A 180-degree turn took place in my life. Previously, I was an advocate of “technological progress”. More than that, I was morally ready to become a cyborg at the first opportunity :) Gradually, I caught myself thinking that I had stopped trusting technocrats. My focus shifted towards an attempt to achieve the harmonious coexistence of humans and nature.

This installation is a symbolic farewell to a hundred ordinary human professions that are disappearing right now due to the development of neural networks.

I recorded a video portrait of myself saying farewell to professions that have “outlived” their time, alternating farewell messages with the names of the professions in the 10 most widely spoken languages. After editing the video and sound into the form of a robotic digital avatar (an AI agent), I used a projector to project this video message onto a face formed from broken mirror fragments.

During the residency at Nikola-Lenivets, Nikolay Polissky proposed creating an artefact from whatever we could find on the park grounds and breathing an idea into it.

On the banks of the Ugra river, I discovered a piece of driftwood sticking out of the sand, with a handle shaped like an animal’s paw. After pulling it out, I saw that the root looked like the blade of an ancient orc’s axe.

Raising it above my head, like a little boy who had just found himself in the place of King Arthur at the crucial moment, I suddenly remembered running around as a child, swinging a wooden sword carved by my grandfather, and, for some reason, those three magazines’ worth of ammunition we fired at the military training ground solely for reporting purposes.

I remember how, as children, we imagined ourselves as mighty warriors, but as we grow up, militaristic ideals no longer interest us. Nature itself, through our DNA, buries the “hatchet of war”, and we no longer need bloodshed. The romanticization of battle seems to me one of the most cunning manipulations practiced since the emergence of society and communication within our species.

I have never had a home of my own or, like many others, a family in its traditional sense. Only the cold context of a living environment called Russia.

This is what the hut I never built as a child looks like. My first personal space. My territory. My fortress.

The “huts” we had to live in did not suit me for many reasons. My parents separated when I was about five, but before that, I remember being asked, quite considerately, which of them I wanted to stay with. After that, my mother and I never stayed anywhere for long. Streets, districts, cities, schools and friends changed every year, turning me into a full-fledged symbiosis of a tumbleweed and a ball lightning.

The story of my cell of society, like many others, is a fable in which the swan, the crayfish and the pike^* pretend that this is the natural order of things. The fear of loneliness and the unknown is paralyzing and forces us to follow well-trodden paths. Are there other possibilities? What happens if you break the chain of your lineage when you are the only son? Is it a devaluation of all the efforts made by generations before you, or the completion of a cycle and liberation?