How to explain that our streets are so dirty, and the entrances are mutilated? An unexpected look at the problem of our columnist.
Every time I cross the border between Russia and Finland on the Lev Tolstoy train, I experience a secret shock. Just outside the window there was a strip of garbage in the vicinity of Vyborg, and suddenly, a minute after the border, the landscape seemed to wake up from a swoon: the emerald color of the grass, the spruce forest with red cones, the snow-white slopes of the stones, you can even see the scarlet drops of strawberries in the grass along the railway – and such a visual paradise all two hours drive to Helsinki
But back to Moscow.
Why are our mailboxes hacked and elevators scribbled?
What’s this? The agony of adolescents in the puberty period or the mental attitude to scars …
It so happened that over the past ten years, our family has changed its address twice, the first time we moved to Maryino, the second time to where I am now writing these very lines on my laptop – in Lefortovo, in a block that is five minutes from Yauza. Both times we drove into a brand new, brand new house, just rebuilt by builders, into the entrances, where half of the apartments were still empty. And both times the houses were destroyed before our eyes. In Maryino, two elevators were the first to die. The cargo was burned. The small elevator was covered with foul language, black holes were burned with matches in the plastic lampshades above the lamps. A beautiful creamy yellow entrance, the young lads vehemently kicked, someone jumped with their feet on the radiators and knocked them to the floor. We tried to lock the house with a steel door, unsuccessfully raised money for a concierge …
And here we are in Lefortovo!
Read more:
- Why are we so dirty?
Again, a brand new house … perfect elevators … entrance with electronic constipation … mirrors. How long will the house last? Every morning, going out into the street, I looked around the entrance and the elevator with the same thought: when?
For almost a year, everything was more or less good, the effect of a tightly battened-down fortress worked, flowers appeared on the grounds … and yet, nevertheless, the fortress could not resist … only one stroke today: on each (!) mailbox, a dashing hand wrote a curse, almost all the doors of the boxes broken, and the mirrors in the elevator smashed to smithereens.
Now we survive on platforms – everyone has put steel doors.
I have two possible explanations for this vandalism.
The first is the mass death of adolescents during puberty, in the fatal period from 11 to 13 years old, when they actually die and, tragically growing up, go to spawn fate, like distraught salmon to death, cover the whole world around them, including themselves , traces of psychosomatic agony. To stop this agony – I’m talking about the role of civilization – is entrusted to a woman (girl, girlfriend), who takes the agony of the guys on herself and, in the end, turns the hysterical despot, the elevator scourer, the detractor of cleanliness and the cracker of boxes into a domestic slave (husband), who is already he will not dare to utter a word, touch, or scratch at home.
The second explanation for this craving for scratches was given by artist Bart Dorsa, an American living in Moscow, who participated in last year’s Biennale 55 in Venice. His project “Katya” became a quiet sensation in a parallel program, although it did not receive any laurels or noisy press. Katya is a Moscow girl whom Dorsa chose as the model for his dark suite of photographs. On the one hand, she attracted the American with an unusual fate, Katya was born in the Far East, in the family of an electrician of the local house of culture, but at the age of three she ended up in a convent with her mother, who took the tonsure. For ten years, Katya lived in strict obedience to a nun, after which she ended up in Moscow, where she joined a radical underground group and became an active member of the extreme body painting subculture. The surface with which these artists work was their own skin … tattoo, cuts, mummification of scars, piercing scarification (branding, cutting) and other body nightmare. In short, the show is not for the faint of heart.
In his Venetian pavilion “The Labyrinth of Darkness”, Bart Dorsa built an inspired suite of photographs of the girl’s face and naked body and, in addition, cast fragments of her sophisticated perversions from metal …
Here it is, the Moscow frieze of the new Parthenon, a collection of ruins, a view of the trucks and runways of the Russian mentality. Looking at Katya’s extreme skin, you understand that between her skin and the razor there is a mutual passionate feeling of love, that Katya’s tormented flesh is a reflection of mentality that can be compared with targets in the shooting gallery of history. Her skin has become a kind of palimpsest, on which, in the form of scars and scars, imprints of the social catastrophe of the XNUMXth century are imprinted. It shocks with authenticity, especially against the background of the glamorous cult of fakes and constrictions. What is the origin of the word authenticity? Authentic – see Dahl’s dictionary – means obtained under torture, when the executioner cut out “molts” from the victim’s skin – strips of living skin.
Here is another explanation for the state of our environment: it moans – like a tattoo on the skin – “it doesn’t hurt me” …
“Dialogue of Arts”, 2013, No. 4.