*One of three videos from the body of work Spinebone Soup and Stuffed Rabbits (2018).

The Seige diaries, and the Seige history, chased and forbidden by the official fictional historiography of modern Russia – this is the cruellest accusatory document not only of the atrocities of "hunger politics" of Nazism but also of the thanatopolitics of the Soviet government, for which military machine thousands of dying mute dystrophics were forced to work for almost three years. Muteness is one of the symptoms of dystrophy, the dying person cannot talk about anything except food, and then becomes completely silent.

The sound component of this work is a strict reduction of a language capable of repeating, or rather devouring itself in lacking any other nutrition.

The visuals are inspired by archival photography from besieged Leningrad taken by Boris Kudoyarov in 1942. In this staged shot, three people, a military man and two civilian women, are picking cabbage from the lawn in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral – near the prominent landmark of the historical part of Leningrad. During the Siege, to survive a severe famine, people converted flower beds for vegetables. Since the filming of the dying city was allowed under the utmost severe censorship, in the photographs we see happy and pleased smiling faces – a symptomatic aesthetic choice of totalitarian language.

My anonymized protagonist in a hazmat suit committed intervention in flower beds in various geographic spaces, interlinked by history and the common linguistic realm of violence, and performed a repetitive ritual of harvesting, mimicking the grotesque of the quasi-ethical neoliberal obsession of DIY agriculture. This intervention looks like a joke because it is impossible to imagine that people can again be under siege and use flower beds for planting vegetables? Or did it become possible again in April 2022?

kseniayurkova.com