ever cares about their function, hence the decision to keep the character himself out of frame – you’re only able to observe his fleeting shadow.
The shadow is not only a visual image, but also a metaphor for the trace left by a person in society.
KATYA MUKHINA
You don’t watch TV, so you don’t know the truth
I didn’t go out protesting, but the protest somehow came to me – and that doesn’t count. I slipped a crumpled ticket into my bag next to my passport, my alibi being that I was on my way home from the cinema when I stumbled upon some kind of crowd.
Before I leave the house my grandma starts the usual talk that feels more like a police interrogation – definitely not going on a protest? I really am going to the cinema though – gotta support my favorite film distributor. And of course, as soon as I exit the real show’s gonna unravel in the streets but that’s all details and little things my grandma doesn’t have to know.
I follow the crowd along the canal trying to keep a little to the side - in case I have to run. Then I get bolder at the bridge and climb the high curb to the reflective vests of the press to get a good look around. I don't think I've ever seen so many people in my life. Young, full of energy and ideas. But then, they light harmless flashes on their phones and immediately turn into angry fireflies. I almost start crying. Why? I don't understand myself. Can’t swallow the lump stuck in my throat.
That’s what they call ‘paid opposition’? That’s how they say we are being ‘destroyed from the inside’? In time with the thoughts people start to chant – They-Don’t-Pay-Us.
I let the crowd take me to the square, squeezed by sluggish bug-like paddy wagons from both sides of the canal.
Big and armored, with flashers that won’t ever match the phone flashlights anyway. Moments later, I’m already climbing the stone fence of the underpass, people everywhere – wherever you turn. I see ‘cosmonauts’ line up gleaming with their black shells on the other side of the passage. ‘Do we have to run now?’ I ask the guy next to me. He tells me that so far everything is fine, that there is no need to panic, that we need to worry when the crowd dissolves into separate groups of people. He also adds that a movie ticket won’t help here, it’ll only prove itself useful in court but won’t save you from getting to know the insides of a paddy wagon.
She told me that if I aspire to be a writer I’d better stay out of politics. They’ll cut me out, won’t let me be published. The example with Kira Yarmish’s book didn’t convince her – the publishing house’s name is not in Russian, so Americans must be behind it.
I miss the moment the crowd dissipated around me. First moment – I’m just texting someone, next – the ‘cosmonauts’ rush towards me. A moment later – everyone around me starts to move like they’re at the Olympics. Another second later I climb down the fence purely out of instinct, before I even realize what’s going on.
I land and immediately fall off skinning my hands and knees, try to get up and fall again – I guess at that moment I could relate to all those miserable characters from horror flicks that tried to run with their bodies failing them. Some among the running try to help me but I finally get back up myself and set a new world record in sprinting. I don’t turn back. A guy running in front of me looks back and starts running faster.
The distance is a miserable ten meters from the crossing to the bridge filled with other people, break away and get lost. Only one word keeps coming out of my mouth, and I work my way through, limping and swearing in hoarse whispers.
***
Yara arrives in a couple of hours. All this time I sat in a coffee shop on the other side of the bridge, barely touching the cold matcha swamp and staring at the table. Sometimes visitors looked at me with interest and time and time again I told them what happened in colorful detail, demonstrating the plaster on my right palm. I couldn’t think about anything so much so that some random girls sprayed me with an antiseptic and made me to check out my knee – spoiler: it was all bad so they got me plasters and patched me up. I also discovered that I have lost my front door keys and the beautiful Samaritans, whom I provided with a detailed description of the keys and trinkets, soon return empty-handed – somebody has already taken ‘em in the hour since I ran off.
Grandma is convinced that Yara's dad is a member of an NGO that gets bitcoins from abroad – ‘or whatever your electronic money is called, because otherwise ‘how would she be able to go to study abroad?’ While there, Yara saved up as much as she could, allowing herself only night trips to the library as her means of going out. When she came back, she learned that her dad was prosecuted for writing an article on how the peaceful revolution is doomed at this point. Plus, he's about to go blind. Thanks to that time he got stabbed in an alley last summer. The details only convinced my grandma further – this wouldn’t have happened to a law-abiding & patriotic citizen.
Yara congratulated me as I was baptized into protesting and I nervously laugh in response. She took a sip of the cold and completely unappetizing matcha, and as my personal foreign agent, said:
- And now to the safety rules at protests ...
I stay quiet for a few seconds, going through everything that has been said. I wonder if I did at least one thing right? Then I remember. I lick my dry lips.
