From “You’re Not in Moscow Here”
“…..There are artists in non-capital cities who understand that in order to deal with the uncomfortable reality and for their own ‘cultural survival’ they must unite, form a community, and get public support. Their strategy is not so much creating works as building alternative institutions—’institutional independence.’
The Omsk artist Damir Muratov had found the pressure point of confrontation—Moscow v Regions. Since the introduction of the ‘vertical of power’, Moscow had dominated the other Russian cities, essentially colonising the rest of Russia, squeezing out or muffling local business initiatives, imposing policy and the direction of action of the regional authorities, and impending the cultural development of the regions. In response, the artist created his first independent region—Bednotown [Poverty town], his own world and an alternative institution, studio-dacha-boarding house concert, space for his work and relaxation for his numerous friends. The artist’s wooden house and the area around it has been painted and renovated in the spirit of his paintings—this is a personal utopia, a work constructed in accordance with the laws of art, which reject social stratification, mercantile goals, and hassles. Bednotown is a heaven on earth, a space where people have to correspond to the artist’s idealistic views.
The series It’s Good Where We Are with Russian flags appearing on flags of other countries became the prototype of the artist’s most important project, The United States of Siberia. It wittily deconstructs the concept of the ‘Russian world’ in the version of hybrid Russian statehood and anticipates Russia’s foreign policy of the last three years. The author of the ‘Russian world’ concept, the philosopher and methodologist Petr Shchedrovinsky proposed considering all Russophone people in the entire world as a resource for Russia’s development, a resource for overcoming distrust in our country, and resource for enriching Russian society with knowhow and knowledge. But the president’s administration and his close circle reinterpreted this concept and suggested to use the Russian-speaking population of other countries as a propaganda tool and excuse for military intervention in contiguous states. The flags of various countries show the Russian tricolor coming through—a metaphor for ‘the hand of Moscow.’
The ironic separatism[i] of United States of Siberia sums up the discourse of It’s Good Where We Are and Bednotown—a juxtaposed alternative to ‘Moscow colonialism’ (the opposition describes a political, economic, and cultural trend that has formed in Russia, to put it harshly, an occupation regime). Moscow is perceived here as a ‘foreign land’ that is radioactive, contagious, and incurable, best abandoned to start somewhere else anew. There are clear references to the ‘parade of sovereigns’—the process of creating independent states out of the Union of Republics after the Belovezhsk Agreement (which the current president called ‘a great geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’)—and to the concept of a federal restructuring of Russia proposed by the administration of Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin—a rejection of an ethnic division of regions and the creation of a federal structure on the model of the USA—and to the endless discussions by the opposition about the coming collapse of the Russian Federation because of the irresponsible and predatory policy of the Russian state in the Russian regions. Interestingly enough, the artistic concept of United States of Siberia has no organizational or ideological basis, is not expressed in the form of a text, and exists exclusively in the works of Damir Muratov, yet it is taken seriously by the secret service agencies of Russia. The slogans of the United States of Siberia at recent Monstrations in several Russian cities served as an excuse to set up round-the-clock surveillance of their organizer Artyom Loskutov”.