I’ve been thinking about the residency project since last summer, when Markus told me about it. A few weeks later I met Michael and he invited me to participate in it.

 

 

 

 

To say honestly, I have never been involved in such kind of group - residence - work before. Working a lot with other artists together (it was mostly “long-time, duo-relationships”) I made different experiences but nowadays use to work alone.

 

 

 

Expecting to spend 3 weeks of intensive work with six other artists (half of them I haven’t even seen before) I came to the question: is it possible to get know that people before the event starts? That’s why I was positively surprised when Michael suggested to create this blog. Unfortunately, it took a couple of months before I have found myself able to join it. There are always some “long-time-frequency-waves” running parallel to the “short-ones” through my life. And all ideas, linked to this project are sequenced with those long waves inside my mind.

 

 

 

 

A few months ago I started to think about a textual event, that would precede our real one in Belgium the next summer. I found those short stories, where each one of us writes about him/herself as about the 3rd person very interesting. But that was not enough to start the communication process. So I started to write down my ideas on 4 basic frame-terms, that Michael proposed for the residency.

First I was thinking about one single text (pro person) where each one expresses his/her own experience and attitude toward Love/Death/Life/Soul. And I’m still sure, it would be great, if every one of us will post such writing. But as for my one, I found it growing bigger and bigger, so it is too long for one post, it’s too long for one to read it at once. And, besides that, it’s in russian. I use to write in russian when I dont have enough time to relax, to concentrate and have so many other things to do. So i divided the written stuff into 3 (or 4) parts. The idea is to publish one text after another with about 2 weeks tempo.

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you, who are English (American) native-speakers:

I hope you can excuse me if something is wrong or hard to understand. If the sentence is too long and has a monstrous construction. If THE article is missing or it is in THE wrong place. I have learned english at school more than 20 years ago, I have been only one week in England (since that time) and that was my only visit to the anglophone country.

The following text is the first one in the row. It is very pathetic. It probably reflects my “other” side because in the everyday life I’m just so unserious as serious this writing is.

 

 

Any cosmological narrative, striking through the culture as string starts with a word. Out of nothing starts the time. Out of the whiteness of blank paper, one letter after another appears the reflection of story, mirroring the act of creation. Sometimes it is just an ink-spot. Sometimes the word is wrong and could be erased or deleted with the backspace. “Out of nothing” are coming the basics and leading through their further development to the current moment. This process divides all created forms of being into inner and outer, future and past, reader and writer, creation and it’s consumption…

 

 

 

 

An Artist just as any creator in his work repeats the sujet, the basic pattern founding any cultural tradition. The act of creation stays there as the tower of Babylon, joining not only heaven and earth as elements of the same plane. It connects all those different levels, dimensions such as man, the nature that he created as well as the nature, that created himself.

 

 

 

A man conceives the world around through his compassion for it, looking for and taking place in it. He is a musical instrument and a musician playing it the same time. A man writes a text being the text himself.

 

 

 

 

One brave traveller, taking a vornehm into the world outside could meet, once, another one, who has started his voyage in opposite direction - to the inside world of himself. And even more: in the crossing where they meet they could change their directions adding or multiplying them. The “inner” one starts his journey also in outer space and the “outer” one continues his expedition finding another dimension of the world inside himself.

 

 

 

 

Somehow every human being is a traveller. But most of us are choosing only one direction and this choice is far to be conscious.

Fear of the “other” who also reflects the “dark side” of self prevents peole to come over to the crossing/meeting point.

Is it possible to reach this point without love? Or is it first this point, which allows to see no difference between yourself and the other and, so, be able to love life as such? To be able to see the strings of light which connect every form of life, showing the way between two abysses - the fear of life and the fear of death… to be able to see the strings of souls…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Understood in the paradigm of Aristotelian logic, the language can not describe adequate all those phenomena, which lays behind the horizont of time and space. The language itself, even if we try to imagine it alienated from it’s bearer, is changing and transforming in time and space anyway. To break through into another (spiritual) dimension we have to use a kind of non-euclidian geometry of language. Abstract models and patterns used in order to realize some complexe phenomena are projections of higher dimensions into the space of our everyday perception. It is not objective but truly reflects the poly-dimensional object on the surface.

 

 

 

I do not belong to any religion or confession. Born and grew up in a family of scientists, I inherited a pragmatical way of thinking, based on experiment or, rather, experience. Instead of blind faith I learned to know. Probably that ’s why it took almost 30 years before I could prove elementary basics the other people learned to believe in from their childhood. In my life I have brought those pragmatical principles to their marginal or sometimes even absurd developments. But it is this invaluable experience, which I got in my life-travel, which is founding my inner world and it’s projection to the world outside in/through my artworks.

 

Misha Shenbrot