KOLLEKTIVNYE DEYSTVIYA (COLLECTIVE ACTIONS). THE DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE ACTIONS, Photo and Video
JOURNEYS TO THE COUNTRYSIDE. VOLUME TWELVE
140. Kashchei the Immortal of Collective Actions
During the participants' movement along a snow-covered field and a newly leveled clearing in the forest (parallel to Heidegger's clearing), a small speaker (it was carried by S. Sitar) played the soundtrack of a reading (in AM's voice) of a fragment from Ananda Maitreya's book The Path to Nirvana.
(This cutting of a new clearing, which is several times wider than Heidegger's clearing, was new and completely unexpected for the participants; there arose fears that the place where the bear cub from the action Underground Five-Year Plan was destroyed in the excavations on this new clearing.)
Reaching the place on the snowy field between two remaining birch trees where the bear cub was buried (where up to then we had staged 8 actions), we installed the figure of a white rabbit holding a clock and standing on a round platform 20 cm in diameter, constituting the "Protective Schema of Kashchei the Immortal" ("oak [dub]," "chest [sunduk]," "hare [zaiats]," "duck [utka]," "egg [yaitso]," but the circle with the label "needle [igla]" was covered with an illustration from a pin containing the rocket Soyuz).
We then attached a circle (60 cm in diameter) with the same schema to Kuzkin's back, except where the nouns were replaced with the last names: Dubov, Sundukov, Zaitsov, Utkin, Yaitsov, and the circle with the word "needle [igla]" had attached to it an image of academic Williams (Kievogorsky Field where we stage our actions belongs to the Williams Institute of Feeds).
Per the instructions, Kuzkin was supposed to move into the forest from the clearing (in north-west direction), carrying in one hand a speaker with the soundtrack of a reading of the fragment of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" playing, and in the other a video-recorder. When Kuzkin came out of our zone of audibility of the soundtrack, we called him on his mobile telephone, he stopped, attached the circle-schema to a tree, and returned to the group of participants (the Kant soundtrack continued to play).
Next, a second speaker was turned on with a recording of Vsevolod Nekrasov's reading of his poems in 1991 in Paris (the audio track was extracted from I. Makarevich's video recording). The speaker was placed on a small circle-schema by the feet of the figure of the rabbit holding a clock. Simultaneously with the soundtrack of Nekrasov's reading, we switched the sound on the first speaker from the Kant file to a file of AM reading the text of Ananda Maitreya's The Path to Nirvana (second part) and started moving in the other direction to the Kievogorsky Field (the speaker with the soundtrack playing the Buddhist text was carried by S. Sitar).
The action's objects: a large circle-schema in the forest in the north-east and the figure of the rabbit with the speaker continuing to play the soundtrack of Nekrasov reading his poetry on a small circle-schema in the south-west were left at the place of action.
When we came out onto the field, because S. Haensgen had fallen behind from the rest of the participants, a purely accidental but important aesthetic element arose in the action: the "Appearance" of S. Haensgen from the clearing (in that same fur coat that she wore in 1985 at the action Russian World on that same field) onto the field of vision of the group of the action's participants who were perceiving her. (This demonstrational element of "appearance," which was unexpected to the action's organizers, had organized itself in the structure of the action by the "FISHERMAN" principle – a singular element with an unclear structure within the system of demonstrational/expositional sign fields. Named for the figure of the fisherman that had appeared on the demonstrational field of the CA action Second Picture. In other actions, the "Fisherman" element can occur in the form of a jeep, a cyclist, or an "appearing" figure, as had happened with S.H. in this action, etc.).
12 February 2015
Kievogorsky Field
A. Monastyrski, S. Haensgen, A. Kuzkin, (Yu. Leiderman), M. Sumnina, S. Sitar, G. Titov, M. Leykin, O. Sarkisian
Translated by Y. Kalinsky