“They had stun guns, ya know? They pulled a girl out of the crowd on a nearby street and she was screaming so much ... I just found out from a Telegram channel that today there were some of the most peaceful protests ever, there were almost no detentions, except for cops starting fights in St. Petersburg. There were they, running my way armed with stun guns a few minutes later. How will I get home now – with no keys and limping? I don't watch TV, so I don’t know the truth.
БЕЗ.НАЗ
ЗНАКОМСТВО И ГОРОДСКИЕ МЕХАНИЧЕСКИЕ ЦИКЛОПЫ
Привет! Мы, Маша и Иветта, художницы и участницы группы БЕЗ.НАЗ. И в этом разделе газеты мы бы хотели рассказать о нашем проекте «Hide from height ИЛИ ЧТО ДЕЛАТЬ
СО СПУТНИКОВОЙ СЛЕЖКОЙ», а также упомянуть о нескольких проектах других художни_ков, использующих гугл карты в качестве инструмента для художественного высказывания.
Почему это о современной России? Потому что спутники, летающие над нами, также как и камеры, распознающие наши лица, стахановскими темпами распространили свою сеть по всему городу и теперь, если вы вышли из дома в магазин или поехали в парк на другой конец города, ваш путь можно легко отследить, особенно если вы выходили из подъезда со среднестатистическим домофоном, спускались в метро или просто переходили по пешеходному переходу. В городе мы как на ладони: можно сказать, что у Сергея Семеновича есть все шансы стать претендентом на закрепление за понятием паноптикона, вытеснив с этого места его первоначального создателя Иеремии Бентама. Можно попробовать покинуть город и уйти в не столь заселенную местность, но оставив город — слежка не оставляет нас. Мы всё так же перед лицом всевидящего ока, но более удалённого и менее оперативного.
HIDE FROM HEIGHT
Hide from height — проект, который предлагает любо_му желающе_му эффективно и с помощью минимальных усилий скрыть свое жилище от взгляда Сверху, а именно от спутниковой слежки. Этот проект для тех, кто хочет наглядно и ярко высказать и выразить свое нежелание и неподчинение общему порядку вещей — прямолинейная попытка избежать вездесущего надзора механического глаза, пришедшего на смену божественному.
Первый шаг — определиться со зданием, которое вы бы хотели скрыть [учитывайте тот факт, что наиболее эффективное сокрытие может быть совершено только в условиях полного вашего владения выбранной собственностью. Если же здание принадлежит вам лишь частично или вовсе никак не относится к правам передачи обмена и продажи от вашего лица, то будьте готовы к спорам с сосед_ками и хозя_евами, которые могут сильно затянуться и отвлечь вас от вашей цели, погружая в бюрократическое болото].
Если же вы преодолели трудности первого шага, то для следующего этапа следует, отбросив страх, но сохранив здравый ум, взобраться на крышу и измерить её точную площадь. Затем вернитесь на землю и откройте компьютер, зайдите в интернет и выберите приложение, открывающее доступ к спутниковым картам, (мы не промоутируем компанию гугл и не являемся её амбассадорками в Москве, но в принципе можно использовать и его). Далее вбейте свой точный адрес и приступите к поиску. Чего именно? Куска соседствующего ландшафта, который можно скопировать и которым можно незаметно прикрыть крышу вашей собственности, сокрыв факт её существования для тех железяк, летающих в безатмосферном и бездушном пространстве. Когда выбор сделан, и все за и против взвешены миллиграммовыми весами, пора печатать выбранный кусок изображения на баннере, размером под площадь крыши вашего дома. И последний шаг — плотно и намертво зафиксировать баннер на крыше вашего имущества. Не забывайте про масштабы и непромокаемость материала, всё-таки такой камуфляж при бережном уходе может прослужить вам вплоть до нескольких сезонов подряд.
НЕ МЫ ПЕРВЫЕ, НЕ МЫ ПОСЛЕДНИЕ: ПРЯТКИ С GOOGLE MAPS или я считаю до пяти, не могу до десяти
В современных спутниковых картах, помимо возможности наблюдать за миром с высоты многих тысяч километров, есть возможность также посмотреть панорамы с земли, загружаемые как корпоративно с помощью лавирующих по городам и селам специально оборудованных автомобилей, так и обычными пользователями с телефонами и нужным приложением.
