Six Stones, matrix, 2016
“O, my god,” Belarmino said, covering his black face with black hands. Marika and Anton screened him a video in which they walk through the greasy snow, black with mud, along Burakova Street in Moscow. Marika wore moon rovers; Anton had a long black goat coat and Lappish seal shoes from the Udelka flea market.
They lived in Reutovo (Moscow's far suburbs). Every single night, they traveled on a tram for an hour and a half home, always without a ticket, and then on foot beyond the Moscow Ring Road, where behind a buzzing power line was their house, then garages, and the taiga began. Artists had almost no money during that winter. The budget for the day was seventy rubles (less than 1 euro): in the Atak store, this amount could be enough for a liter of milk, half of the bread, two bananas, and two candies. M&A held out in this mode for about six months until the spring, when they hitchhiked to Budapest.
Danube Stones, Found Object. 2016
Thing is simple and odd; through this oddity, a particular complexity may arise. Once in Budapest, Anton and Marika came across two stones on the bank of the Danube.
“I am holding in my hand a piece of something: small, around 1cm diameter, yellow with black veins. We picked it up on the beach. I’ll put it next to another similar object. There are many different qualities in each; in a particular way, they are like stones, but precisely to say that we can not.”
Artists have watched them interact, playing with meaning and score. M&A found out that there are three types of stones: stones, things like stones, and things not like stones.
Danube Stones, Found Object, 2016
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky, a Russian art theorist, noticed that art requires the Сoncurrence of both time and space for the artwork and the spectator. The artistic act establishes the place and time of the conditional ersatz-ontology, which might be objectified by anything. The artistic act is a manifestation of Nonknowledge in space and time as the oneness given to us in its absence.
Six Stones, Matrix, 2016
Artists developed a topological matrix in which the stones act as variables; the empty place in the matrix is denoted by “the stone”, which can be occupied by any object. The topological matrix is the simplest expanding group structure of six objects.
Six Stones, Matrix
The quantity and proportion of personal belongings have always attracted artists' attention, so they decided to fix their material condition: 83 things were the entire M&A's property for that moment.
The topological matrix might be read temporally as a transition from one cogitative event to another in time, connected with past events and the synthetic unity of all these events together.
Six Stones, matrix variation
The artists' possessions were bounded together and hanged on the six strings as a weight for the tension. The strings served as the drivers for the processual performing of the sounds collected and selected by the artists, especially for the event. Six suspended objects formed the playground for a performative procedure that lasted 6 hours until the installation got broken.