Habitat

«Habitat» as a term refers to the place where lives a species or individual, it has certain characteristics. Often, animals simply «choose» the place that best suits their needs - and if the climate changes they migrate to more suitable places for life. Unlike many animals, humans build their own habitat by subjugating the surrounding area, building dams, changing river courses. The idea of this installation is about the nature of man to control the space around him. The first part is the space of a house immersed in darkness. Entering the forest sounds - birds singing, grasshoppers scraping - the viewer finds himself in a dark room, in which the filling does not correspond to the sounds at all. Here, spatial, tactile, and sound sensations of a person come to the fore. The loss of visual reference forces us to perceive the surrounding space and objects around us differently. Getting used to the darkness and moving deeper, you can find objects that are quite familiar to an apartment: a table, a bed, a sink - mixed in a chaotic order, it is easy to trip over them, and it is difficult to find the logic of the arrangement. A house as a space is a physical habitat for a person - living in an apartment or a private house, in one country or another, we always have a similar set of objects and a desire to arrange them in a certain way, the most convenient for us. By building walls around ourselves, we protect ourselves not only from natural disasters – hurricanes or rains – but also from other people, from any potential danger. Home is a place that is maximally subordinate to man – and if it gets out of the control of the owner, it becomes unsuitable for living. The second part is the opposite space of the first part. Full of light, it can be disorienting after being in the first dark room. Since the light in the two spaces is contrasting, the second part is the antipode of the first both in image and in meaning: in the dark room it was a house full of the sounds of nature, but here it is the opposite. This is a place of nature but the forest here is artificial. Ceramic trees with forest birds fused with petrified trunks hang in the air. These birds are also wrong: they have no eyes or beaks, faceless, they become a mouthpieces from which human voices are heard. They all recite the rules of behavior in the room, trying to subjugate the space around them, and none of them succeed. They all speak out of turn, so their voices turn into a twittering sound. The rules they recite do not correspond to the space, so they cannot control anything. The last part is an empty and unlit space isolated from the other parts. Here, there are no sounds from outside, the noises within are also caught by the acoustic traps. Entering the thick darkness the spectator gets into a soft place, where the floor sags under his feet, and the distance between man and walls is unknown. The sound here can be heard not through the ears, but through the muscles and bones. This part becomes a mirror for the spectator: staying here only with his own thoughts and his body without any possibility to see or to hear something, to control the space around, everyone challenges his own physical or mental feelings. After completing the previous two parts of the project this room can become a trigger for panic or fear or a place of calm depending on the viewer’s experience.