Where

I am interested in the topic of disappearance, and I decided to make an installation on this topic as part of the residency.Having spent time in Nizhny Novgorod, and also having visited Chkalovsk, Dzerzhinsk, Gorodets and Gorbatov, I discovered how strongly each city in the region is connected to water. People settled on the banks of the river to drink water, and lived off the water for hundreds of years in these places. But nothing remained of the ancient settlements, not even of the houses that were a hundred years old: the water that fed them flooded these same houses. In Dzerzhinsk, the river changed its course and began to flood the settlements on the bank, so the residents moved from there three times. During the construction of the Nizhny Novgorod hydroelectric power station, many houses were flooded: despite the fact that the residents were offered to move higher up the bank, some houses had to be abandoned, and some resisted and did not want to move. So somewhere at the bottom of the Volga there were flooded houses. I decided to make the space of the house underwater: entering on boards and logs, the viewer first finds instructions at the entrance on how to behave in the space. On the back side, the point where the flooded houses are located is marked. After reading it, he must explore this space in silence for 15 minutes: objects, texts on the table (from them you can get the impression that this is about the history of the construction of the hydroelectric power station, a worker who worked at the construction site and lived in Chkalovsk). As a result, moving deeper, he runs into a cabinet. From a distance, it is just a cabinet, but if you look inside, you can see that it has already begun to fill with water. Inside it is water from the Volga, stones from the shore of Chkalovsk, a couple of photographs, lids, shells. It turns out that this is the flooded house.