a video project by Chto Delat
realised by Tsaplya [Olga Egorova], Nikolay Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky

This project is a collaboration between Dmitry Vilensky, Tsaplya, and Nikolai Oleinikov (image: left to right), who invited Igor Lebedev and Artiom Magun to join them in this slide show performance. The soundtrack provides a didactic commentary reflecting the community and its collective actualization of the piece.

As Nikolai Oleinikov and Tsaplya put it in the soundtrack’s opening lines: “Our group meets quite rarely and this piece was the result of one of those rare meetings. Actually, we’ve been wanting to make a piece about our community for quite some time, to tell about who we are and what we are doing. A kind of self-analysis, in other words. What inspired us was Viktor Popkov’s marvellous painting “The Builders of Bratsk”. But we didn’t try to imitate the heroes of this painting…”

This project is inspired by the painting “The Builders of Bratsk” (1961) by Viktor Popkov. As a Soviet art critic once accurately noted, “the paintings main theme is the ‘resurgence of life.'” By today, this piece has become an iconographic symbol of self-possessed, concentrated people, not only standing on the brink of great changes, but capable of making sense of this transformation and realizing it.

It is important to note that the workers on the painting are not shown in the process of working, but that they are taking a well-deserved cigarette break. They have interrupted their work and now have the chance to consider both the relations that govern it, but also the significance it will have to the transformation of society at large. This is exactly how the painting was read in its time, as an interpretation we would like to return to today.

popkov_builders of bratsk

This painting is the ideal image of the “Thaw” under Khrushchev, when it seemed that the real Soviet human being had already been formed, and was now ready to build a communist society. The painting’s characters are such people. However, the painting’s power lies in the fact that they are absolutely real people, even if they have been idealized.

Our project’s goal is to apply this ideal image to contemporaneity. We invite the spectator to return to the composition of this painting and to suggest a new version of the process of its creation. We want to show (through a slide show and sound track) what might have preceded this moment, in which they took on a pose that turned them into a symbol of certainty, strength and belief. What was it? Hard work? A conflict in production that found its own solution? Or maybe even a hidden love story? Maybe it was all of these things at once, and maybe none of it happened. Our goal lies in constructing a situation in which people today (ourselves and our colleagues from Chto delat) become “ideal,” stretching to reach this image.

Special issue “What do we have in common?”

The project was shown in a number of ways, also linked to the distribution of the newspaper Chto delat #9.

Related Texts

Chto Delat, Builders_Soundtrack

Chto Delat, Answers to Question Posed by WHW in Collective Creativity Exhibition Catalogue, Kassel 2005

Bojana Kunst, Collaboration and Space, in Maska (Ljubljana) 2005

David Riff, Three Common Questions on Community (previously unpublished)

David Riff, What do we have in common? A Fictional Panel Discussion

Oxana Timofeeva, From the Inoperative Community to the Workgroup

Venues included

-Workshops Art Moscow 2004
-“Collective Creativities”, Kunsthalle Fridericanum Kassel, May 1st – July 7th 2005.
-Galerija Moderna, Ljubljana, 2005
-Aktualisierungsraum, Hamburg, 2007