background noise

shitty affects of now (that I also invite to commune and take risk with the rest on the scaffolding platform) are important methodological instruments of this work.

During the last two years of being here I have felt largely embarrassed in front of my colleagues (yes, you who are reading this now) to feel so shitty most of the time. Right at the start of the program I lost a creative and romantic partnership that became to mean more than I thought once it was completely and irreversibly gone. The loss of that connection informed other losses such as the loss (partially imaginary) of the connection with creative and intellectual communities of St.Petersburg that I affiliated with my ex and that lovership. The loss of the ability to find intimacy with humans. The loss of breath. The loss of touch. The loss of self. Just the loss altogether.

These last two years have been the lonely years of depression and envy toward others who had what I seemingly did not, enveloped by the world pandemic and the living in a foreign country. While submerged into these daily affectual and somatic experiences, I have been trying to make sense of my relationship with art, love and friendship, the places of my migration and whatever it is I called home.

Reading the book by Ann Cvetkovich "Depression: a Public Feeling" just now made me begin to rethink my depression (and all the other shitty affects attached to it) as the experience of loss caused by the lack of personal and ancestral archive and the lack of history erased due to the capitalist circuits of ongoing migration. This artistic work is about tracing, tracking, re-writing, fictioning, imagining, rejoicing, re-uttering, celebrating the pasts and the presents, making new archives and histories while being at loss and depression. This work is only possible because of deep loss, envy, despair and depression.

I call the shitty affects of now the background noise - because truly it often has a debilitating and exhausting presence - but also I call them my assistants, my creative partners, my fellow bus riders. We ride together in this project. Storm riders.