Urban Self-Expression Headquarters Public Day

The coming-of-age stage, migrant experience, the death of a loved one, marginality—this is liminality. Revolutions, life under capitalism bursting at the seams, the Donetsk Region, voting, confession and communion—this is also liminality. It means a threshold state, an existential crisis, when you cannot live in the old way, but haven’t learnt how to live in a new way yet.

Having entered this threshold space, the participant is invited to meet their liminality, to sense and express it. The space is a quadrangular collapsible structure (resembling a voting booth), covered on four sides with translucent curtains. Inside, the participant listens to a meditation guide using a QR-code, with a printed version of the text also available. In leaving the space, the participant crosses the symbolic threshold of their own liminality. 

Pietà addresses the theme of experiencing and accepting death. Your own and that of your loved ones. Each participant will become a part of a mini-installation created by human bodies and will have an individual experience dealing with loss.

Pietà (“pity” in Italian) is the iconography of the scene of the mourning of Christ by the Virgin Mary, depicting the Mother of God and the dead Christ lying on her lap.

Participants are immersed in their own emotional experience, forgetting about the daily routine, the public space, and the random audience. This is an exercise in focusing on yourself and regaining your own worth. Two participants take positions replicating the Pietà scene, each going through their own personal experience of losing someone or themselves. The performance ends as soon as one of the participants stops experiencing their loss.

The idea of ​​the project amused the doctors, but even today medicine is bringing its methods closer to sleep as a healing source… And I believe that I am not so far away with my project, that soon the poet and the musician will come to the aid of science with technology and will complete my dream of building a “Sonata of Sleep”…

Konstantin Melnikov

Sleep Tight is an art project by Urban Self-Expression Headquarters about the feeling of vulnerability in the urban space, as experienced through the prism of street sleep. Last fall, together with the artist Darya Trubarova, Sleep Research Laboratory performed collective practices in the manner of sociological polls of passers-by.

As part of the 2nd Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, the Laboratory’s junior employees offer relaxing sonic therapy; snooze sessions during which Museum visitors are encouraged to talk about burnout, anxiety, and their sense of place.

Especially for the project, the junior staff developed the “Melnitsa” (Mill) simulator, based on architect Konstantin Melnikov’s Green City concept. Participants will be offered a short rest according to the system of “rationalized sleep,” which is a series of activities that include awareness of disturbing topics, relaxation exercises, and meditative immersion into “sleep” while listening to the podcast Feelings in the Big City.

We absorb a “culture of shame” from early childhood. They shame us with or without reason, control us, and teach us to be “proper and good,” often using shame as a tool of suppression. An unresolved encounter with shame paralyzes and interferes with life even long after the “shameful” event.

“As part of the performance My/Your Shame, people can share with me a story in which they experienced shame, in response to a shameful story from my life. I am creating a confidential area. One by one, participants will step behind a screen, where we will sit with our backs to each other. I will not see their faces unless they want me to. Participants can share any stories. This is a zone free from condemnation,” says Dima Kulishov.

If we are afraid to talk about our fears, then how can we work with them? If the city’s public spaces do not belong to us and various institutions and systems use fear as an instrument of suppression, then where can we find a place for self-expression? When we meet ourselves we face a huge number of implicit and explicit fears, very often without finding opportunities to articulate them openly. Fear/Dating is a temporary space for everyone to reveal their fears, share them with others, and find alternative ways to experience them.

Participants will be invited to discuss their fears and will be introduced to practices for overcoming them in the format of speed dating, before creating their own manifesto reflecting on their dating experience.