I’m borrowing the title from Luis Buñuel’s movie, which, in its turn, is a paraphrase of Marx’s adage about the specter of communism haunting Europe. For me, this expression is a very good description of the process of substitution: instead of acknowledging certain things as belonging to us, we yearn to appropriate them. The issue of who owns freedom, goodwill, fate or even one’s own body—and whether anybody can claim ownership of these things at all—has become a horrible muddle.
On the one hand, I’m tempted to focus on deserted spaces that emerged on previously state-owned sites that were once intended for public use. These voids might seem to be free territories, buildings or spaces, but in reality they do have owners. Formerly open to the public, these abandoned, windowless construction sites, wastelands, unkempt houses or booths, locked up centers for culture and other locales of this sort have become dangerous negative spaces of perpetual reduction where invisible Masters lurk in wait for those who might accidentally stumble onto their land.
On the other hand, I keep seeing bodies repressed by the system that undergoes internal redefinitions, or expressions of the physical (instead of the human) bring old Soviet standards back to life; bodies are defined by the same old rules once again.
Pascal Gielen has described the purposeful and systematic privatization of common spaces as “enclosure.” Continuous common land has lately been transformed into discrete “enclosures” of the growing number of owners, marked up with a grid of walls or fences. But did Soviet-era access to common spaces have anything to do with freedom? At the time, the state forcibly assigned certain spaces as public and imposed a unified design on them, applying rigid norms to the planning and decoration of these sites. Virtually identical spaces proliferated across the empire, and the introduction of a unified standard led to the common corroding the private. Besides, common spaces turned into glorified incarceration areas under the system’s watchful eye.
I see the same process of colonization of the individual in both scenarios for the distortion of the idea of common spaces (it is worth noting that in the case of enclosures, the private does not equal the individual at all). The indivisible individual is at risk of being divided and tamed because it is the otherness, once each individual recognizes it as his or her own, that defines their belonging to humankind as a plurality in unity. Both trends, the old and the new alike, presuppose enforced surveillance of free spaces. It does not matter whether we are dealing with common land on which the authorities have imposed prescriptive rules, or with the ghettoized gated communities of “elite residential complexes”: either way, public existence comes to be defined from without. The mass of discrete statistical “population units” steeped in the principle of standardized uniformity supports the roiling “agonism” of a community, with its complicated, contradictory and conflict-laden structure. Freedom, it seems, is being squeezed by the “vice” of ideology, or else privatized.
Weighed down by the painfully familiar experience of rejection and prohibitions, we have learned to find certain bracing impetus and inspiration in limitations; suddenly confronted with freedom, we feel at a loss. Spontaneous expressions of humanity are usually doomed to oscillate between the two options instead of choosing the third, tenth, or umpteenth way. Lost in search of an appropriate norm, we rely on the misleading principle of similarity. Artificially imposed norms have undermined our understanding of normalcy to such a degree that normal human phenomena have come to be viewed by many as ugly, pernicious, heroic or insane.
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While working on this series, I have singled out something like the threshold of humanity, or the conditions, that is, under which it becomes visible. Something seems to happen when people perform certain solemn or, to the contrary, necessary repetitive quotidian actions: something that fills these activities with separate meanings. The act of ascribing meaning to actions, when an individual believes to have overcome the immanence of the utilitarian quotidian, or has indeed overcome it, can be either instinctive or conscious. In my opinion, in these cases humanity appears as either its lookalike, or, to the contrary, comes forcefully to the surface.
There’s no denying that I approached this topic within the framework of the peculiarities of the feminine status; granted, I did not single it out, noting its importance as a signifier of the human state as such instead. I sometimes think that femininity, with its attendant special physicality, objectified status, subalterity and immanence imposed by society, is a good metaphor for marginality of the human condition as such once it dares to “accept the offer” of the system.
The series is subdivided into two parts that approach the theme from different perspectives. In the first series, I depicted the interiors of an abandoned sanatorium in Kaniv (coincidentally, the project was created on one of its floors) and then added, based on conditions and limitations of its rooms, stairs and corridors, the things that may seem human, have been human, or only resemble humans. The second series, comprised of four works, is based on several years’ observations of Kaniv weddings, which I have transformed into a representation of ritualized celebrations as such. The attributes of contemporary wedding celebrations are evocative of the classical imagery of ceremonial Roman processions or bacchanals. Therefore, humanity has to stand the test of limitations or prohibitions imposed by the System or the Customs. Both parts of the project point to an act of sacrifice, so to speak: I draw parallels between wasteful wedding potlatchs and the system’s quotidian violence, where humanity as such becomes victim.
The superficial expressions of humanity I’m tracking in my works can take on different forms under the repressive conditions of the norm. For example, descriptions of sexuality in the works of St Theresa, or St Catherine with her imaginary wedding ring of Christ’s foreskin, as described in The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, stem from extreme religious exaltation, which, in its turn, has nothing to do with sublimation. Therefore, I would like to eschew a definitive interpretation of certain figures in the series: some objects may appear to resemble flesh, to be fleshly (another expression of humanity), or to serve as a metaphor of human nature made manifest in its unconstrained form in juxtaposition to the severely codified surroundings. Accordingly, I value painstaking distinctions between the similar and the identical (the former presupposes differences, whereas the latter serves the norm).
Most of these works adopt elements typical of Soviet interiors: recognizable walls with their upper part painted white, and the lower part traditionally painted into a dirty “restrictive” shade with oil paint; palatial decorations of cramped quarters, with carpets on the stairs replaced with imitative paint on the stairs themselves. When working on the project, I noticed that the upper part of typical wall panels reminds me of the horizon, and this painted horizon became both an ominous sign and a metaphor of the system for me. I’m drawing parallels between the notion of the standard in Soviet construction and cars as the contemporary symbolical embodiment of the standard (in my weddings, they are always a stand-in for Roman ceremonial chariots). An SUV decorated for a wedding is startlingly similar to a hearse, another standard unit commensurate with the dimensions of a human body. Therefore, all attempts to standardize human bodies, actions or relations accomplish the opposite: Soviet buildings calculated to satisfy minimal human needs rankle humankind, and a celebratory car designed to fit human dimensions reminds viewers of death.
The realization that the exit is not where most would go looking for it instills the suffocating atmosphere in all works of the series. There is not a door, nor a real skyline in sight. We can only break free through humanity, wherever it is present and wherever we are capable of recognizing it.
(Vlada Ralko, Kyiv – Kaniv, June – September 2018)
*The project was supported by ChervoneChorne Art Group