Citation of the performance ‘Surpassing the Beeline’ directed by Abhishek Taphar in Frascati Theater, November 2018
After 11 years living in the Netherlands, I still do not feel completely Dutch. I will always be an immigrant. At the same time, I do not feel Russian anymore, still asking myself, who am I? I went back to eat white chalk from the sacred mountains where orthodox churches and monasteries are located. I really desired that chalk, and even though it seemed pure and sourced directly from nature, I was getting stomach pain, but I couldn’t stop eating.
For the past year, I have been in the practice of collecting and eating earth from across the world. Sometimes, it makes me feel like a world citizen. I started mixing different types of edible earth from different countries. This material has memory and keeps history of what the land has experienced. To make sense of who I am, I listened to these materials. It experienced shifting homes, wind, turbulences, love, loss. It would inform me rather than I inform it. Earth knows better than I do. I wanted to map the right composition of the material, which would sustain, and could represent me. However, different types of clay repel each other, and remain fluid. Of course, I still take pieces of ceramics and eat them.
Here are ceramics cups produced out of mixture of clays, edible earth found on the Dutch market, face masks, clays from my country and possibly some local Dutch earth. You are welcome to have a bite or taste them by licking. I am sharing with you my practice, and it’s up to you, if you take it or not. Maybe the cup already broke, while you were drinking tea, as all of these cups are at the verge of breaking. This project is living on a breaking point, which is negotiating between different soils, between different social/political histories and memories.
