Category: Poetry/Texts

PROJECT STATEMENT

This shop was created in order to remind people (be they men, women, girls or boys) that they are free, that there is true love on earth, and that they are not obligated to follow what others say, neither their parents nor the boss at work, but rather, they can find ways to solve all problems, ways to exist in this world. Their internal world (including all weaknesses, fears, and illusions) is a treasure, despite the brutal reality of everyday life which often argues against this tenderness. In the store, there are very dear things (this means that are hard to part with), and likewise, there are very cheap things. This is in accordance with a desire to make the store truly democratic. Because a dear thing can be given to any person as a reward for what he achieved, or plans to achieve, in life. The things in the store try to converse with the observer about his or her desires, longings, unquenchable hopes and dreams. These things differ from ordinary objects in that they have already conversed with people (other people wore them, and the artist pondered over them.) They are wiser than ordinary things and, it follows, much closer to the human heart. It could be said, that the FNO Shop sells things “inside out,” because unlike ordinary clothing that hides the sensitivities of its wearer as an apparatus of the collective mindset, this clothing actually reveals it. By showing a glimpse of the wearer’s soul, it manifests a relationship to the world as to an ideal lover who understands and accepts you as you are, or even as more than you are. The FNO Shop is functioning as a teaching program, a cognate-analog to the European “workshop,” that includes art therapies that the creators of FFC developed over the course of many years in its practice. In connection with this program, the store does not have ordinary salespeople; by way of contrast, there are more of therapists who are trying to reach together with a customer the level of communication that can help you to solve the problem and get charismatic in a finding your own ways for existing in the society.

The Clothes Workshop (proposal, work in progress so far)

The workshop provides tools for the participants to explore and express their inner reality.

Tabitha Kane

Continue reading “Shop of the Utopian Clothes”

Clothes from Lena’s aunt.
Once in our project came Lena. She came from a small town. As there it is very expensive to rent an apartment in St-Petersburg she was living at her aunt’s home. Aunt seems to be a very nice person from the beginning, but later started to be sadistic and tiresome. Lena complained about her aunt to us. We thought of a solution; how to help her? 
And we created the idea of asking her to bring aunt’s album with photographs and her dresses from the past. Then we created a decision to print photographs to textile and include them to the clothes from aunt’s wardrobe. When the work was done Lena showed her aunt the objects that we created with the help of the situation. Aunt’s mind was moved; she did not expect such an extraordinary thing and was pressed by starting a kind of psychoanalyze of herself in order to understand what happened with her. 
After that Lena got a kind of resistance to aunt (also for understanding her better) and managing the situation. We were proud and happy that it helped her.

Polly’s Jacket.

Polly had a child when she was seventeen. The child’s father, a nonconformist artist, straightforwardly warned Polly that he wouldn’t have anything to do with her or her child. You can imagine what she had to go through after giving birth, especially since her mother isn’t exactly mentally well. The letter on the jacket is addressed to an imaginary ideal lover who would rescue her from all her woes and bring happiness to her child.

Dresses for the project “The Zoo”

Jacket and dress are symbolizing two hypertrophied male and female principles as a mirror image of the victory of wild capitalism in contemporary Russia . We are compo rising the binary oppositions between rich and poor classes with male and female alienation. We think that politic influence on the people s understanding of relations and our target is to show that working in this micro politic level is also very important .

In 2004 in Stockholm, Gluklya and Tsaplya mounted The Garden for Businessmen, a performance involving 12 businessmen, which posed the questions, as Gluklya puts it: “What is this person except his profession? Is there any life except their business? Who are they as a human? That’s why we proposed to make a kind of dance, with them holding little girls’ dresses representing the more vulnerable, more fragile, part in them.”

The interplay between performance and sculptural object is played out in Garden for Businessman’ where immaculately suited professionals extemporize and perform with children’s clothing in a quintessentially modern corporate environment. In both cases the protagonists play a central role in determining the nature of the work, which again explores the complex interplay between a sensitive, internal humanity and its public face. Like the naval cadets, the businessmen, contemporary symbols of power and authority, express potential layers of tenderness and even powerlessness in a personal theatre of dress play’. They are helplessly drawn into a paradigm perhaps to some degree beyond their grasp; becoming signifiers of an agenda sadly alien to the world of business.

Mаrkus Williams

Dear friends,

We have a new page on Facebook for the upcoming Queer Culture Festival in St. Petersburg. There will be updated information about the festival – programme, pictures etc.

International Queer Culture Festival /http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-Queer-Culture-Festival/147727131920287?ref=ts

Feel free to invite your friends. Hopefully we see you in September!

Best regards,

The Organizing Committee International Festival of Queer Culture 2010
http://queerfest.ru/?lang=en
queerfest.spb@gmail.com

Continue reading “Queer Culture Festival”

Love-research excursion
spring-summer 2010

The collapse of the old rules and anticipating new rules, even if only formal, is where aesthetics and social resistance meet (Paolo Virno)

Our project is a research about conservative stereotypes in human relations and gender fixing frontiers in a context of cultural values of contemporary neoliberal society. It is a critical research about the ‘Myth of Love’ as well as the myths about the concept of history, tourist expectations, cultural standards and art autonomy. It’s obvious that investigation of the myth means historical knowlege. This part of the project is important and we are happy to collaborate with the art-historian Peter Wagemakers who kindly agreed to take part in our project.
Our hero is a tourist who came to Amsterdam. His name is mister Grey. He does not know what he wants. Maybe love? But what is this? He is just very tired from his life, responsibilities, bills, problems. He has a mid-life crisis. Never in his life he hurt anybody or brought pain … maybe only slightly by his indifference. His mind is in a transitional state, ready to change. Traveling through Amsterdam his mind changes completely.

Our project consists out of two parts:
Social research based on interviews and the excursion as a result .
Video-film.

We would like kindly to ask you if you’re willing to cooperate in our project by letting start the excursion in the W-139. and to distribute headphones and give deskinfo.
Partners of the project will also be the Rijksmuseum and the Lloyd Hotel and
probably De Balie.

Time

As far as we do not now when we can get the support for the project we are planning the realisation of the project approximately around spring-summer 2010 .

Mister Grey adventure