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Pilikin's project will first be presented at V2_Organisation in Rotterdam during the Next 5 Minutes in January 1996. Watch this page for links and further information.
Dmitriy Pilikin is an artist and curator based in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The city of St.Petersburg was founded in 1703 by Peter the First. From 1712-1918 St.Petersburg was capital of Russia. In 1914, at the height of 1st. World War and anti-German feeling, the city was renamed Petrograd. In 1924, the year of Lenin death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. In 1991 the city was given back its historical name of St.Peterburg. Thus it happens that the city's historical/toponymical map contains a closed lacuna bearing the name of Lenin. The name of a man who was largely responsible for the course of events in Russia during the existence of the USSR.Leningrad existed for 67 years - an interval which corresponds to the average human lifetime. In this time several generations have come and gone. The residents of this city have lived through a series of serious trials: three revolutions, civil war, Stalin's repressions, the Second World War, a 900-day siege by Fascist forces ... During all this time the city, like the country itself, was cut off from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain- a construction which imposed not just a physical barrier, but, above all, an informational one. Which is to say, all incoming information had to go through a political filter/ decoder, a device which resulted in East and West being perceived only as "virtual worlds".
The aim of our project is a symbolical rehabilitation, the restoration of the informational and communication field connection with which was lost during the period in question. Photographs from the family archives of Leningrad residents have preserved the faces of people of that time. These private and non-ideologized images draw the viewer's attention, for every man is not simply a participant in, but also a Witness of, the epoch in which he lives. Today the faces of these people are on the World Wide Web, a network which unites the the whole world.
Of all possible ways of making a visual archive of an age it is photography that is considered to give an exact copy of reality. From looking at photographs - those flat, two-dimensional pieces of paper - we get a nostalgic feeling. But these flat piceces of paper are also like windows flung open on the past, they draw in the looker's gaze. For people are not simply participants in, but also witnesses of, the age in which they live; they observe that age from a discrete distance.
Through six decades of the existing Soviet state our people were isolated from the entire world with the Iron Curtain. Almost nothing and nobody could go through this physical and information barrier. All the information from West to East and from East to West was checked and changed according to the ideological needs of the Soviet state. We want to restore the broken communication by means of a symbolic art project on the Internet.
Everyone in the Rotterdam exibition, as well as everywhere else has access to our website in order to get images (non-professional photos from family photo albums of 1924-1981) of citizens of Leningrad. Net communication has its own specific features which are very organic for the idea of the project. I mean the time of waiting and the fact that the image is appearing very slowly on the screen. Photos will appear on computer monitors with music (symphony #7 in C op.60 "Leningrad" by Dmitriy Shostakovich).
This project is part of large project, devoted to the problems of the archiving and the representation of Time.
Dmitrij Pilikin.