The Elephant and the Butterfly: Garage Teens Team projects
Dasha Dubodelova
Moog and Buchla: A Revolution in Music and its Spreading to the Masses
My project is a study of the modular synths developed by Robert Moog and Don Buchla and the influence these people had on the electronic music industry.
I have been listening to electronic music since childhood and I am trying to produce my own tracks now. I was curious as to how it happened that we hear electronic music absolutely everywhere today, how it has spread to the masses. So, I decided to plunge into the history of modular synthesizers, aiming to find out what happened between the time when music was produced using machines the size of a room with complex commutation and when compact and easy-to-use devices were introduced. My project is about how two people contributed immensely to the development of electronic music and made it so much easier to create.
My friend Seryozha Olyakov helped me to conceive and implement the project. My friend Rita Berezutskaya and sister Alina Dubodelova also helped a lot with the research and to refine the text. I love all three of you and thank you very much.
Dasha Lebedeva
Are you walking tonight?
Are you walking tonight? traces the emergence of vogue culture, whereby the illusory world of unattainable chic, familiar to all Americans from the shop windows of fashion boutiques, came face to face with New York reality. This contrast is the key to understanding the style that eventually formed around the personalities of legendary drag queens. The biography of one of them, Angie Xtravaganza, formed the basis of this project.
In 1988, Michael Cunningham dedicated his short story The Slap of Love to the fate of Angie Xtravaganza, the Mother of the House Xtravaganza. Following Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning, which explored the underground ball scene, Cunningham reconstructed and put on paper the history of voguing. His interviews with dancers and personal memories were the sources for idea behind my project.
Voguing is currently one of the most vibrant and popular trends in contemporary dance. Whereas in the 1970s and 1980s this flamboyant style did not reach beyond American cities and was condemned by society, since then it has gained global recognition. The conflict between ephemeral dreams and harsh everyday reality has been left in the past, on the graffiti-covered streets of Harlem, but it was this contradiction that allowed vogue culture to develop its characteristic features at the beginning of the journey.
I would especially like to thank the Garage Teens Team educators Polina Struzhkova, Emma Bayer, and Anastasia Chekryzhova.
Participants:
Head of the project: Lebedeva
Photos: Olga Ryazantseva
Voice: Evgeny Kirillov, Elizaveta Anisimova
Design: Polina Kulchitskaya
Make-up: Maria Gutsanu
Sound and editing: Maxim Pechersky
Sasha Vitko
The Role of Art during a Crisis
The museum chair is not comfortable. If you get up from it, you will need to look at the works around you. How to look remains unclear. Does looking mean not paying attention to all the notifications from various media about how everything is bad everywhere for everyone? Or does it mean looking for a reflection of the ongoing horror, looking for a way to combat them in the artifacts? After all, if we are not trying to make the world a better place, then what are we doing here at all? An uncomfortable conflict, almost as uncomfortable as this chair. You want to get up, but it seems easier to just continue to sit…
Many thanks to Uasmi Nasser for helping me with the audio. Without him, nothing would have worked out!
Tonya Soboleva
Art Vandalism as a Reflection of the Will of the Other
My focus is on the relationship between art, vandals, and society. I studied the problem of art vandalism and found one of the possible reasons behind it, based on a combination of the relationship between the community, the violator, and the art object damaged by the vandal.
With this video, created by me and my colleague Anya Rusanova, and a text read by Alexandra Soboleva, I try to convey the atmosphere in which the future criminal exists and how their attitude toward art evolves from neutrality to hatred, eventually leading to an act of vandalism.
Just like other Teens Team members, I try to view the situation from a different angle, carefully avoiding radicalism and unfounded conclusions about people and events.
Asya Ivanova
Generous Body
Link to the project website is here.
What meaning can be assigned to the phrase “generous body”? The body is “generous,” containing many unique aspects, or the organism is “complete” and uniform. You can also think about a physically undeveloped body, which in society’s view is opposed to the other label, the “thin” body. Or is this all just nonsense? This word game can reveal constructs inherent in human thinking.
With this project, I wanted to analyze various aspects of the subject’s relationship with their body. The project immerses the viewer as a direct participant in their own inner world, opening up an opportunity for an honest and intimate conversation with their body.
My reflections on the subject of the bodily are based on the experience of some notable personalities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Pina Bausch, Pedro Almodóvar, and Louise Bourgeois. Works by these seemingly unrelated authors intertwine, if not in terms of their approach to the language of expression then in their understanding of bodily practices as a powerful discursive tool.
It should be noted that my statement deals with feminine experience. This is not because I meant to label “male” and “female” bodies. It derives from an attempt to concentrate on a single aspect and trace the specificity of a woman’s perception of her body as an experience that is familiar to the author of the project.
Special thanks to those who shared their experience as the project evolved and helped me to bring it to life: Yulia Shamsutdinova, Anna Renova, Lyubov Gurenkova, Anna Demochkina, Ramil Alyautdinov, Aleksandra Drozdova, Maria Roskoshno, and Roman Dementyev.