Так вот, подобный вид слежки также активно практикуется над нами с вами, а многие из нас этому только потворствуют. Да, с помощью подобного инструмента мы можем оказаться практически в любой точке мира, не поднимая попу с насиженного места. Мы можем стоять на тихой австрийской опушке, будучи при этом в центре запыленного и зашумленного мегаполиса, или наоборот, рассматривать сотни лиц на центральной городской площади, сидя в деревне. Но остается вопрос: стоит ли оно того, и что мы отдаем взамен? Мы позволяем незнаком_цам беспрепятственно оказаться на нашей улице, в нашем дворе, иногда даже у нас в квартире. Все больше и больше данных о нас становятся не просто доступными, но качественно и в высоком разрешении заархивированными и структурированными по годам и месяцам.
Тема спорная и предполагает длинную дискуссию, которую мы можем только начать, взяв в качестве начала проекты нескольких разных художни_ков. Надеемся, что для читатель_ниц это станет предложением к продолжению разговора.
1
Художник Джон Рафман, например, был рад наличию и эффективности спутниковой слежки за ним и его возлюбленной во время их романтического путешествия. Сейчас объясним почему. Рафман потерял свою возлюбленную, ушедшую из жизни в молодом возрасте, и остался без единой её фотографии. Он тяжело это переживал и надеялся отыскать хоть одно материальное свидетельство с образом о ней. В какой-то момент он вспомнил, что когда они были вдвоем на отдыхе у моря, мимо проезжала машина гугла, снимавшая панорамы. Рафман сразу же отправился на поиски этих фотографий, не зная существуют ли они на самом деле или нет. И нашел.
После этого он продолжил изучение гугловских уличных панорам и собрал такое количество изображений, что создал отдельный проект 9 eyes, названный по количеству объективов на панорамной камере. На сайте 9-eyes.com художник переодически публикует свои находки, совершенно разные по содержанию, от сцен справления нужды на парковках и прямо посреди дороги до миролюбивого и даже скучного пейзажа. Странное, страшное, обычное, красивое, меланхоличное — всё соединено в один большой нарратив.
2
Данный ресурс можно не просто использовать как инструмент, как набор уже имеющихся данных, созданных, собранных и используемых постфактум, но и вмешиваться в них на этапе возникновения. Так, художники Робин Хьюлетт и Бен Кингсли, когда эпоха повсеместных панорамных съемок улиц еще только начиналась, узнав, где пройдет съемка, решили внедрить свое искусство внутрь сервиса гугл. Они организовали несколько разнообразных сценок, расставив их по улице, которую снимала гугловская машина. Таким образом, механизмы, намеревавшиеся вероломно и без предупреждения внедриться в среду, были обыграны художниками, вывернувшими ситуацию наизнанку и сопроводившими машину парадами, игровыми сценками и другими активностями. Сцены были как обычными-привычными городскими событиями, так и странными внедрениями, багами в размеренной жизни города. Проект носит название Street with a View и был создан в 2008 году.
3
Художник Виллем Попелье в своем проекте «Визуальные доказательства моего существования» следует одной правдивой для нашей реальности и простой установке: «В мире, где все записывается, тебе больше уже не нужна твоя собственная камера». Художник встает перед камерами наблюдений, смотря им в лицо, намеренно влезает в кадры других людей, помещает себя на карикатуры, делает скрины во время общения по видеосвязи. Собирая все эти фото-документы, прося незнакомцев прислать кадры ему на почту, выманивая снимки у охранников, что именно хотел сказать Виллем Попелье? Мы уже слышали его слова выше, но можем позволить себе и более широкую интерпретацию: волей-неволей вопрос о нашем присутствии в материальности, о нашем существовании или отсутствии в пространстве, в реальности, больше не принадлежит нам и не планирует возвращаться в нашу собственность в обозримом будущем, мы лишены такого права технологическим прогрессом, дошедшим в руки даже самого неосознанного зеваки, возможно, и не подозревающего каким оружием он наделён.
4
Следующий проект был создан художником Саймоном Векертом, который с помощью 99 мобильных телефонов, сваленных в одну тележку, ввёл Гугл-карты в заблуждение, сымитировав ситуацию, которая распознается сервисом как пробка. В одиночестве шествуя по мосту, он был воспринят как целое скопление машин, образовавшее красно-бордовую линию. Здесь наиболее любопытным является контраст, который выстраивает художник между высокими технологиями, обычной передвижной тележкой и простотой обмана.
А мы напоминаем, что кажд_ая из нас сам_а в ответе за собственное цифровое присутствие, анонимность и публично видимые данные. Двигаясь по дороге к перевороту системы слежки и вероломного внедрения в личную жизнь маленькими шагами, мы приближаем момент нашего цифрового освобождения. Берегите себя и своих близких!
