Depot

Andrei Monastyrsky is one of the main ideologues of Moscow Conceptualism, a leading contemporary artist, and a co‑founder of the group Collective Actions, which began producing spatial and time‑based actions in 1976. Over the years group members have included Nikita Alexeev, George Kiesewalter, Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, and Sabine Hänsgen. Most of the actions were documented and published in fifteen volumes entitled Trips Out of Town.

The two‑hour video recording Depot was shot at Depot railroad station on the Savelovskaya line on January 30, 1990 for Andrei Monastyrsky’s installation Trip to the West. The location was not accidental. This was where Collective Actions participants met the viewers of their first actions in the mid‑1970s in order to accompany them through the forest to the Kievogorsky Field, which was the main place for the group’s events. The film is a minimalist sequence of views of railroad platforms, bridges, technical elements, trains, and the landscapes surrounding the station. The fixed shots of views are accompanied either by their usual background noises or the voices of Monastyrsky, George Kiesewalter, and Sabine Hänsgen reading excerpts from the Handbook of Snow, edited by D.M. Gray and D. H. Male (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1986), in Russian, German, and English. The book consists of three parts: “Snow and the Environment,” “Snowfall and Snowcover,” and “Snow and Engineering.”