Contemporaries, I am bad

Ksenia Bashmakova

First of all, I was interested in working with a visual representation of the text. To get away from direct illustrativeness was
Not easy, especially when the text was torn out of context. I wanted to convey not what feelings or images that this text evokes, but what images could lead to its appearance - to look into the author’s head a second before the creation of the line. The skull, symbolizing death, I wanted to imagine not as a central figure of the composition, but as an object that is constantly nearby. Like the ticking of the wall clock that we ignore because we are used to it, but which is never interrupted.

Yuri Ugolnikov

For me, as for Ksenia, the photographs were not precisely illustrations or something like that. Rather, I wanted to show two poles of human existence. Poles, in the hesitation between which, often not noticing their constant presence, life passes.

The extreme points of tension of life are death (non-existence) and creativity-in which life, I apologize for pathos, and overcomes death (not quite, but to some extent overcomes). At the same time, in a paradoxical way, this enhanced manifestation of life, life in a square, also includes the image of its opposite - makes death itself part of immortality (sorry for pathos again). In general, for me it was an attempt to show ordinary as a mixture of creativity and death.

I wanted to pick up the texts unexpected, something scratching, texts that are knocked out of everyday speech, but would not immediately be recognized as literary, rather, as a kind of anomaly, the accident of the language: I wanted to show the flickering of the text on the verge of life and literature (in general, on the verge of existence and non-existence).

Since I am not friends with the camera (and with the technique), the main work fell to Ksenia. For the most part, I flickered around with a lighting device (1 piece) and brought coffee with cookies.

The great difficulty was to find some places and time, convenient for both her and for me. It turned out to be shot in two gunsuas: the first time they shot in the Cultural Center "Pupan", and the second - literally at my work. The “skull” was both times the same. Anastasia Ishova gave it to us. Later we tried to change the “skull”, but we never did it. This is probably the best.

The authors of the texts

"Contemporaries, I am bad" - Valery Silivanov

“Everyone goes away, and I pass ...” - Walt Whitman (free translation of Yuri Ugolnikov)

"Everything goes like a steamboat" - German Lukomnikov

"The patient was surrounded by few things ..." - Yuri Olesha

"You, the light that enveloped ..." - Walt Whitman (translation of Korney Chukovsky)

"How endless space ..." - Andrey Platonov

"I dreamed in the neon light ..." - Valery Silivanov

"Pay attention ..." - Valery Silivanov

"Using the services of the state ..." - Ekaterina Sokolova

"Do not stick out ..." - Ekaterina Sokolova

"I am a muzzle ..." - Valery Silivanov

"We are adequate ..." - Ekaterina Sokolova

"About ownerless and suspicious ..." - Ekaterina Sokolova

"Heaven until the morning of Gaslo ..." - Valery Silivanov