Anxious hour

2018 ZIL Cultural Center, Moscow, Russia

Light-projection installation
Site-specific

The team

Kristina Markova

Graduate of the Faculty of Media Communications of the Higher School of Economics, Institute of Contemporary Art BAZA, Visual Culture MA student at the Higher School of Economics. Works with feature and documentary movies, animation.

Katerina Beloglazova

Film critic, curator of movie programs, founder and curator of the Cinema Club at Moscow School of New Cinema, member of the Cultural Patriarchy and Vizbor Girls music collectives comprised of three performers: Faith, Hope, and Love Vizbors.

Sasha Minchenko

Artist, musician, active collaborator of the G5-54 community and senior editor of the video streaming channel DeriveTV.

Eat Rust

Hungarian ukulele composer, who lived in a cardboard house on Vorobyovy Gory for a while. Main activities: dark amateur music, freak folk, cultures of Ancient Asia Minor.

Alek Petuk

Artist, musician, USTU graduate. Founder of the Kuzlesfest, a festival of independent situations, and organizer of the Fence exhibition place that functions within the space of sleeping (the cognitive sonority community), member of the Coincidental International.

Jan Kalnberzin

Media artist, active underground actor of 2000s, founder of TouchFest. Currently actively engaged in creating a video for plastic performances and interactive multimedia installations.

Lena Klab

Person of melted identity, punk improviser, theory lover, practice lover.

Mediums of folk culture, noise music and amateur singing collide in certain ways and create a narrative. Periodic switchings between darkness and light add temporal feel. Formally, we are working with the legacy of Chris Marker.

Concerning meaning, the work is built on the contradictions arising within spontaneous street gatherings. This work tries to open up social and philosophical problematics associated with such forms of human organizations as microsocieties and microcultures. As of now, neither in the contemporary theory nor in Roland Barth’s classic “How to live together” we have not found all the answers and do not fully understand how to live this way.

In the creation of this work, we actively participated with the residents of Kuzminki (Moscow district) and of adjacent areas; these contacts could introduce some adjustments to our performance at different stages.

First mentions of the Anxious Hour community are dated back to 2017. The precise goals and objectives of the participants are still unclear. Trying to clarify the situation to some extent, we thought that artistic forms could help answer our questions. On the other hand, maybe it is more interesting for us to stay in the dark, away from the economy of light. The participants of the Anxious Hour (be reminded that the community did not name itself, it is just a journalistic name) themselves believe that one only needs to be together while the sun sets over the horizon.

Representatives of friendly microcommunities, their friends and relatives take part in the performance.