Description:
“Endless Shell Echo” is a staged enactment of everything at once — yet it retains a profound, naïve tenderness, as if a traveler or a young dreamer has lost their way and all sense of orientation in space and time. Seven magical portals create a dramatic narrative structure built around the communication of characters through music, singing, dialogue, and carefully composed visual mise-en-scènes. A paradise lost and regained culminates in the heroine’s transformation into a little mermaid, signaling that everything is only just beginning — the wondrous prospects of a new journey titled “The Holiday of Love” open before her.
The motif of flight and relocation between worlds through tunnels, pipes, or wells is familiar both to myth and fairy tale traditions. Yet here, the ability to fly is presented in a different light — more as a disguised play with space, where exit and entrance become almost indistinguishable. The psychological and physical sensations of floating, flying, and weightlessness are intimately tied to the notion of happiness and the concept of love — a culmination embodied in Endless Shell Echo.
Through recognizable symbolic elements, it becomes clear that the journey takes place deep within an underwater world, beginning at the threshold between the unconscious and the dream state, as suggested in the first scene. At each stop along the route stands a magical portal — a kind of checkpoint — and the artist, assuming the guise of various heroines, appears inside, beside, or near these thresholds, poetically “casting spells” to metaphorically inform us where we have arrived and what lies ahead.
Overall, the work reproduces certain ritualistic patterns, most closely resembling initiation rites that evoke the psychological archetype of death and rebirth.
Diana Kapizova offers the viewer ample space for interpretation, aligning herself with a new generation of artists who are deeply peace-oriented and have consciously distanced themselves from traditional critical-artistic paradigms. Endless Shell Echo can be read as a myth of eternal return, a reenactment of the archetypal initiation order, a Platonic allegory of the cave and transcendence of bodily limitations — where desire generates images and images give rise to desire — or as the anguish of the prophet Jonah, “the waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.”
Others might associate the experience with Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices, with the myth of Venus born from the sea foam bringing humanity the precious gift of love, or recall the poetic imagery of Mikhail Kuzmin.
Some might interpret the route as a retrospective journey through the bliss of prenatal life, or as a psychoanalytical model of narcissism.
Endless Shell Echo is Kapizova’s expedition into fantastical worlds. The structure of this alternate reality is composed of a sequence of fairy-tale scenes, each unfolding into the next, ultimately culminating in the heroine’s ascent and transition into the otherworld.
– Svetlana Taylor, Independent curator and lecturer
