Woman

I had a dream. I see an old house that reminds me of a traditional Russian izba, a house made with large raw logs. I’m inside. The light is soft, it’s coming from a window and makes me feel that it’s early winter morning. A woman is standing in the middle of the room. She is naked. Her hair is long and partly covers her face so I can’t properly see it. Her head, her breasts, and her hands are white with flour. Everything is silent. There is blood on the woman’s fingers and there is blood on the floor.

Flour

I went to a house in the Russian countryside where I used to spend summer when I was a child. It was abandoned for 15 years after the death of my grandmother. No one entered the house during all those years and inside everything was as it used to be in my childhood. I opened the kitchen cupboards and found flour and other products. Here is some flour that I took from there.

Ashes

I always have notebooks that I feel every day with notes of things to be done and I usually fail to do them. I also write down my dreams and never reread them. And I write about my big plans that never come true because life goes in a different direction. I keep those notebooks because I have nostalgic feelings towards them. Recently I had to clean up the home where I don´t live anymore. I found 6 of those notebooks from different years. I took them with me. On that day I went to the bank of a river in Moscow. I was sitting there watching the river flow. It was getting darker and I made a fire using someone´s old bonfire. There I´ve burned all my notebooks. When the fire was gone I collected the ash.

Heart

When I was 5 years old I found a small ceramic figure of a lamb on a street. I felt sorry for it lying abandoned and not needed any more. That day I was severly punished for having it because my mother though that I had stolen it. But I still think that it was worth saving this little lamb, though I cried from pain and unfairness. I went to a market to buy some blood for my other project. And at the butchery shop I saw these hearts. Suddenly I felt how lonely they were. I wanted to take at least one of them with me. So I did.

Wood

This is a fragment of a Russian wooden log house. It is not built yet. It existed a long time ago. The house was in a village in a Russian nowhere. A village you have to drive to for eight hours from the capital and for the last 4 hours the road goes through a forest and there is no one there, no villages, no people, no electricity, no internet. A long time ago people were living there but then all of them moved away or died. The last inhabitant was an old lady living alone in this house. When she died the village was left completely abandoned. Then my friends found this village. Everything and everyone is gone but the wood stayed. Because this kind of wood can live forever. My friends disassembled the wooden house into separate logs and moved it to a new place nearby. Now the new house is being constructed out of these old logs.