The Island, (Access to water), 2021  

 Public art installation. Concrete boxes, acrylic painting, sand, beach debris, sound from a speaker. The work was created as part of Valeria Novitskaya’s curatorial project “The Island”, dedicated to Fabrichnaya Street in Novosibirsk. For the inhabitants of Factory, the concepts of “island”, “safe haven”, “isolation” are key in the perception of their place in the city, and personal self-awareness. The inhabitants of the street are cut off from the main body of the district by the railroad, and from the river by river fences. port, although historically the street was in the city center and from it through the park you could walk to the beach.

To talk about the problem — the impossibility of access to water for local residents, I created a kind of hermetic capsule in which the dream came true and access to the water was symbolically realized. As a basis for my project, I took abandoned concrete boxes, which I cleared of debris, thickets and covered with sand, made a painting on the walls referring to reminiscences about summer, a river, a beach holiday, and put a column from which sounds recorded by the river were heard — the splash of waves, the course of ships, the cries of seagulls.

The walls of the unfinished building turn into frames for the sky, since there is nothing more to see at the installation site, and the sky becomes the embodiment of that very dream of a utopian paradise beach.

The idea of the beach on Factory Street is utopian so much that concentrated in an abandoned unfinished box, it is no longer a designation of a problem, its albeit a temporary, but a solution, but a difficult philosophical task, can we feel freedom in a limited space, can we be transported to the place of our dreams, being on the outskirts of the city in unfinished garages? Finally, which is stronger, our intentions or reality?

The total installation was made as part of the 48 Hours festival, with the support of the Goethe Institute.

Thanks to volunteers Maxim, Zhenya and Lera, Masha and Natasha