Description: This video contains my attempts at calculation the victims of the Blockade. These numbers are the first thing that comes to my mind when I’m thinking about this tragedy. What impresses me is not only the number but also the difference in numbers from different sources.
In my work I’m trying to I was thinking a lot about how it’s possible for a human being to realize 1000.000 of died people. When we hear the numbers as one million, 28 million, five thousand, etc. we are not able to compare it with real lives, real people.
I try to make calculations in different places and find any method of visualization of such a big number of human victims. All my attempts are just numbers or signs, it’s not possible to find the correct method.
The goal of this video is to focus people on the Blockade and on the scale of this tragedy. But it’s not only about the Blockade, but about victims of any war. With this video I’m trying to show the impossibility to present life victims in numbers, the soulless and anti-humanistic approach of the official statistics with their rounding, measuring, and depersonalization.
Natalia Tikhonova She is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and researcher currently based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She works with different mediums, ranging from videos, poems, painting, and installations to social and curatorial projects where non-art analytic methods are combined with traditional art practice.
The main interests of her projects are the states of instability and fluidity with their paradox of staying and moving at the same time. She explores them on the questions of memory, identity, personal and political borders, and art definitions themselves.
One of the main topics of her researches is changing the space and time of art from the perspective of "exhibition", which she defines as a sign and a process. Her curatorial projects exist in the form of nomadic practices or online platforms, and aim to take shape of streams and points convenient for multimedia and gray zones in the middle of private and public space where we all live now.
Other topics of her art projects are determined by processes and changing trails of time, history, memory, identity, and structures of feelings. She tries to define them by examining themes of post-soviet, traumas, militarism, mass media, propaganda, collective memory using personal reflections, affective domains, and analytic methods.
