an exhibition of printed works, launching narrative of reflections on cultural confluence, periodic mimicry, adoration and appropriation of the Other, about imaginary mythology and self-exotization, about splitting of the identity and the digestion of cultural codes through morphology of “global” and an extracted search for introduction, a way to establish serendipitous connections.
The term Anthropophagy is taken from the idea of the Anthropophagic Manifesto of Oswald de Andrade about changes in the socio-political environment and transformed the goals and methods of substitution, sometimes the essence and subject of the anthropophagic act changed places.
Anthropophagy Cultural is about new boundaries of identity.
12.12.2020
Anthropophagy as being in love
It is in the human character to wolf down (sub)/consciously somebody with whom they sympathise. Being under the influence of those whom we like, with time we can find out that our verbal and non-verbal vocabulary has expanded. Without any violence or difficult co-living we are intruded by someone else's words, intonations, gestures, habits, and they become our own.
Psychologists claim that the correlation between sympathy and mimicry works both ways. In other words, it is possible to invoke sympathy from a subject by copying their qualities.
In this case, by committing this act, what might the mimicking one feel? How does absorbing of those qualities impact the relation towards the object? How to fall in love with movements of the other within your own body? Were they stolen, borrowed, or gifted?
The sea and water is filled with myths and legends. The blue horizon is binding us all together, but at the same time having a separating force. The open water with its adventures and escapism, alluring and frightening us, with its hazardous uncertainty. The new land on the other side, encountering and othering the unknown with an ambiguous loathing and copying.
The clear water with all its imaginary creatures, sleeping dragons, which arises every spring and provides rain and a good harvest. The dark water with dragons being cosmos-creating chaos monsters, a creature that needs to be killed, in order to free the people and make a peaceful world. It is different approaches to good and evil, but at the same time an overlapping dragon tale, with a myriad of variations that have been told, written down and told again.
what if the cultural environment and other people are treated not as information, but as absorbed matter? what if the process of absorption is no less intelligent, aimed at perception and analysis. specialized epithelial cells, smooth muscles, enteric nervous system, endocrine populations, all this is a grandiose environment in which matter / culture is assimilated, sorted and excreted. two types of experience, two choices of culture - to be devoured or to be devoured.
be food or to eat.
By absorbing the meme culture, we drive ourselves into the framework of banality, not noticing how we play the same game with given conditions, as if nothing else is there. My work is about absurdity of this phenomenon, about stereotyped particular nation. I studied a huge number of memes with internet request of the identity of a Russian person and came to the conclusion that mostly it represent a narrow view, which is very far from my point of surroundings.
I interviewed three people, wondering who they associated with or were fascinated with as children and teenagers from characters in movies, cartoons, and books. I adored tv series “Charmed” as a kid, and in first grade we played after school, becoming Phoebe, Piper, and Prue. But my experience was more of a disappointment. Alas, the magic didn't happen, but the faith remained. My goal was to find one word that defined the cultural anthropophagy of each interviewee. What they absorbed so strongly in childhood and adolescence that formed into a pattern and was within, being accepted or rejected. By identifying the script patterns of how the interviewees interacted with the adopted traits, a dashed line appeared, parallel to the lifeline (the coordinate of time from emergence of association to present day). The intertwining of the continuous line and the dashed one (the script itself) is about the struggle/interaction/acceptance of these internal scripts that were absorbed along with the characters from the cultural field of the time. Three people who grew up around the same time in the same country highlighted a variety of associations: the fair samurai Kensi Himura with the Barbie smile, sad like Eeyore but independent as The AristoCats, or Tanya Grotter looking for adventure.
There are two designations in english (language or, rather, usage) those sound similar, but have definitely different meanings: autophagy (autophagocytosis) and autophagia. The first is the natural mechanism of cells' self-regulation, the ability to remove unnecessary or dysfunctional components. The second is about self-eating. One of these designations means the severe pathology but another characterizes normal, healthy process.
Where is the difference between the reflection, self-critisizm, self-regulation, those help to make important decisions and conclusions, remove unnecessary or dysfunctional components to make room for a new and total self-eating, which is making blind, devours, chains, kills (not only the carrier, but the people around)?
My project consists of mystical illustrations of social and biological processes of autophagy (autophagocytosis) and autophagia. I'm mixing and bluring the borders between them.
NOTHING PERSONAL A Personality is a combinstion of consciously and unconsiously appropriated pieces of others' experience. An other is a combination of the appropriated pieces of experience of others and so forth:))) In fact, each one is built like a construction set or a kaleidoscope - when shaken and the coloured pieces of glass turned over another individuum comes into being. They call it differently - I, personality, individual, my reality, etc. Thus: Personality = experience. Experience is gathered. We all are gatherers. What has been accumulated (=experience) is stored, transmitted, cherisheded, sort out, defended, fought for to the bitter end. With the development of information technologies, this process is globalizing and scaling, but the essence remains unchanged - there was nothing "personal" in the "personality". We conducted an experiment (see ill. 1-6). The study involved the residents of Siberia ("Sever" Residential Area). The results of the experimental procedures show that with the help of sensitive sensors it is possible to determine and record the subject-to-subject migration of the particles of experience and even trace the paths and influence of subjects-objects-landscapes (natural and anthropogenic). The experiment clearly confirmed that subjective experience is the part of the global information flow, and a person is a tool for enriching the global data processing system. Even if they live in a remote Siberian village. Even if they do not suspect the existence of the phenomenon or the Internet.