Utopia and Uhronia

Elena Samorodova-Sonina and Sergey Sonin

Curator Ivan Chechot

Winzavod Art Center
4 Syromyatnichesky Lane, 1/8, building 9

18.04 - 28.05.2023

A new exhibition curated by renowned St. Petersburg art historian Ivan Chechot opened on April 18 by the artists Sergei Sonin and Elena Samorodova-Sonina. The project is a metaphysical fantasy in the genre of documentary myth, its authors offer an alternative, quantum version of events that took place in the Russian history of the XIX century. The project is based on a reflection on what the shape of the Russian way of life would have looked like if the secret plan of Emperor Paul I and French First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, known as the Indian campaign, had been a success. In linear history, the utopian plan for a Russian-French alliance has remained unfulfilled.

Utopia and Uhronia

MIDLAND LANDLORD'S DREAM

The exhibition-installation, more precisely, the visionary interdisciplinary performance Utopia and Uchronia. A Midlander's Dream" is one of the realization options of a large project of the Partnership "Lead and Cobalt". It is devoted to the Indian campaign (turn of the 18th-19th centuries) of Emperor Paul I and Napoleon Bonaparte (then First Consul of France, and soon afterwards, in 1804, crowned Emperor of the French). This campaign and alliance of the two emperors almost came to fruition in 1801. Only the assassination of Paul (in the linear history that we are used to) stopped the advance of the Russian troops in the direction of India and put an end to the Russian-French rapprochement aimed at the destruction of British predominance in the world economy and politics of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the space of the project "Preparation for the Indian campaign" the fate of the sovereign Paul the First was quite different, and the villainous plot suffered a complete fiasco.

Sergei Sonin and Elena Samorodova (the creators of Lead and Cobalt) assume that the Indian campaign took place and resulted in a complete victory over the British. India became a Franco-Russian dominion, the Franco-Russian Indian Company was founded, its wealth poured into Russia and France, and mutual penetration of cultures began. World history has radically changed the direction of development. There were no military clashes in 1805-1813, the old Germany was not destroyed and there was no war of liberation. There were no revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and many other momentous events in Paris. For more than half a century peace and stability reigned, the development of capitalism and its corollaries - materialism, godlessness, class struggle and moral decay - as well as the colonial system were stymied. Britain was left with the unenviable fate of an island manufactory. The centuries-old legal piracy of the British navy was permanently blocked. But later the horizon tightened again, the fog thickening. Russian and German Anglomania reared its head. The world bourgeoisie demanded satisfaction and prepared for revenge. After the death of Nicholas I, history returns to the old track. Riots, conspiracies, wars, dubious theories, the spirit of greed and hedonism, naturalism, decadence in art, - all this plunges Europe into darkness. The Germans enter Paris in 1871 and proclaim the New Empire; Britain awakens - the struggle for the redivision of the world begins. At this time, the circumstances and the fact of the Indian campaign are already forgotten, the monuments of Russian-Indian-French civilization are overgrown with grass, and only in dreams the veterans of the campaign still remember the ancient and eternally young images, fragments of grandeur and beauty, solemn processions of fighting elephants, still hear the Russian-Indian tunes, still whisper mantras addressed to the great gods. But these are already the dreams of the landlord of the Midlands.

The exhibition in the a—s—t—r—a gallery exhibits fragments of the Russian-Indian civilization. These are photographs taken in the Moscow suburbs and the Tver region; reliefs and sculptures that speak of the synthesis of Russian, ancient and Indian origins; a sacred sculpture of Artemis or Great Mother symbolizing the life-giving spirit of the Earth. The gallery halls are decorated with large-format embroidery millets, miraculously surviving monuments of textile art of the Russian-Indian classic era: they are decorated with ornamental and symbolic motifs related to the Indian campaign, Paul and Napoleon. Here it is the quintessence of "provincial orientalism" and French refined taste. The name of the genre and technique ("a thousand flowers") points to medieval French trellises. The art of millefleur was borrowed from the French - the allies of the Russians in the Indian campaign - by the domestic white-haired seamstresses in Tver province. The motley breastplates of Pavel's Hussar regiments and Napoleon's heavy cohorts roar triumphantly over the hall. A Russian-Indian mantra is played, a sitar strangely reminiscent of a gusel, or the frantic clanging of a balalaika. The blows of the gong call for calm, and sleep is drowned out.

