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Sasha

Short Film, 2013, 30 min.


"Being a painter myself and making a film about a fictional Russian painter (Sasha) who is suffering from a serious identity crisis, situated in Vilnius, Lithuania, I started to question myself how location functions in relation to the creative process. I also wanted to research the entire group of countries and people between Russia and West Europe who had lived through communism and its propagandist language as well as its collective consciousness created by this experience. Next to this, I was thrilled to find striking connections between the Russian avant garde and their way of thinking and my own work. It felt like finding kindred souls in this epoque of investigations and search for new ways to travel beyond a pre-conceived perception of reality through art."

"While the film 'Sasha' focuses on the influence of the imagination on the physical reality, I wanted to look for a way to make tangible the physical quality of the game of power present in this above mentioned part of the former Soviet Union. In this array of countries, every day life changes each minute, since it is set in a broader field of quickly changing tensions, like chess pieces moving on a grand chess board. The work ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ is a result of this research and consists of a video installation and a film in the making.

Arcadia was an actual place in Greece, but was used in mythology to refer to an imaginary idyllic place of beauty and harmony, while the "Ego" symbolizes Death, announcing its presence, in this place.

Not only did I find these similarities with the Russian avant garde of the 20th century in my own work, the era of Revolution which is engulfing our planet now seems to quite poignantly link to that era as well."

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