‘Keeping Things in the Dark’
A four-artists installation by Anna Škodenko, Darja Popolitova, Viktor Gurov and Francisco Martínez
Sillamäe Museum
05.05–03.06.2023
Over the last three years, we have visited 36 basements in different towns of Eastern Estonia, investigating which things are kept and which practices take place in underground. The result is the four-artist installation ‘Keeping Things in the Dark’, which reflects on how basements make room for alternative ideas, historical representations and orders of visibility. People need hideouts and places to store things in the dark. Things that should not be visible in the apartment. Therefore, in the house, a basement is the most important place among the unimportant ones.
The installation is composed of four parts, each developed by one of the members of the group:
– The “Cellar Door” video installation leads us to the basement of a five-storey apartment building in Kohtla-Järve. The building itself is located on the hollow ground of an abandoned oil shale mine, which threatens its standing, slowly dragging it down and putting its inhabitation at risk. However, Jelena Mutonen keeps decorating the deformed walls of the house’s basement with mosaics made of left-over tiles, which other inhabitants of the building are giving her. Here we can see Jelena guiding us around her cellar, and hear a song about it all.
– The audio-visual sculpture titled “БАЮ-БАЙ” is composed of a vertical video and a 3D-printed baby carriage. The name of the sculpture comes from a Russian lullaby and after twisting the word “баять” (to talk along). Having such a calm name, the video, however, culminates differently — silence turns into a rave, the past becomes present, and inanimate objects come to life.
– “Sartre downstairs” is a visual representation of the existential messages and aesthetic rehearsals found in a dozen Soviet-era basements. A half-poetic, half-archival collage has been created on a linoleum floor reproducing the rather spontaneous creative acts of local residents and youngsters throughout different eras.
– “Subterranean biographies” is an assemblage of material culture based on different basement encounters. It gathers a series of extracted objects, displayed along with the respective personal and contextual stories. Some of these objects are about family relations; some other objects are holy and ideological; and there are also emotional memorabilia, preserved because of referring to childhood. Here, the authenticity of the materials is paramount of the integrity of the installation.
Photography: Francisco Martínez
