The Letters of The Litter
2025
Series of sculptures
presented at minimal, minimal
POUSH, Aubervilliers
Photo: Evgeniia Chapaikina
This grouping of sculptures, retitled The Letters of The Litter, is a collection of sculptural essays on agency, political history, and techno-social metabolism. Their intersection aligns with the muted piano of the arrested musician-activist, hunter-gathering logic of algorithmic control, and the knocking communication system used in 19th-century political prisons that reminds us of a cicada’s chirping. The dried plant, rusted piano strings, technological waste and salvaged leftovers are composed vertically, and orchestrated as if a necromantic analysis of accumulated loss. The Letters of The Litter was displayed in a group exhibition minimal, minimal, curated by Yvannoé Kruger, 22nd May, 2025 — 19th July, 2025, POUSH, Aubervilliers
Essay S: Noel
Essay K: I'm in a toxic dream of last night
These two sculptural essays are related to the story of talented pianist and novelist Pavel Kushnir, who was arrested for an antiauthoritarian video blog and died in obscurity in jail during his hunger strike in the summer of 2024. The axis bears traces of everyday life and turns the things carefully selected into abstract biographical fragments with socio-political context. The strings that lost their piano are a political tongue that lost its voice. The lifespan of memory is uncertain, but the sculptural axis becomes a poetic storage of quasi-archeological findings from a barely visible timeline for the lost things and their voices.
Essay S: Noel was inspired by The Noel, the novel Pavel Kushnir and the political voice of the music and musicians. This novel repeats the structure of Harmonice Mundi (1619) by Johannes Kepler and is based on the cut-up literature technique of 117 other novels. The Noel appeals to the story of the failure of Rote Armee Fraktion and the aspirations of the left-wing movement in the 1970s. The work was published posthumously. The departure points for Essay K: I'm in a Toxic Dream of Last Night were the deformation of political voice in the milieu with the anocracy – the worldwide scale fusion of democracy and autocracy regimes. This process is characterized by the downgrade of the agency by instrumentalized uncertainty of the political regime. The materials and entities lost in spatiotemporal cycles of repurposing find themselves as imprints of entropy in the unlikely assemblages.
The core of the sculptural structure is a corroded piano string encrusted with downgraded materials from the synthetic and natural domains. This vertical axis becomes a post-mortem analysis, focusing less on the physical death, rather than on deconstructing the emotional and psychological structures by social entropy with (geo)political context. These transformations are related to the modality of permanent transition of the constellation of an endless number of social, cultural, and technological entities. The dried plant, repurposed debris of the piano, waste of technologies, salvaged leftovers, and this essay about the long journey of the shapeshifted material necromancers. These materials experienced the transition from their original environment, repurposed or disconnected from their intentions and origins by social metabolism. The sculptures orchestrate (dis)used, downgraded, and repurposed materials of techno-social entropy into their story of the entities of the lost.
Photo: Anna Denisova
Essay C: Oscillation
This is an essay on the topic of the intersection of the algorithmic control and the logic of hunter-gathering in a techno-social milieu. The repurposed fishing gear combined with special needles fused with an interlinking approach into a quasi-medieval pattern, presents ubiquitous modality for the times of the digital media age and the nature of wavering trust for data sources. The maybe-enemy logic of the social media interactions that poisoned political and media landscapes. The hidden hunting/fishing gear feels so close to well-constructed silicon-lithium gadgets that exploit users' anxiety and desires.
Essay I: Signal
This essay is a part of the collection of sculptural essays The Stranded Horse and The Riderless Night about the intercrossing of non-human and human actors in political history. This work is related to the life story of the knocking communicating system in the political prisons of the 19th century. Essay I: Signal was inspired by the biography of Vera Figner and her memoir of the period as a prisoner in the Shlisselburg Fortress. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II a few dozen arrested revolutionaries were transferred to this prison. All were to be denied any kind of contact with the outside world, including visits from or correspondence with relatives. They have used a quasi-morse code system for communication between solitary cells. Some of them described this as a sound of insects, cicadas-like chirping and you need time to understand that is communication between political subjects over oppressive silence. The number of wooden balls encrypts the first knocked sentence of Vera Figner in the fortress cell: “I'm Vera*”.
*The name Vera in Russian means “faith”.
Essay A: Through a Glass Darkly
Essay M: Ashen glow
The exchange between society and nature glows in the debris and details from the abandoned spaces, overgrown gardens and scapes between use and decay. The recent past and foreseeable future, one could shimmer over artefacts from techno-social domains like the Earth's light can be imperceptibly visible in the ashen glow on the dark side of the Moon. The subject of a poetic, yet strictly documentary, pictorial composition of metabolism.
This exchange is shaped by geopolitical and media transitions. The metamorphosis of statuses and relations as a normal modality is inherent in this transformation. This uncertain modality is produced not only by the fluid nature of media but also the wavering trust under omnidirectional media exchanges. The transformation of people's instincts and behaviors encompasses the potential enemy modus for each new digital encounter, which could be an algorithm, scammer, or other user. Bad faith is rising from surveillance as the business model of the internet. This shifted trust in the remote relationships and intimacy design conditions of milieu and its physical imprints in cultural and infrastructural domains. The metamorphosis of intimacy with the transitional modality of politics is shaping a specific spacio-temporal continuum of possible and probable. The blurred spectating with interferences through the media mirror constitute the darkly witnessing. These field of life scenarios, like the night, is the liminal zone full of myths, dreams, and speculations.
Essay A: Through a Glass Darkly and Essay M: Ashen glow are shaped by leftovers, lost and repurposed materials. The elastic synthetic fabric catches fragments of the memory-traces and depicts them as quasi-portraits of the techno-social domain. Its structure glows by the indirect light of the spatial, functional, and cultural descent of carried assets. The CPU heatsink extracted from the recycling loop of computer components that can't mitigate heat anymore as well as the separated bicycle chain can't serve its purpose. Both elements lost their function but still have emissary abilities.