MARIYA SKITYAEVA
my name is Masha and this is my work “Cop’s kiss”, created during the first month of my four month house arrest for the planted drugs case, right after being released from jail!
acrylic paint on paper
NIKITA DEMIN
GROWING WILD
I can't remember exactly how and why I left the yard then and walked along our long street towards the sandy ravine, behind which there’s a forest. When you return from a big city, there is always a need to wander: your legs are used to it, and the boredom of the quiet, measured village life does not allow you to sit still. This street became so narrow and quiet as soon as I grew up, and the fences seem to have half settled into the ground, exactly like their owners, our parents. My classmates left here for the nearest city and got lost, some for good, some almost for good, that is, they come here solely out of need and pity. There’s no money here. Opportunity is a word the locals laugh at. Our village is emptying and turning, despite the TV, into real suburbia. The cottages of the “urban” occupy new parts of the collective farm fields. Lawns and pickup trucks - the American dream - pictured on the site of a real estate office. But for some reason, it’s difficult to imagine an emo band music video or a version of The Simpsons in this brute scenery. Too grotesque.
The ravine, which once gave me a sandbox, and my father — the foundation for our house, is now completely overgrown with wormwood; a rusty bucket, frozen mid-stroke, creates the impression that time was stopped in an instant and forgotten to be switched on again. Tall grass now grows unobstructed around the bend of the rusty stump. The forest beyond the ravine was never wild, rather, it always grew wild from the accidents that happened in it: the corpse of a neighbor's dog, which impressed me at six, was quickly blurred in my memory when Vitka the Fool hanged himself in this forest. He was about forty when he seemed to have remembered everything that had happened since his severe shell shock near Grozny. And he got very mad at everyone. He was removed from a big tree when his face had already dried out completely and turned blue. He’d lived with his sister Marina, whom I was told to call Aunt Marina, and was her house worker — literally working for food and clothes. All that Vitka remembered about life and himself was that he was corporal Chernykh and that a grenade explodes three seconds after you release the pin. He impressed us, boys, tremendously with his knowledge of a dozen skillful ways to kill a person with apparent good-natured humor. But now Vitka, as he himself would say, “croaked”, and the wildness was just beginning in the forest. Here I had a fight for the first time, set fire to a tree, exploded on a "Corsair" firecracker, and found out that my classmate Ksyusha goes here with a boy from class 8B, and it’s not to show him the stamps in her album.
The forest also aged like the street, it became visibly smaller and drier, many branches of black trees on the first line became noticeably sharper and more dangerous as if warning — stop wandering! The place where we made fires and boiled perches in a pot in the winters and even the pull-up bar, which some unknown grown-up boys put between two strong trees, disappeared, and only my memory cut them into reality. The forest thickened, but I headed for the turn, beyond which a series of paths lead a local to the rindle. That’s what they call the river here, which during the existence of the village shallowed to a narrow stream. I imagined, making my way through the branches deep into the forest, how scary it would be if I suddenly saw a high-rise building here, like the ones on Kotelnicheskaya embankment or Arbat*, and the rindle nearby. I wanted to take a picture of these at first glance unsightly, crooked trunks, which outlined in space an infinite number of logos for black metal bands that had not yet been created. If you cut a skyscraper among the branches and decorate it with such a font, you get a funny meme about how space in Siberia invents heavy music simply by existing. I don’t remember how I got about a dozen photos, I remember that I bent down and photographed a mushroom under my feet. A very cute unknown baby with a long stem and a tiny puffy cap. And then, here, if you look closely at the photo, someone tore off the bark at the very roots, and here are pits from picked butter mushrooms. This one is sentimental, just for myself.
The stream has completely dried up, or the space became so wild that it changed so that the stream cannot be found. I had a little less than an hour before dark when I stumbled into headlights in the middle of the narrow road, on the side of which Max and I had buried my puppy, who had died of distemper. I knew this long way home, but I did not expect to see a car here ...
The headlights went out abruptly, and I saw that it was a police cruiser that caught me in the middle of my wild forest at this evening hour. The window opened, and an ordinary face of a policeman appeared from inside the car. Like everyone else:
— Loitering, are we?
— Huh?
— I say, loitering, are we, let’s see, who do we have here, ID?
The second policeman who was driving lit a cigarette and opened the window. It’s strange to remember your feelings at such a moment, but anyone who has lived in a big city knows how any question from a policeman knocks the ground out from under your feet, especially at such an hour, and even more so in the middle of such a place.