For thirty years I have ploughed with a veteran plough.
I've ploughed countless rows;
But the old wounds still burn
And it seems too soon to die.

The day grows darker. The bird's cry is more audible.
On every side of the woodland,
Where ominous dragons lie dormant.
Into the gaps of the clouds, into the gaping fracture,
Behind the slow and golden eagle
The flaming legions are coming...

It's the muffled voice of a veteran It is the muffled voice of a veteran of the Indian campaign, who has returned to the renewed Russian Empire, to his estate, somewhere in the upper reaches of the Volga - a Palladian portico, obelisks and a rotunda pavilion over the river. But here, among the birches and fir trees, there are figures, images and forms that suggest "Russian provincial Orientalism".

Nature is the same Rome and reflected in it.
We see images of its civic power
In the transparent air, like a circus blue,
In the forum of the fields and in the colonnade of the grove.

Orientalism," say the authors of the project, "is always a projection of the West to the East. Otherwise, it is open expansion, an imperial gesture. Citizens of small, insignificant manu-facturer countries are incapable of asserting such a style. Open expansion is honest expansion. Its eternal, aesthetically flawless model is Alexander the Great's campaign to Iran and India. And the task of the imperial gesture of power is not at all to unify the eikumene, but to bring peoples together in battle and on the stage of world history for mutual spiritual enrichment.

"We are in the 21st century, but among the heroes of the 18th and early 19th century... Do we want to say something to them? Or just to be among them? What does it mean to be among them, to be drawn to them? What does it mean for them to be with us?". - These are the questions that the anxious modern viewer involuntarily asks when confronted with the phantasmagoria of "Lead and Cobalt", slightly fearing that they will be unnecessary for modernity. Modernity, on the other hand, arrogantly assumes that the main question is always a question about the needs of modernity. The latter is understood narrowly: the 20th century, its second half, the beginning of the 21st century, although these are only moments in world history, distinguishable only because of the extreme overestimation of their own significance. Yes, of course, artists say, we want to say to the past: don't disappear completely, don't leave us alone with ourselves, stay with us, at least in the role of a fairy tale, be the last thread linking modernity to the world of the poetic as that "space" (inverted commas indicate that it is not a space at all) where contingency reigns (double, triple contingency! - this hybrid or even identity of the predetermination and randomness of connections and sequences), probabilistic relations reign, and an achronic, self-contained, ouroboros-like movement rules, which allows no reference to places and times, to bodies and intellects, but only to autopoetic myths. And this is not only art in its radical freedom to assume that everything is wrong and wrong again, but also History itself, the unpredictable muse-artist of free existence.

The modern world is tired of its own earthiness, exhausted by the sterility of sterility, its limited correctness, its worthless health, its mixture of modesty and conceit. It is again in demand for fairy tales, heroes, myth and the fantastic. There is a renewed desire for war: some are at war with chimeras, some for the preservation of safety and prose. Many feel that living constantly in a critical and self-critical mode, forever embarrassed and seeking forgiveness for the unforgiven, is humiliating and boring. False tolerance and naïve neutrality are tiresome! Power, moral, political, intellectual, is in demand. Only art pretends to be shy, but secretly, behind the scenes, in small spaces, the incantation of fire, the invocation of myths as a means of motivating the effective life of the imagination, up to and including the call for heroic death, has already begun. The dim, quiet voice is still in vogue, but the super-presence of heroes, scandalising society, is already beginning to overshadow the humble, and they are snapping back. Everything is coming to a collision of old and new gods and myths with each other, and so they put on their armour, adorn it with new feathers, trumpet past victories and dream of future ones. These are inspiring pictures. The storm petrel is once again flying over the sea, and the fat penguin is seeking shelter, telling himself that all illusions, utopias and uchronias will be defeated by material interests.

