Summit

The idea of a summit, an encounter between important people and things at a round table, is a recurring theme in the work of Pepperstein and Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, the group he founded with Sergei Anufriev and Yuri Leiderman. Entities gathering at a summit range from philosophical concepts to animals and microorganisms. Here, we witness a meeting of phantom leaders that has somehow created an impossible flourishing, where the energy of the earth and its flora oozes from the attributes of power: the armchairs, the flags, and the table. The ”brotherhood of man” from the songs of John Lennon and Simon and Garfunkel has proved possible in a particular state of consciousness and the dreams of the psychedelic revolution have come true.

Explaining his interest in inventing and designing new states and regimes, Pepperstein connects it to “a certain asymmetry” in his consciousness, which “replaces memories with the activity of the imagination.” “You keep forgetting things, but your imagination reconstructs the missing pieces, so in the end you find it easier to invent things than remember them.”