Digital Fermentation. Video programme, Dartington, UK, September, 2021

Nestlings of the Sea, 1996, 05:39

Drawing and scratching on 35mm film, screening format HD video 

“Nestlings of the Sea” is a plotless film that uses drawing and scratching on 35mm film. The artist uses old archive films in a new way. The original material is documentary films produced by amateur Soviet studios in the 1970s. 

This art is a kind of delayed social art, continuing the tradition of an ironic interpretation of Soviet culture. Many methods bring it close to the aesthetics of the “parallel cinema” of the 1980s. The aggressive “battle for peace” is only the outer layer of the work. Its true meaning is the absolute absurdity of everything that official ideology offers. 

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Woodcutter, 1985, 06:00, B/W 

An eccentric and absurd comedy with endless non-stop fighting, chasing, murders, and suicides which are intercut with Soviet symbols of peace and freedom – white doves flying away from the hands of ‘pioneers’ – and documentary footage of the pioneers’ everyday lives..

All other things equal, 2020, 19:32

“Crafting fairytale fiction from documentary-style late-Soviet propaganda, All Other Things Equal is a hypnotic and sensual work of detournement with construction atypical of compilation films. Resisting essayistic meaning, the film instead presents a series of stacked moments that are elliptical, sensory, and quietly subversive in picturing a world populated wholly by women. The polar opposite of didactic, All Other Things Equal instead embraces the extra-symbolic and extra-textual elements of these images and the spectral montage of their arrangement, constructing a world which does not map easily onto the contemporary notions and stakes of Western feminism.” – Herb Shellenberger 

Acrobatic Sketch, 2012, 07:29, 16:9, HD MOV 

Wickedly absurdist video novella takes on the space of the bathtub of a communal apartment in St. Petersburg city as the metaphor for the symbolic connections we make, miss, and struggle through. The work is made in a creative tandem with Maya Popova, who plays the lead role and performs the acrobatic solo in the bathroom. The artist was interested in a performing component of the project and its transformation through editing. 

Exhibited: 2015 “New from Ludwig Collection” Russian State Museum, St-Petersburg;2014 “The Other Capital” NCCA, Moscow; 2015 “On My Way” Cultural Zone of the Venetian University Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy. 

Field, 2015, 05:44

This work represents a piece of hand-drawn animation, or kind of succession of drawings (about 1 thousand graphic artworks, calking paper) depicting body positions, available for direct vision, i.e. without use of mirrors or other reflecting means. Painting from life was another condition to create additional frame that made the result vivid, existing in space and time, and subordinate to body accommodation, capacities of vision and perception, and definite time frame.We get our perception and experience through our body, but if we get the idea of existence of things due to the body, how can it be objectified?

Disappearing Staircases, 2015, 04:28

“When I was a child, I was afraid of clouds. I felt as if our house had simply own off into space.
I found this viscous and white infinity all around intimidating due to its emptiness… Years later I can still see my house in the dream, I am running, I am trying to get inside, get into my room, but the staircases have already disappeared…”

Emerging From the Swamp, 2016, 04:00

This work was conceived during an artist residency in the Everglades National Park. 
The remains of a European explorer’s studio is staged submerged in the swamp in the Everglades. Antique artifacts: a desk, bookshelves, maps, collected shells and skulls, and a globe, all appear semi submerged in the mosquito infested swamp. The fate of explorer is left a mystery. The video and photos were shot by the artist sitting in a canoe in the swamp. In the video a snake slithers across the table. 

Skinned, 2018, 07:24

Written, directed and animated by Francesca Fini, music by Pandacetamol (freemusicarchive.com) 

A Dadaist collage that plays on the concept of identity, elaborated through impossible selfies taken by the protagonists of famous masterpieces in the history of portraiture and self-portrait. What is hidden under the skin, skinned by the toxic radiation of mobile phones? What would Leonardo da Vinci or Andy Warhol have done with this evil device? 

The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed, 2019, 04:00

The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed, video, 2019, 4 min. 

The video takes its inspiration from the song “The Return of the Giant Hogweed”, released by the British rock group Genesis in 1971. The song warns of the apocalyptic spread of the poisonous plant Heracleum mantegazzianum (giant hogweed) after it was “captured” in the hills of the Russian Empire and brought to Britain by Victorian botanists. The lyrics of the songs are filled with ironic humor and describe an anthropomorphized plant that is on a mission to destroy the human race. The video “The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed” is an updated version of the story told in the Russian language, looking at the Cold War era half a century later from the viewpoint of the giant hogweed itself, telling the story of its fall.