Katya Podchernyaeva
Your Letters Make My Entire Library
The project is about how a collection of archival letters turned into a piece of art that helped people realize the power of love under the onslaught of Stalinism.
Nine years of continuous communication and waiting. Waiting for the end, which, as it seemed back then, might never come. The heartbreaking story of Lev Mishchenko and his wife Svetlana Ivanova helps you change your perception of present-day relationships and understand quite a lot about the horrors that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
Varya Grechukhina
[or/and]
My project explores how important it is to re-read classical texts and look at how they relate to what is happening today. In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, for example, one can simultaneously discover slightly scary parallels with the period of self-isolation and quarantine, which can be reconsidered through other texts, through the analysis of the everyday and the relative mundanity of violence.
I would really like the final piece to be a little rough and perhaps somewhat weird. This is how I see what is going on, it is this sometimes rather helpless mundanity that conceals the greatest fear for me. It seems that you can fight it in different ways, including through the practices of reading and re-reading, which may open up ways for new, modern-day interpretations of previously written texts.
Avgustina Shamarina
What is Alive?
Link to the project website is here.
My intention was to reassess the impact on people of the theme of death.
This idea emerged in connection with my interest in Namegarden, a public memorial complex created by artists in the courtyard of a private crematorium in Nizhny Novgorod. The project addresses one of the fundamental aspects of human existence—the fear of death.
I was thinking about my associations with death and came to the conclusion that it is not merely the disappearance of a person’s individual life. This is a question of posthumous existence and rebirth, and therefore of how one can overcome the fear of death, how to turn death into a meaningful and, perhaps, creative moment of life.
I would like to thank artists Artem Filatov and Alexei Korsi for the inspiration. And our teachers for their support.
Ekaterina Mastyukova
(Un)known
Drawing on Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road, my project takes a look at hitchhiking as a way to establish relationships with strangers. With the help of collages and quotes from the book, I tried to convey the feeling of connection that arises between people in a short time spent together.
My project is about uncertainty and the unknown, to which we agree when entering into a dialogue with strangers.
Anya Trofimova
[a place. with too many thoughts]
The moment of choosing the relationship and the art was the easiest for me. My eyes did not wander and my heart did not thump—“What?” Mentally singing the line “But the captain, drunk and stubborn, won’t disappear anywhere while the lighthouse is burning”, I knew clearly that the band ssshhhiiittt! would be central to my project, and the relationship of choice would be the relationship of the band’s lead singer Nikita Kislov with himself.
Why this topic and this band? Honestly and sincerely, this is the most significant band in my life. They helped me find a way out of the jungle of disappointment, severe pain, and loneliness, when everything seemed so cumbersome, as if you are falling into an abyss, knowing what is down there, and that is exactly why you are falling. But this music smoothes out the fall, saves, kindles the heart, makes you believe and burn with fire.
For what? To show the importance of feelings and thoughts, emotions, and the surrounding world. You are not alone, no one is alone. Anything is possible, you can handle it. Everything will come to you, for sure.
For whom? For those who will respond in their hearts. For my own self, who does not understand whether she has remained in the past and wants to finally break this thread.
I would like to express my gratitude to the musician Isha from Odessa, the stars, Nikita Kislov, my mom, the amazing Emma, and the equally wonderful Polina. Thank you very much.
Margo Mityakova
Fathers, Children, and Contemporary Art
This subject is very emotional for me, since I often encounter teachers’ negative attitude to contemporary art. They often call it violent, aggressive, and evil, although in fact it is just a reflection of real life through the prism of the artist's eyes and brush.
To reveal these attitudes, I wrote and edited a dialogue between Olga (a Russian language teacher, representing the older generation) and Denis (a young man representing the new generation, a defender of contemporary art). I am thankful to my friend Alyona Starostina who helped me with it. I selected works by famous artists, representing both the new and the old schools. Voiceover and sound recording: Sveta Agaverdieva, Roma Bardakov, Maria Vasilyeva; and, of course, thanks to Antonina for the edited video.
As the story unfolds, we see teachers’ and young people’s attitudes to contemporary art, as well as how these attitudes to the creations of contemporaneity change.
Like other Garage Teens Team members, I want to explore the given subject more closely, but from the point of view that I am used to facing in my life.
Aleksandra Elisovitskaya
Look Between the Lines. The Jewish Museum Berlin
Link to the project website is here.
Daniel Libeskind’s original Jewish Museum Berlin design was entitled Between the Lines. My work began with reflections around this building, but later I realized that many of the themes and approaches to work that are implicit here remain relevant for the architect.
My project outlines a conversation about these “between-the-lines” topics that run through Libeskind’s practice, just like the Void axis in the Jewish Museum—somewhat invisible, but in fact deeply material.
I would like to thank Garage Teens Team’s curators and teachers Anastasia Chekryzhova, Polina Struzhkova, and Emma Bayer for their support in the development of the project. Thanks to Maksim Ershov for his consultations on the history of music.