Real time seems to run late. The specificity of memory structures predictably presupposes that the real will be reevaluated, pulverized and inevitably deformed in the course of its transformation into memories as phenomena ostensibly preserved in the archives fall under the clout of specific laws and are pushed into a separate, parallel course. Once the things archived by memory are expunged from the active flow of time, they get corroded and fall into ruin; but what are we to do when existence is being edited in real time?
With the war in its fourth year, our hybrid reality seems to create reservations in order to contain certain people, things, territories and events. There are somnolent preserves where the environment’s total resistance consumes each movement before it happens, rendering active actions impossible. (“What can we do?”)
A hostage, a refugee or any person barred from participation in active processes cannot decide his or her own fate. Some undefined territories or moments in history are suppressed, as if purloined from reality. Some things are continuously transformed into menacing destructive elements, the dangerous Odd Ones Out between the organized, well-defined communities, a test and a temptation for each community. Despite being eliminated from the game, some elements acquire crucial roles. Inactive and forcibly removed from many foundational processes, they become staggeringly important. These elements seem to question all that was constant, familiar or faultless (in its familiarity).
This reminds me of the game of musical chairs, where the number of chairs is one fewer than the number of players, meaning that once the music stops and everyone takes their seats, one player is left out. Hannah Arendt had similar reflections on persons or entire communities that were forced to leave their residencies, displaced from their homes and doomed to search for a new one: the basic human right to choose a place of residence freely is not guaranteed because all territories are already claimed and occupied. Therefore, those left without a place, like a player left without a chair, are expunged not only from the general system of social relations, but, in a sense, from humankind as such. “The Odd Ones Out” slip beyond the boundaries of laws due to their special status, which, in a way, sets them free and ungoverned.
This creates a sort of prohibited zone for everything that is deemed indecent as regards the “norm.” Hostages and refugees are indecent because they are inconvenient, a complication everyone could do without. War is indecent because it is upsetting. Refugees are indecent because they are alien. Bodies are indecent because they tend to not fit the standards. Departures from the norm are also indecent because they spit at the tradition that enshrines continuity. The living are indecent because they are unpredictable. The political is indecent because it lays claim to the private, etc.
In reflecting on these reserves or lands prohibited from interacting with the familiar world (in reality, these are one and the same), you cannot avoid the hermetic. The question from the ancient Ukrainian lullaby, Where will we stay the night?, is oriented towards the future nobody can predict. It can be read as a question about lodgings for the time and about shelter, as well as a question about what is ours, and about the future shape this “ours” might take. How would we recognize our future shelter?
Returning to Hannah Arendt yet again, let us pause at her definition of authenticity or what’s “yours” as the thing that stays with you, no matter the circumstances. After all, authentic selfhood often subverts the so-called “norm.” Norms as a guarantee of ordered and stable existence reject difference by their very definition. Doesn’t alien seem alien only insofar as it does not match the “norm”? Doesn’t the curious superfluous element (the Odd One Out, the one “left without a chair”) instantly undermine any hasty generalization with the very fact of its existence?
We should probably try to establish the criteria of otherness in order to obtain the key to interpretation of the general picture of the present goings-on. Again, I am reminded of children’s tests asking to find an odd element that seemingly undermines the cohesiveness of the picture. I was always fascinated by things that threatened the deathly quagmire of rules, things that “spoiled the picture” and got censored out. I’ve been interested in discrete anarchic elements that obstructed the predefined course of events and, moreover, became a precondition for any event as such.
In my 2016 series The Base, I started to single out objects that, in my opinion, were symptomatic of the post-Soviet urban space: neglected fragments of Soviet urban spaces, unnoticed, “slunk back” and found space among more modern sites. These objects are even recreated, wittingly or unwittingly, often in all their needless and purely ritualistic might, influencing surrounding spaces by the very fact of their existence “beyond the zone.” Desolate areas around the Kaniv studio where I’ve been working, on and off, for four years now are filled with these objects/signs: recognizable bus stops, empty pedestals, abandoned buildings, etc.
This time, I would like to collect things that seem to “stick out” or be expunged because of their incongruity or unfitness to the chosen system. The destructive potential of these “oddities” threatens common sense, because common sense intentionally normalizes and depletes reality so that it won’t overflow in its superfluity. (Vlada Ralko, May-July 2017, Kyiv)
RESERVE
(AFTER WORK ON THE SERIES WAS COMPLETE)
The parallel wartime quotidian life has made a collective hostage or a person controlled by external circumstances the hero of the time. This hero resembles a doll, a surreal body without organs; interpreted literally, it must indeed look like one. This depersonalized, anonymous body of a human doll without a recognizable face rejects its organs (power to act) without using them, and becomes the Odd One Out, the Goodwill Hostage. It is excluded from life systems as if it had no earlier life, “before” life has a chance to occur. In the poem of Vasyl Stus, the phrase “destiny is in no haste to beget us” sounds like a cry, but in this case the body voluntarily lingers at the fetal stage, choosing to stay (and live out its life!) “in reserve,” without joining the open game. It is neither a subject nor a seductive Baudrillardean object; it is a thing that remains a permanent potentiality.
The question “What can we do?” places this human doll, tired before real exertion and scared before real fear, beyond any relationships. Instead of the seductive “source of opportunities,” all we get is a reserve of opportunities, a frozen preserve with ossified rules. Its inhabitants move, do their part, go to work, eat and sleep carefully, as if treading on eggshells.
I chose figures and things made invisible by their familiarity. Nobody notices them, their familiar visage has exempted them from the flow of life. The series’ key figure is a worker moving in a somnolent rhythm with no regard for weather or time. His inexorable monotonous progression reminded me of Death. I was also struck by shawl-swaddled women shambling through empty streets to a church on Savior of the Apple Feast Day: they looked like puppets guided by a set of instructions. While working at the Kaniv studio, I observed what was happening around me. All persons and objects seemed to exist on their own, with no external ties. Even the shadows they cast seemed separated from them. This effect of fully isolated elements was further underscored by scorching heat that did not relent as we worked on our canvases in Kaniv. Everything was so empty that persons and objects ran the risk of being hunted down by the emptiness. Even my own presence seemed strangely illusory. (Vlada Ralko. August-September 2017, Kaniv-Kyiv)
*The project was supported by ChervoneChorne Art Group