Two artists before us. One gushing generator of projects, productions, phantasms. That's Florestan! The other is a graceful, apolonically precise moulder of images, giving them grace and humour, ambiguity and flair. This is Eusebius, according to R. Schumann - no, more - the affectionate Cora herself, showing pictures to children. The overall fruit is full of slightly fractured romantic irony, that rattling mixture of dream, faith and bitterness, shifting either into some elfishly naive arabesques or exploding with fits of icy Kleistovian rage, a dance of Shiva.

But these are also two cities, two faces of Russia, between which the war chariot (the artists' personal transport) weaves the fate of Russian myth-making. The icy Florestan and Shiva are St Petersburg, Emperor Paul, idea, will and passion. Bark, Artemis, terracotta, dough, coloured threads and fabric - this is our Russian India, and more simply - Moscow, softened by the haze of Central Russia, incomprehensible and simple - teaches renunciation of passions, of terrible fairy tales - for the sake of her maternal sorrows. Glory to secret Russia!

Ivan D. Chechot

PhD in Art History, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University, Head of the History and Theory of Fine Arts and Architecture Sector of the Russian Institute of Art History

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"RADARS OF SECRET RUSSIA"

Elena Samorodova and Sergey Sonin, creators of the Russian-style mockumentary genre, directors of large-scale hoaxes, founders of a number of artistic associations (Lead and Cobalt, Apollo Committee, Wolf Berry workshop) are contemporary multimedia artists working in two capitals - Moscow and St. Petersburg.

"Russian Invisible Empire" by Samorodova and Sonin is either a post-apocalyptic world or a parallel reality, a kind of laboratory of science fiction, skilfully woven and intricate. The viewer is left with a feeling of déjà vu - the world is almost the same in the photo and video, but different.

A series of compositionally and visually perfect pseudo-documentary photographs, shot in freeze-frame mode, construct a visual narrative, a technique that can be traced in all the projects of the creative tandem. "Documentary Myth" by Samorodova and Sonin is built on the intersection of photography, short films, sound, historical objects and fictional artefacts that form a self-sufficient universe. The recourse to subjunctive history is a conspiracy to which the artists invite the viewer. The artists' images are developed along the same lines as in film and television, with the electronic means of simulating the real.

Central to Samorodova Sonin's projects is the notion of time. The aesthetics of their stylisations are lost between the past and the future, it is as if the present is absent. Time there has stopped so much that it can be cut with a knife, reshaped, stretched and accelerated. The artists freely manoeuvre between historical epochs, refracting space and time. Their favourite themes are Ancient Egypt and antiquity, Russian statehood, Palladianism, folk epic and fantasy - cultural codes and historical epochs intricately woven together by demiurgic activity.

Samorodova and Sonin's projects are not just a game of inconsistencies. By exposing a crooked mirror of the subjunctive development of Russian history, the artists expose its hidden springs, which we have yet to rethink. Dominants and constants, images, heroes, themes, all the starting and meeting instances are in the past. It is to them that artists turn, manipulating them to such an extent that they obtain a different semantic reading.

The works of Samorodova and Sonin are unreservedly mesmerising. The visual embodiment of their works is perfected. But the tense semantics expands the semantic context, engaging the viewer's conceptual systems, appealing to their cultural background, knowledge and reading. Ultimately, the documentary myth of Samorodova and Sonin is deciphered by each individual. The reality of the creative tandem is ready when it interacts with the viewer; it is the viewer who sets the final point in the interpretation of the artistic myth.

text by Ekaterina Kartseva,

Candidate of Cultural Studies, Associate Professor of the Department of Cinema and Contemporary Art of the Russian State University of Fine Arts

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"FUTURE IN THE PAST. METAhistory and its Quantum Reflections".

Word of the authors about the Truth of Myth and the Russian fork in the road

Instead of an epigraph - we put up a column of questions:

- "We are in the 21st century."

- "Among the heroes of the 18th to the turn of the 19th century."

