Autoarchaelogy, performative installation, A3, Moscow, RU, 2019

Where to store things? For us, it is a problem, namely as an artistic one: we try not to produce art objects precisely because we have no place. We felt this especially deeply when we had most of our belongings just to bury because they didn't fit on the plane. Among them were notebooks, graphics, musical instruments, and all our paintings. For six months in the ground, things have ceased to be what they were before. Water, temperature drops, bacteria, and other factors began to turn them into the soil so successfully that after the deconstruction of installation we had to throw everything away except few paintings covered with the perfect German Gesso.
There is no more room in the world for new things. We, as artists, work with the things we already have, or with those things that we simply cannot do without. These are our personal belongings: clothes, dishes.
There are not many of these things. They are constantly following us, accompanying us in our lives, in our travels. Some of them—In September we will have to leave Moscow. And some of the things we won’t be able to take with us, that we have nowhere to store, we have decided to bury.
The soil will become a temporary storage for these things, the things displacing the soil, pushing out… a part of it. And, according to Archimedes’ principle, the things will force a portion of the earth up to the surface, leaving behind a trace measured in a universal equivalent.
In general, both these things and this soil are casts of our life; they are part of our physical existence. This soil, therefore, is a cast of that existence. Thus, the displaced earth will be our… self-portrait. If you look closely, that self-portrait will turn out not to be so conventional and primitive. It reflects us in quite a detailed and many-sided way, in different aspects. It depicts us in sufficient detail, from different sides.
This is a modest work… for which, among other things, the earth has been involved.