Performance Being Together at the Archstoyanie Festival in summer 2017. In the picturesque valley of the river Ugra near the village of Nikola-Lenivets, the artist arranged a hundred of his wooden animals on rough knotty pedestals and invited the audience to light this unusual “firewood”. The art, created and sacrificed, became a powerful source of physical warmth for a time, and the image of blazing fires that warmed the attending crowd – a memorable and, at the same time, alarming and totemic metaphor for the unsatisfied striving for solidarity in our era of isolation and frustration.