- "Is there something we want to say to them? Or just to be among them?"

- "What does it mean to be among them?"

- "What does it mean for them to be in our midst?"

- Non-modern scenery, and what are we doing inside it...?

What could be more interesting for an artist (staying in his modernity and present time) than immersing himself in national history and its reflected meanings - meanings?

...Deeper and deeper, going through layer after layer, continuing to see and listen to the rays and reflections that change and refract everything around and within and beyond the edges of the Oikumene.

In the deep, dark water covered with the ice of time.

...beyond the precipices of the edges is the Cosmic Ocean, waiting for its time to begin to melt.

So the Artist is at the centre, the reflected Cosmos around him.

The Greeks were the first to visit the Cosmos. The Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great (with his Diadochi) went his way and was able to create by his will and genius a syncretic Empire with continental capitals - Alexandria, inspired and created by his passionary inner element, but also by strategic political calculation.

Through time, after him - Alexander, went the Sovereign Emperor of All Russia and Supreme Master of the Order of Malta Paul the First Worthy and the Emperor of all the French, the "collector of Europe" - Napoleon Bonaparte.

Historical linear context:

...As soon as the threat from revolutionary France disappeared, Sovereign Paul the First began to prepare for a military and strategic alliance with Napoleon.

Emperor Paul and Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, intended to make a joint campaign to India, with the aim of reducing the British colonies, depriving it of its main "colonial pearl", as well as to establish a naval blockade of the British Isles (to prepare them for the further "small fate" of an ordinary country-manufacturer).

"...The English are preparing to attack me and my allies, the Swedes and Danes, with fleet and troops. I am ready to receive them, but it is necessary to attack them themselves and where the blow to them can be more sensitive and where they are less expected. India is the best place for that. From us to the Indus, from Orenburg it will take three months, and from you it will take a month, but only four months. I entrust all this expedition to you and your army, Vasily Petrovich... All the wealth of India will be your reward for this expedition".

Decree of Paul I to Ataman Orlov:

"The Emperor Paul took up Bonaparte's idea, and decided to teach the Indian elephant to stride in the Prussian manner...".

From a conversation between French and Russian officers at a bivouac during manoeuvres in one of the commanderies.

The words were originally attributed to the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, allegedly said by him to Gerard Duroc, before his departure to St. Petersburg on a secret mission.

... In 1800 Paul 1 dissolved the alliance with England, and severed diplomatic relations with her. Restrictions were imposed on English ships in Russian ports. On the initiative of Sovereign Paul, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and Prussia signed a treaty of armed neutrality. The desire to oppose England was so great that even a fantastic, at first glance, the plan of invasion took real shape.

The landing force of the Grenadier Corps of the rowing fleet, which will become the basis of the future garrison of the island-fortress, is being prepared for transfer to Malta.

The island of Malta becomes one of the provinces of the Russian Empire, and a new administrative-territorial unit is introduced in the state - the commandery (inherent in the spiritual and knightly orders). On the lands of one of them (belonging to Count Litta) begins active preparations for the Indian campaign.

A year after these events, in January 1801, the Ataman of the Army of the Don, General Orlov, would be ordered by the highest command to march with Cossack regiments to Orenburg, and from there to India. It was assumed that the combined seventy thousandth Russian-French army will be led by General Andre Massena. The plan of sovereign Paul and the First Consul of France Napoleon was that the allied forces, united in Astrakhan, cross the Caspian Sea to Astrobad (which is in Persia), and then move to India through Herat. That is, by the way along which in ancient times passed phalanxes and hetaires of Alexander the Great. And shortly before that (the same 18th century), - the cavalry of Nadirshah, the Shahinshah of Persia, the destroyer of the Mughal Empire.

It was planned to start the invasion in May 1801, with arrival in India planned for the end of September.

To prepare for penetration into the largest British colony - "the pearl of the empire, over which the sun did not set even then", in 1800 was created a prototype of the future Franco-Russian Indian Company, which was to ensure the commercial superiority of the Russian Empire in Central Asia and India.