— Well, I was… walking — I answer quietly, gripping the keys inside my hoodie pocket.
— Let’s go.
— Go where, I... I live here — I’m even more scared, the keys hurt my hand.
— In the woods?
— No, nearby, on Vishnevaya street.
— Can you believe these people? — the driver says bitterly — Digging right by his own house.
— Let’s go — the policeman repeats sternly, opening the car door.
Ask for identification? Remember your rights, remember your rii-i-ights... Okay, maybe I should ask for a call? In the woods? Fuck, maybe OVD-Info*, but I guess it’s not a rally... This is illegal, right? Damn, I have no idea what to do in situations like this... And I remember that everyone forgets. And then I realize who was "digging" what and what they "want" from me.
— Uh... Identification?
— Everything at the station. Let’s go.
— Lyoha**, quit mucking around with him, get him into the stakan***.
The sun went out on the horizon, and lights were turned on in the windows.
— Thanks, smartass — hisses the policeman. He’ll start screaming, how do I prove he’s “holding”.
“Holding” what? What are you saying?
— Did you really just walk around here? Mmm... let's look at your phone at the station and find out where you’ve walked, how much, and for how much you’ll go.
I wanted to rush into the forest, to run and run far. I felt that I was one breath away from home and from burning these cops’ plan. Where to run, I did not know. Anywhere, all the ways lead home now. And I ran. I probably shouldn’t have. Dark branches cut my face. The screams and the sound of my breath became elongated and drawn out.
The grenade in my head exploded much faster than Vitka had promised. And the fear stopped.
— How do I fill out the protocol, you fucker, with my hands all bloody? — shouted the first one.
— Quit yelling, man, quit yelling! We'll fill it in right now, don't fidget.
I tried to move and realized that I was inside some kind of a box or a cage, and hissed in pain. I felt a dull pain in the back of my head.
— Shut up, shut the heeeeell up! — the policeman’s voice crackled in my head.
— Lyoooooooooooooohaaaaaaaaaaa! — came after. I fell asleep and woke up repeatedly. It felt like we were driving for an eternity. We drove for 20 minutes. To the district station.
— You should change your password, I-was-walking, your date of birth isn’t a password.
— Here’s bark, here’s a burrow, here, and here… That’s it for you, motherfucker!
— The forest isn’t dangerous — it’s people you need to be afraid of — said my father, appearing from behind a tree, his hunting gun on his back.
Verenitsyn took out a notebook and started reading his story aloud:
— I know more than a hundred lanes in Moscow, where you can hide from people, a forest of buildings and traffic signs, huh? What do you think?
— No way — Anya was surprised; she tightly squeezed my hand in hers — Wild...
— Shklovsky opened the whole mast with this expression, the sail which we inflate every time we use this phrase — Sergey Ivanovich moved away from the lecturing desk and smiled contentedly. It was evident how delighted he was to share these words.
— Where should I put him? — Eremchuk, bring in the stiff, ha ha ha, get him to the hobos! Let's air him out — the officer took a sip of fragrant tea with bergamot from his mug.
— Each turn inside, — Verenitsyn continued— inside the ring****, is a new round of this enormous chain of the city’s technical nature!
— Everything that loses its meaning outside survives in the forest, only a person has meaning because he invents it — father took one last drag and put out the cigarette butt with his foot.
— Stop fibbing, everyone here is innocent! — Shiryaikin remarked hoarsely.
— Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, there are clear signs of crime, just look at the photo! Bark!
— Why the fuck did you touch his phone? — the major looked at the lieutenant.
— The forest is growing wild from human savagery! — father read the crooked writing on the wooden fence of a machinery company — ain’t that the truth!
*OVD-Info — a human rights advocacy group that provides legal help to political prisoners and people who get detained at political rallies.
**Informal version of the name Alexei.
***a windowless solitary cell with an area of not more than half a square meter inside a police vehicle, a remnant of the GULAG.
****Moscow is built in rings.
MARY OVSEPYAN
ANNA GORINA / NINA SMIRNOVA
1. One day, Good and Evil decided to take on human form and come to
Earth to have a productive day
5. Ate ice cream in a bowl
6. Walked around a large puddle
2. They were invisible to people, so they could do anything at all, but still they longed for something simpler
9. Got some chips
3. They walked around the block
7. Graffitied along the railway tracks
4. Visited the strange place
8. To leave their messages for the train passengers
10. Swing on a swing
14. Went to pee in the forest
11. Shared little secrets
15. And then it was time for them to return to their business again. Until
Good and Evil are friends, there is balance in the world, although sometimes there seems to be more of one or the other. Let them
never quarrel!
