CYLAND MediaArtLab takes part in Archstoyanie 2017, the 12th international festival of landscape objects in Nikola-Lenivets, Dzerzhinsky District, Kaluga region, Russia. Archstoyanie 2017 will be held July 21-23.
At the festival, CYLAND MediaArtLab artists Sergey Komarov and Alexey Grachev will perform live as Kurvenschreiber, the collective interested in transporting analog electronic music away from the rather sterile, academic environment to which it has become accustomed, and opened technology up to the possibility of spontaneous interaction with live performers. The collective has radically reclaimed their synthesizers for spontaneity and exploited the tendency of analogue models of their instruments to betray reasonable expectations and stay between control and accident.
This year’s theme, «Being together», is the next stage of the ongoing project «Mental Firewood» which, having started with the exhibition of 2015, is constantly updated and modernized. At first the project was fully dedicated to Siberia and was built around the subject of warmth. Wood as a material provides the allusion of warmth, the metaphor of a mental bonfire, and the wooden totemic sculptures had a potential processuality. The next logical stage of the project development was this statement’s practical realization. The sculptures made from utilized wood that had been just potential bonfires in the space of a museum or a gallery now became real bonfires. And here the artist gets the chance to uncover another important subject for his practice, the subject of «Community» – how sculptural plastics can become social and economical plastics and be the source of uniting warmth. In this case one of the original functions of a bonfire is being addressed – unification, because people have been uniting around bonfires for ages.
At this stage the project becomes a participatory performance that creates moments of unity. Having fought for individualism for so many years we got used to only turn to the personal/individual things. Now is the time to turn to something that unites us. Art is a great tool not only for exploring society, but also for creating delicate social connections. Therefore, to answer the curator’s call (How to live? – Stick together.) a whole range of important political, social and philosophical subjects is being touched upon.
More information available at http://www.arch.stoyanie.ru/projects.php?alias=167