After the victory of the Allied army, on the Indus River, the first personal meeting between Emperor Paul and Napoleon, First Consul of France (crowned in 1804 "Emperor of all the French") took place. Before that, they had exchanged coded dispatches, which were delivered to them by magpies in the service of the Feldjäger Corps.

Reports from British agents about Paul's plans (in alliance with Napoleon) to deprive England of its "colonial pearl" greatly alarmed the government of King George III, and England subsidised the plot against Paul and his subsequent assassination through the envoy in St Petersburg, Lord Whitworth, and his mistress, Princess Olga Zherebtsova, whose salon was the "headquarters of the conspiracy".

...The conspiracy itself failed, thus revealing a sardonic mockery of the villainous plans of the conspirators - oath-breakers. In the chambers of the Emperor the villains found a mechanical doll - automaton "The Sovereign", made by the master mechanic Ivan Kulibin. The sovereign himself looked at what was happening through a system of mirror periscopes in the walls of the Mikhailovsky Palace.

The conspiracy was beheaded, the Great campaign to India began....

... Russian India flourished for fifty-odd years. In 1856, after losing the Crimean campaign, and as a result of the Peace of Paris, the Russian Empire leaves Hindustan. By this time Sovereign Paul, a quarter of a century earlier, is making the transition from physical substance to metaphysical quality, returning to the metropolis, "his Alexandria" (as it happened to Alexander the Great in his own era), and the deposed Emperor of all the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, after the royalist counter-revolution of the Bourbons, sails to the American colonies, still French Louisiana.

Veterans of the Indian campaign, Russian colonists and their families return to their estates. Russian provincial Orientalism, a retrospective genre - reminiscence, "the art of veterans" - emerges and develops in memory of the Great campaign.

Parallel action:

Twentieth years of the 21st century. From the Russian manned research orbital station MIR 2, a probe with a directed nuclear charge was launched to change the trajectory of an asteroid towards Earth and prevent an impact event threatening a planetary catastrophe.

The nuclear charge destroys the asteroid, and it splits into several large fragments - meteorites.

One of them turns out to be on the same trajectory, and flies towards Earth. Radiation from the explosion and electromagnetic pulse destroy the orbital station, but the Russian cosmonaut manages to leave it in an escape capsule, and flies to Earth along the trajectory of the flying meteorite.

The meteorite does not burn up completely in the upper atmosphere, and the capsule with the cosmonaut flying after it manages not to burn up in the atmosphere and land among forests and swamps in the borderland of three provinces of the Russian Empire in 1801.

During the fall, the cosmonaut was severely traumatised and his communication equipment was damaged, including a portable quantum computer. The cosmonaut manages to get out of the capsule on his own, but fails to realise that he is trapped in a "time trap".

Having received severe compression injuries, he removes the helmet of the spacesuit from the last strength, breathes in the ancient air, and loses consciousness ...

In that World, he is accepted as a Messenger.

Emerging from the equally hospitable Russian Cosmos, the lunar-solar spirals of splash-shards twist over them - Artists (if they are lucky enough to be them and take on this burden), and they sometimes acquire and launch quantum powers... In a kaleidoscope of reflected meanings, inferences (of different temperatures), premonitions and insights. And parallels and correlations are components of documentary myths.

A devotee of these practices experiences a strong biospheric tension, followed by a distortion of metaphysical space and personal visionary boundaries.

But artists as terms (Terminus) remain standing on the borders of Secret Russia. It's about luck (for the best of them).

Arcadia, Elysium, the Greece of the Spirit under Rome, always within. Just as provincial Orientalism is always a projection of the West into the East. And in no other way. As the inexhaustible paradisus verbum russicum, Slow and full of wonders and stories, it moves - secret Russia like a huge ship. The spirit fills the tight sails, the ship manoeuvres in narrow places, holding the fairway from the last effort, but always manages to moor under the Polar Star in its secret harbour.

The helmsman bears his own name.

P.S. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiātur.

artists Sergey Sonin and Elena Samorodova-Sonina