These are alien and useless objects in urban space, a space where everything is made for something and undergoes strict selection for usefulness. Everything in the city has a specific function. My objects are for nothing: they are not a sign, not a plaque, not a decoration. And these words themselves are not tied to a specific material form; their meaning is not stored in them but arises only in the presence of context and an observer.
Each such word, torn from its utilitarian context, works like a funnel: deprived of its usual function, it remains tied to a chain of thought patterns within consciousness and begins almost forcibly to draw meanings from the surrounding space, forming an autonomous structure of meaning in the observer's mind, forcing habitual reality for a moment to lose its utilitarian certainty, to fall apart and reassemble slightly differently.
This work is about how total utility has absorbed us so completely that it has become an independent substance — so independent that it is unclear who is looking at whom: the word at the viewer or the viewer at the word.
The words are dispersed throughout the city space, but when they meet together, in whole or in part, they form a sentence that likewise describes nothing. A sentence where meaning is either born, migrates, or disappears simply from proximity.
It is almost a spell.
The use of holographic film creates an optical effect: as the viewer moves and the conditions of the space change, the word flickers, emerges from the background or sinks into it.
In the context of London, these objects acquire an additional layer of alienness. They appear as artifacts from another world, detached from function and context, with no apparent purpose. For those who do not read Russian, they are unreadable — only native speakers can decipher the words. This furthers the research into what language does to thinking, and how we differ from one another because of patterns formed by language. Moreover, the very form of these symbols — unfamiliar Cyrillic letters — attracts attention and compels decoding, even for those who cannot read them.