12. Found a ball on the sports court
13. And played football
Evil - Anya Gorina
Good - Nina Smirnova
OLEG FROLOV
THE TRIUMPH AND CATASTROPHE OF THE PERSONAL
***
Can practical psychology be used for problems that are traditionally solved on historic, economic, sociological, cultural, and religious-philosophical levels? With the important condition that the material, tools, and methods available in these disciplines most often reach people in a fragmentary, mixed, unclear form, and live in the contradictory eclecticism of the inaccurate everyday speak. Is practical psychology able to provide answers to those questions that are inevitably asked in modern Russia, the answers to which determine how people will cope with their daily difficulties? Here are several questions, tasks, and topics on the solution of which the happiness, meaningfulness, and well-being of many people in modern Russia depend: social inequality and disunity, militarization and criminalization of the way of life, the threat of repression and military operations, the impoverishment of working people, the lack of freedom of expression. I doubt the immediate possibilities of the above-named disciplines to be useful support for people. I will name one big obstacle here: thinking with excessive generalizations, spatial and temporal - such as professional and leisure communities, social strata, country, world, historical paradigm, the spirit of the times, generations, and others - ignores the reality of life situations, the individual here and now of a person, leads to the establishment of fictitious barriers in communication, obscures the significance of the specifics of a personal situation. Tasks formulated based on the material of the above-mentioned disciplines turn out to be unsolvable and add further difficulties. Practical psychology can reformulate the above questions for each specific person as practical tasks based on the individual life situation as a whole, in a given environment at a given time. Practical psychology can help a particular person see their life situation as a combination of what is possible and what is impossible here and now.
***
The illustration presented along the text can be perceived as the author's commentary on the widest list of life conditions of people living in modern Russia. These states are experienced and comprehended as unhappy, dysfunctional, and meaningless. Biographical indicators, social markers of achievements, and failures taken in isolation from the experiences of the person do not play a leading role here — from the outside, these states can look very different: in the spectrum from the heights of the so-called success, triumph to the depths of desocialization, self-isolation, despondency, catastrophic thinking. The illustration is based on the figurative definition of chronic dissatisfaction with life, given in the context of Gestalt therapy by the founder of the method, Fritz Perls. A vivid image of two constantly fighting dogs or clowns gives an idea of the conflict of an idealized and shameful self-image, fantasies about one's omnipotence and helplessness, high and low expectations. This chronic process is accompanied by anxiety, a sense of unsettledness, and imbalance, resulting in various forms of maladjustment, depressed and agitated states, and takes away the strength needed to solve life's problems. Here is the original description:
“...two clowns...who play self-torture on the stage of our fantasy...:
The dog on top is usually correct and authoritarian; it knows what's best for us. Sometimes it’s right, but it’s always correct. The topdog is the dictator who says "You must" and "You must not". The topdog manipulates with demands and threatens catastrophes...
The underdog manipulates with defensive behavior, apologies, flattery, crying, and the like. ...the underdog is very cunning and usually gets more done than the topdog because the underdog is not as primitive as the topdog. The topdog and the underdog are fighting for power. ... Personality is divided into controlling and controlled. This internal conflict, the struggle between the topdog from the underdog never stops, because the topdog and the underdog are fighting not for life, but death.
This is the basis of the famous game of self-guidance. We usually take it for granted that the topdog is right, and often the topdog makes completely impossible demands of perfection. If you are cursed with perfectionism, then you are completely stuck. The ideal is a stick that will allow you to beat yourself and mock yourself and others. Since the ideal is unattainable, you cannot live up to it. ... A stick always has two ends; if you carry around an ideal, then you have a wonderful tool for playing the favorite game of neurotics — self-flagellation. There is no end to self-flagellation, self-torment, self-torture. It hides under the guise of "self-improvement". It won't work.
If a person tries to live up to the demands of perfection that the topdog puts forward, the result is always a "nervous breakdown" or flight into madness. This is one of the underdog’s tools. If we see the structure of our behavior, which in the case of self-improvement is split between the topdog and the underdog, if we listen and see how these two fighting clowns can be reconciled, then we understand that we cannot intentionally change ourselves or others.”
(Fritz Perls, Gestalt Seminars, 1969).
***
I see the practical use of this figurative representation for reformulating questions and finding alternative solutions to the problems of living in modern Russia. I will list several topics that can be clarified if we rely on this view. Return of interest in personal experiences, creativity, responsibility, rejection of mass behavior trends. Orientation towards and belief in the greater reality of personal processes, their priority over ideas about historical and cultural processes. The priority of one's own voice, one's testimony, and the voices of the immediate environment over the voices of narrow-focused experts and eclectic experts, relying on one's here and now, and not on a "philosophy" designed to explain the status quo or its complete opposite. Distinguishing and separating one's conflicts and interests from external conflicts and interests, given only indirectly. Consistent passage of all steps towards the goal, starting with getting to know yourself, with the formulation of the problem, and not from the end — with a suitable but unrealistic fantasy. On the whole, it seems fundamentally important to pay attention to one's own experience of dissatisfaction, meaningful and presented as a conflict of euphoric intentions and catastrophic expectations. Such a careful look will reveal how “external” issues, perceived with a high level of generalization are colored by specific human experiences and will contribute to the maximum revision of established ideas about conflicts, oppositions, the possible and impossible in the context of the difficulties of life in modern Russia.
SVETA LUAKYANOVA
AVITOPOEM*
Long-stemmed glasses for beverages
400 rubles
Product type — table setting
Category — kitchen goods
Condition — used
"Set of 6 beautiful glasses"
(with golden rims)
Seller Galina
Private individual
5 stars
1 review
Galina also sells enameled basin USSR
"No chips"
Romanian buffet from 1976
(With a beautiful veneer pattern)
"In good condition"
7000 rubles
(A steal!)
Also a chest of drawers-linen cabinet
"No chipping
No imperfections
Its whole life under a napkin"
(In Moscow, these sell up to 10k)
Galina is selling for seven
Radio phonograph "Rigonda"
20 thousand
(Galina, you know this is too much)
"Soviet
Valve
Retro radio receiver
Also
Phonograph
Perfect working condition
All accessories are original
Including the needle"
(20 thousand - nah)
(The lid can be lifted)
(No, why the fuck would I need a radio phonograph?)
Two vinyl records by Led Zeppelin
"Beautiful melody and performance"
(Who’d argue, Galina)
Fold-out sofa
With a linen cabinet.
Woolen carpet two by three.
(Of course, from a wall)
"Beautiful warm flawless carpet"
(Flawless carpet!)
Meat grinder
From stainless steel.
900 rubles
(We had one at home
When I was a kid
On Sundays, dad minced meat for cutlets,
I buy ready minced meat)
Reel-to-reel stereo recorder 212-1
(Who needs these now?)
Three thousand
(haha)
"Perfect condition"
(Who cares)
Lamp
Desktop
Ceiling lamp
Crystal
Chandelier
"A rare piece of furniture"
Tableware:
Glass with long stem from USSR
"Delicate glasses for 50 rubles each"
Antique coffee set
(Oh is it antique even?)
“Will appeal to the most demanding customers.
Can become an exquisite decoration of your table"
(Galina)
Tea set Imperial Porcelain Factory
Eight thousand rubles
(For this kitsch?)
"Golden daisies" set, tulip shape.
Imperial Porcelain Factory
15 items
Buffet storage”
(And here is the buffet):
Writing cabinet with a folding table
(Perfect condition, of course)
New electric boiler USSR
"Amazing
electro boiler
Kit
Water
heats up
Instantly
+ case "
(I remember it - a curled thing - my mother took it to the hospital
Boiled tea for us
In a faceted
Glass
Iron flavored water)
Soviet suitcases
(Can’t look without tears)
Polished
Writing
Table
Sewing machine Podolsk
(With a spool of white thread)
Mortar and pestle with a Rechitsky Porcelain Factory mark.
“A mortar and pestle are indispensable for preparing fresh spices and seasonings,
grinding
pills"
Walking stick
Five hundred
“Walking stick was used a couple of times
Didn’t need it
Like new
Height
Adjustable."
Walkers
Three thousand five hundred
"Walkers for the disabled
Height adjustable
Collapsible
Therefore, they are easy to transport.
In good condition"
Chair-toilet for the disabled
"Height
Regulated
Used
Not
For a long time
In great condition"
Four thousand rubles
Seni adult diapers
Three hundred
Rubles
"New"
"Size Three"
"Full pack"
"And three more - as a gift"
2 bedroom apartment, 60m. 9/9 floor
3,000,000 rubles
Komsomolsky district
Republic of Tatarstan
Naberezhnye Chelny
HPP settlement
4th complex
5A
A bright and cozy two-bedroom apartment for sale on the 9th floor of a 9-story building with a 3-meter sunroom. The apartment is warm and sunny. Shared vestibule for three apartments, friendly neighbors. Good location, in a good area along Musa Jalil Avenue, all windows overlook a well-groomed square. Wonderful view from the windows of the spacious main avenue of Naberezhnye Chelny, the Melekeska River, and the greenest area of the city — Zayamelekesye. Walking distance to shops, bus and tram stops. A playground in the courtyard of the house, a kindergarten, and a school nearby. Adult owners.
You can use military mortgages, maternity capital, any form of state support, including for young families.
A big advantage of this apartment is the ability to make renovations to your taste)))
Realtors, please do not disturb.
*Avito is a Russian classified advertisements website with sections devoted to general goods for sale, jobs, real estate, personals, cars for sale, and services.
SVETA PERO
NEW
Will they drag you from Yama
Right into detention
After one half-a-liter
Or straight to jail?
For walking on lawns
After classes on prose,
Or for a chat
Take you outta your flat –
Why?
Does it need to be clarified?
In school, we got fables with lambs and wolves
Memorized
The rally tomorrow has been approved
Gotta be safe and fun
Tell that to those arrested
At the previous one.
People with masks and helmets
In SPb and MSK
Stand around Duma, the courts and the cops
And paddy wagons move slowly in queues.
Will we get through riot police, my miss?
Will we stand in front of shut doors?
Or they’ll deal with us as with those kids
Is this not greatness?
None of us have
Anything personal
No rights and no decency.
Postin’ memes on Oprichnina?
That’s right, hello.
Handwriting in your testimony warps
Something crossed out will turn into confession,
When your kidneys receive unwanted pressure.
Proven
Guitly
Fullstop.
***
A Pandemic of fear spreads in waves.
The Lord took the firstborn. “Why did you do this to us?” –
Everyone asked. The church is now silent,
God’s out of reach, accepts no complaints
No way to get to him, even if you need ‘just a sec’
Any family member can get stung
By the System, poisoned by powder planted in secret
This problem will solve itself quietly if
You got money to carefully treat it.
Got no cash – you get locked up.
The moment the sting touches your space
You’ll fear any stranger with a smile on their face.
You’ll tape over your webcam
Though you thought only weirdos do that
Now when you come home,
You’ll check the door for forced entry
Check if the phone’s been tapped, if your friend’s been entrapped.
And you’ll think it’s okay, still no 1937.
***
I see no bottom
Of this day
See no light
In dense time.
Can’t breathe
Can’t escape
This boat sinking
We’re all in the water, we’ve always been in it,
And we drown, we don’t swim.
If I could reach the bottom
Someone must live there
There must be fish
That flap, clap and squish
I’d try to push off
I’d try to swim out
Whatever way possible, even if belly up.
But time crushes me with deep sea pressure
But time sets up traps all around
Licking my wounds with sea salt.
There’s no space in the dark
But the country remains –
I look at my passport,
I don’t feel the bottom.
SONYA KONOVALOVA
STAY SILENT – THE BEATING WILL BE VIOLENTviolent
/Pandemic reflections/
The threat of political isolation and the fear of alienation encourage the assertion of one's "Self" in the space around. The rumbling clatter that took over the media has absorbed everyone: state employees, entrepreneurs, artists, workers and politicians. What used to be in the blind spot of public attention is now openly asserting itself. Fragments of news reach us, wounding our eyes and ears. Overloaded traffic, poisonous headlines and endlessly vivid footage straight from the scene. Amid the high-speed barrage of messages, a disturbing thought flickers - this world is doomed. All that remains is to barricade ourselves with a closet from chronos, cosmos, eros, (corona) virus. But is this demo version of life worth anything? Trying to remain unscathed in the maelstrom of events, we hide our vulnerability, deny our fragility, indulging in a cold culture of silence. We voluntarily deprive ourselves of the opportunity to rise on the crest of the Wave of Rapid Changes by being apolitical and apathetic, by hiding behind a screen of illusory calmness. Do not succumb to informational violence. Something really awful all over the news? Remember that the problem posed – halfway solved! The Pandemic became the Pandora's Box of the XXI century. When we opened it, we recognized the weaknesses of the people and therefore the weaknesses of the system. Only by violating the straight order of things or accepting the disorder around us, it is possible to change the world. In chaos and devastation lies the potential, the concentrated rampage of life. It just needs to be directed. Then the scattered cries will turn into a harmonious choir. All as one, one as all. And our resonating hearts will break the shackles of self-oppression. After all, stay silent – the beating will be violent.